Term
click below
click below
Term
Normal Size Small Size show me how
Asia Vocab
Term | Definition |
---|---|
Tsunami | A seismic (earthquake-generated) sea wave that can attain gigantic proportions and cause coastal devastation. The tsunami of December 26, 2004, centered in the Indian Ocean near the Indonesian island of Sumatera |
South-to-North Water Diversion project (SNWDP) | The PRC’s inter-basin water transfer scheme (the world’s largest) to deliver massive quantities of fresh water from the Huang He and Chiang Jiang river systems to the burgeoning urban areas of northern China that face severe water shortages. |
Dynasty | A succession of Chinese rulers that came from the same line of male descent, sometimes enduring for centuries. Dynastic rule in China lasted for thousands of years, only coming to an end in 1911. |
Sinicization | Giving a Chinese cultural imprint; Chinese acculturation. See also Hanification. |
Hanification | Imparting a cultural imprint by the ethnic Chinese (the “people of Han”). Within China often refers to the steadily increasing migration of Han Chinese into the country’s periphery, especially Xinjiang and Xizang (Tibet). |
Asian Tigers | The Asian tiger economies typically include Singapore, Hong Kong, South Korea, and Taiwan. |
High-value -added goods | Products of improved net worth. |
One-Child Policy | Chinese population control policy initiated in the late 1970s that proscribed (and enforced) a limit of one child per family of most population groups (mainly urban, Han populations). This policy, ended in 2016. |
Gender imbalance | The demographic imbalance of males outnumbering females resulting from selective birth control. In China, this is an outcome of the One-Child Policy. |
Dependency ratio | An indicator of the pressure on a country’s workers, the age-population ratio of (dependent) people who are not in the labor force to those (productive) people who are in the labor force. |
Floating | China’s huge mass of mobile workers who respond to shifting employment needs within the country. Most are temporary urban dwellers with restricted residency rights, whose movements are controlled by the hukou system. |
Hukou | system A longstanding Chinese system whereby all inhabitants must obtain and carry with them residency permits that indicate where an individual is from and where they may exercise particular rights such as education, health care, housing, and the like. |
Special Economic Zone | Manufacturing and export center in China, created since 1980 to attract foreign investment and technology transfers. Seven SEZs—all located on China’s Pacific coast—currently operate |
Overseas Chinese | The more than 50 million ethnic Chinese who live outside China. About two-thirds live in Southeast Asia, and many have become quite successful. A large number maintain links to China and as investors played a major economic role. |
Economic geography | The field of geography that focuses on the diverse ways in which people earn a living and on how the goods and services they produce are expressed and organized spatially. |
Foreign direct investment | A key indicator of the success of an emerging market economy, whose growth is accelerated by the infusion of foreign funds to supplement domestic sources of investment capital. |
Urban system | A hierarchical network or grouping of urban areas within a finite geographic area, such as a country. |
New Silk Road | China’s ongoing ambitious project to forge an overland routeway of high-speed railroads to link East Asia to Europe via Central Asia. This new “Eurasian land bridge”, mapped in Figure 5-19, follows the general alignment of the fabled. |
China-Pakistan Economic Corridor | The 2000-kilometer (1250-mi), northeast-southwest development axis stretching between the westernmost Chinese city of Kashgar and Pakistan’s new Indian Ocean port of Gwadar. |
Buffer state | A country or set of countries separating ideological or political adversaries. In southern Asia, Afghanistan, Nepal, and Bhutan were parts of a buffer zone set up between British and Russian-Chinese imperial spheres. |
Nightlight map | Map that displays the nighttime distribution of artificial lighting in a given area, a good surrogate for the area’s level of development |
Regional complementarity | Exists when a pair of regions, through an exchange of raw materials and/or finished products, can specifically satisfy each other’s demands. |
State capitalism | Government-controlled corporations competing under free-market conditions, usually in a tightly regimented society. |
Conurbation | General term used to identify a large multimetropolitan complex formed by the coalescence of two or more major urban areas. |
Demographic burden | The proportion of a national population that is either too old or too young to be productive and that must be cared for by the productive population. |
Technopole | A planned techno-industrial complex (such as California’s Silicon Valley) that innovates, promotes, and manufactures the products of the postindustrial information economy. |
One nation- two systems | The arrangement under which capitalist Hong Kong functions within the PRC’s communist economic system. Widely seen as a model for the future reunification of Taiwan with mainland China. |