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CHINA.

1.  The socalled "Chinese Republic" occupies the central and richest part of Asia.  It is largely undeveloped and contains practically everything that is necessary for the support and maintenance of life for our present day of civilization.  The country abuts on the Pacific for a distance of over two thousand miles air line.  It is triangular in shape and extends westward from the Pacific for about twenty-five hundred miles in an air line.  The western two-thirds of China is more or less mountainous, difficult of access on account of the absence of modern communications, is sparsely populated and not very productive.  The eastern third of the country contains the great river systems:  the Yellow, Yangtze, Pearl, and the MeKong.

2.  While some sixty different tribes are reckoned among the inhabitants of China, nine-tenths of the total population is composed of Chinese.  The Chinese are supposed to have come from east of the Caspian Sea, to have migrated eastward, and to have pushed the indigenous people away from the productive and fertile valleys of the great rivers, those pushed to the north being of the Tungus race, the modern examples of which are the Mongols,

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