North vs. South China

This spring break I visited Shenyang, a city located in the Liaoning province in the Manchuria / North China area. When I went there I didn’t expect too much of a change between Guangzhou and there. I was proven completely wrong with huge changes in the culture, the people, and the environment.

 There is no official line that separates North China from South China, but everyone believes that the line starts at Jiangsu province and runs to Sichuan province with Tebit being its own area. Of course, there won’t be major differences between the areas around the line, but when you start comparing places that have a larger distance between them when they are on the opposite sides of the line, there would be obvious differences. Shanghai and Beijing are undoubtedly the two biggest cities in China, and if you have been to both cities, you could notice huge differences just by looking around in the airport or looking around the hotel that you are staying at. There would be many differences between North China and South China due to their geographical locations.

There is a big difference in the 2 regions of China due to their geographical locations. South China is all located on an alluvial plain with multiple rivers running through the region. This makes the soil very rich and great for farming. The food from South China is very diverse throughout all the provinces but they mainly include rice with a big variety of meats and vegetables with seafood. On the other hand, Northern Chinese cuisine usually focuses foods that are made out of dough such as noodles, buns, dumpling and other wheat-based food with more priority on meat than vegetable because of them living in a cold and dry climate with not a lot of rich soil to grow crops in.

 Northern Chinese cities still have a great deal of communist influence in them with some modern propaganda posters scattered around train stations and streets. It is very difficult to find propaganda posters around developed Southern Chinese cities due to it being very far away from Beijing, which is where all the government buildings and the head of government is.

Northern Chinese people usually have ancestry back to the Manchus or Mongols and southerners trace their ancestry to the Thai or Viet and other southeast Asian countries. Some Chinese Stereotypes about Northerners is that they have smaller eyes, taller, bigger body type and long faces while the southerners have shorter, narrower body type, rounder faces and bigger eyes than Northerners. The people in Northern China are usually stereotyped as loud, loyal and say whatever is on their mind and I could say that the stereotypes are true after visiting there and all the people that I interacted with having at least half of these traits. according to echinacities.com Southern Chinese people are stereotyped as “cultured, cunning, soft and refined, and fond of art as well as industry” these reasons made the people of Northern and Southern China very different. Northern China and Southern China are very different due to being in a different

 

geographical location that caused the people, culture and their ways of doing things to be different. What I just said could not be applied to everyone and every place, but it is a broad explanation of the huge differences between a normal Northern Chinese and Southern Chinese person.