While I am preparing the Guyana report, I wanted to share a few interesting maps which help me understand the world better.
The first shows how concentrated the massive Chinese population is. Most of the country is essentially uninhabited. The North-East is truly the Chinese heartland, with the coast and one central spot sporting the rest of the population.
The reason is obvious if you look at the geographical map. Most of the country is made of mountains, deserts, or desertic mountains. That inhabited central spot?
The Sichuan Basin, flat, humid, and fertile lands, is home to 100 million people. It also has its own dialect of Mandarin.
It’s an area of China I know extremely little about and I will try to read some more about it in the future.
Why Africa is so complicated to administrate: crazy high ethnic diversity. Hostility or competition between each of these groups matter often more than national identity.
At the same time, the extreme division, especially along the equator makes the colonial borders not worse than the absurd level of fragmentation a return to ethnic borders would create.
As in most cases with division over ethnicity or religion, a higher level of federalization is probably the path forward.
Forest of the world. Europe is actually doing better than I expected, and so is China. Still, the bulk of the world’s forest is in the Russian & Canadian taiga, and the Amazon, Indonesian, and equatorial African jungles.
With the ongoing war in Ukraine, the world is breaking apart into 3 categories:
Opposing Russia & West leaning: most of the GDP, but only 36% of the world’s population. Essentially this is the West alone with its East-Asian allies.
Neutral, unwilling to get involved: India, the Middle East, some of Central Asia, Brazil. 32% of the world’s population.
Supportive of Russia: 27.6% of the world population, 16.8% of GDP. China + Iran & Pakistan + some of Central Asia and Africa.
Actively supportive of Russia is almost nonexistent, with just a few pariah states like North Korea, Myanmar, Syria, and Venezuela.
I just hope this map does not prefigure the “Central Eurasian Power” vs “the Allies” in a looming WW3.
