China covers an area of almost 3.7 million square miles and is the most populous country on earth having more than one billion people. The bordering countries include Mongolia, Kazakhstan, India, Nepal, Burma, Vietnam and Korea. The People's Republic is led by Chinese Communist Party and governed by the State Council. The main language spoken is the Mandarin dialect of Chinese but there are more than 150 languages and dialects spoken throughout the country. Approximately 350 million people inhabit the region of the Yangtze. There is plenty of wildlife along the river as well which include the Tibetan antelopes, Mongolian gazelles, and snow leopards, just to name a few. 

Waters of the Yangtze are often used for rice and wheat irrigation. It also has enormous and inexhaustible hydroelectric resources. In 1995 construction began on the Three Gorges Dam near Yichang and is scheduled for completion in 2009. The dam will measure about 600 feet and about 1.5 miles wide. The dam is expected to help control the flooding of the Yangtze River Valley. The Three Gorges (the Qutang Gorge, the Wuxia Gorge, and Xiling Gorge) will also be the largest electricity generating facility in the world. The hydroelectric generators will provide 1/9 of China's total power output.

There is a lot of controversy surrounding the construction of the dams. There are 140 villages, 1,600 factories and over 80,000 acres of growable land that will be destroyed. It may also cause animals to become extinct. The area is very prone to earthquakes because it lies directly on a fault line. Actually, the plateau and gorges were created by collision of the Indian-Australian plate, drifting northward, with the Eurasian plate that began over 40 million years ago and continues today.