Click here for ancient China.

1800: There are 150,000 catholics in China
1801: China's population is 295 million
1804: The "White Lotus Rebellion" ends
1815: The Protestant missionaries of Melaka publish a magazine in Chinese
1817: Britain exports 275 tons of opium to China
1817: Cholera spreads from India to China and Russia
1830: corruption, decentralization of power, popular rebellions
1839: The imperial emissary Lin Zexu arrests 1,700 Chinese opium dealers in Guangzhou, seizes tons of opium from foreign traders and writes a letter to Queen Victoria of Britain urging her to end the opium trade, and in response the British start the "Opium War"
1841: A flood destroys Kaifeng again
1842: The British seize Shanghai
1842: under the Treaty of Nanjing, China cedes the island of Hong Kong to Britain
Jul 1844: The Treaty of Wangxia between China and the USA opens five Chinese ports to the USA
1845: An English-language newspaper, the "China Mail", is founded in Hong Kong
1850: An English-language newspaper, the "North China Herald", is founded in Shanghai
1850: Xianfeng becomes China's emperor
1851: the Taiping rebels, led by a village teacher, Hong Xiuquan, stage an anti-Manchu rebellion that will last 14 years (30 million people killed) and create a Christian theocratic state, the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom
1855: Revolt of the Nien in China, led by Zhang Luoxing
1856: China seizes a British vessel in Guangzhou and China is attacked by British and French forces ("Second Opium War")
1856: Following a massacre of Muslims by imperial forces, the ethnic Hui sultan Du Wenxiu/ Tu Wen-hsiu/ Sulayman ibn `Abd ar-Rahman sets up a Muslim state in southern China (Yunnan), the Pingnan Guo Sultanate
1860: British and French troops loot Beijing and force China to sign the treaty of Tientsin that opens more ports to Europeans, and turn Shanghai into a center of international commerce, an "unequal treaty"
1860: Russia and China sign a border treaty that grants Russia the coast around the newly founded city of Vladivostok ("Convention of Peking"), another "unequal treaty"
1860: Russia secures north Manchuria
1861: The new Manchu/Qing emperor, Tongzhi, is five years old while his mother Tsu Hsi/Cixi wields the real power
1862: Popular uprising in Korea
1862: Popular uprising in Kansu (northwestern China) by Muslim sect "New Teaching"
1862: The Hui/Dungan Muslims of Shaanxi and Gansu revolt against China and massacre Han people ("Dungan rebellion") trying to establish a Muslim state next to the Taiping state
1864: Chinese general Zeng Guofan/ Tseng Kuo-fan and his Hunan army defeat the Taiping
1865: British investors form the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank
1865: Yakub Beg, having lost the Kokand Khanate (Tashkent) to Russia, founds a Muslim state in Kashgar (Turkestan), while the "Dungan rebellion" expands towards Urumqi
1868: Chinese general Li Hongzhang/ Li Hung-Chang and his Anhui/ Anhwei army defeat the Nien in China
1869: The Suez canal halves the distance to Europe
1870: There are 400,000 catholics in China
1870: Yakub Beg defeats the Dungans at Urumqi but refuses to return the land to the Qing empire
1870: Chinese general Li Hongzhang/ Li Hung-Chang rules over Tianjin/ Tientsin and launches a mixed program of modernization ("government supervision and merchant operation")
1870: Chinese mobs massacre French missionaries in Tianjin/ Tientsin
1872: First educational mission of Chinese students sent to the USA
1872: The newspaper "Shun Pao" is founded in Shanghai
1873: Britain exports 6250 tons of opium to China
1873: Chinese general Zuo Zongtang/ Tso Tsung-tang defeats the Muslim rebels of Kansu
1873: The the Pingnan Guo Sultanate is destroyed, one million people are killed and Du Wenxiu commits suicide
1875: Tongzhi dies and Cixi, breaking the old rules of succession, appoints his three-year old cousin Guangxu as emperor
1876: First railway in China
1876: Japan forces Korea to sign the treaty of Kanghwa
1877: About nine million people die in a famine in 1877-78
1877: Chinese general Zuo Zongtang/ Tso Tsung-tang defeats the Muslim rebels of Yakub Beg, and ends the "Dungan rebellion" after 8 million people have died, mostly Han people, and millions of Muslims flee to Russia and Central Asia
1880: Li Hongzhang is appointed in charge of relations with Korea
1881: The first Chinese daily is founded in Singapore, the "Lat Pau/ Le Bao"
1882: First telegraph
1882: China sends troops to defend the Korean government and Japan sends troops to defend its delegation after a mob attacks it
1882: Christian missionaries are admitted in Korea
1882: Zhang Zhidong/ Chang Chih-tung becomes governor of Shansi province
1884: War erupts between France and China over the borders of Annam/Vietnam and France invades Formosa/Taiwan
1884: China annexes eastern Turkestan and renames it Sinkiang/Xinjiang
1884: Zhang Zhidong/ Chang Chih-tung becomes governor of Guangdong and Guangxi
1885: France and China signs a treaty recognizing French authority in Annam/Vietnam and returning Formosa/Taiwan to China
1885: China's Li Hongzhang and Japan's Ito Hirobumi agree to pull out their troops from Korea
1886: A flood kills more than one million people in Zhengzhou
1889: Zhang Zhidong/ Chang Chih-tung becomes governor of Hunan and Hubei and begins a modernizing program
1894: China sends troops into Korea and Japan invades China (first sino-japanese war)
1895: Japan defeats China and China is forced to cede Taiwan and recognize Japanese sovereignity over Korea at the treaty of Shimonoseki
1895: Britain controls two thirds of Chinese foreign trade
1895: Chinese intellectuals found the "Society for the Study of Self-Strengthening" and Zhang Zhidong organizes a "Self-Strengthening" army in Nanjing
1895: Peiyang University is founded
1895: Shikai Yuan is appointed to create a new imperial army with German instructors
1896: Robert Hart sets up the first post system in China
1896: Chinese students enroll in Japanese universities
1896: So Chaepil founds the newspaper "Tongnip Shinmun", written in vernacular Korean, that launches a reformist movement
1896: China grants Russia permission to build the Chinese Eastern Railway across Manchuria to Vladivostok
1897: Kang Yuwei demands radical reforms
1897: China cedes Kokang to Britain's Burma
1897: Germany seizes the port of Kiaochow in China
1898: The anti-Confucian "Hundred Days' Reform", launched by emperor Guang Hsu/Guang Xu to modernize China and appease Kang Yuwei, fails when the mother of the emperor, Tsu Hsi/Ci Xi, has him arrested and confined in the Forbidden City, while Kang and his collaborator Liang Qichao flee to Japan
1898: China grants Russia a lease for Port Arthur in Manchuria
1898: Shimpei Goto is appointed in charge of Taiwan and begins economic development
1898: The Imperial University is founded
1899: the Russians take Shenyang
1899: the Qing support the anti-western Boxer movement
1899: The ancient Shang capital of Anyang is discovered
1900: Russia occupies Manchuria
1900: the anti-western Boxer (Yihetuan) rebellion, supported by the Qing emperor but not by the regional governors of Canton (Li Hongzhang), Wuhan (Zhang Zhidong), Nanjing and Shantung, is crushed by foreign troops (Russia, Britain, France, Japan, USA) and empress Tsu Hsi flees to the mountains
1900: China's population is 467 million
1903: Britain gains control of Tibet
1904: Russians seize Harbin
1904: British troops occupy Tibet
1905: Japan takes Shenyang
1905: the Confucian system of examination is abolished
Aug 1905: Sun Yatsen founds in exile the nationalistic and pro-democracy "Tongmeng Hui/ United League"
1905: After Japan defeats Russian, Russia withdraws from Manchuria, loses Sakhalin, and recognizes a Japanese protectorate over Korea (treaty of Portsmouth), the first time that a non-European country defeats a European power
1905: Japan opens a coal and iron mine in Benxi, Manchuria
1906: Japan establishes the South Manchuria Railway Company
1907: Britain and Russia negotiate the status of Persia, Tibet and Afghanistan
1907: Chinese exiles in Paris led by Wu Chih-hui found an anarchist paper, "Hsin Shih-chi/ New Century"
1907: Japan forces the Korean emperor to abdicate and real power is seized by Ito Hirobumi
1907: Chinese exiles in Tokyo led by Liu Shih-pei and his wife Ho Chen found an anarchist paper, "Tien-i Pao/ Natural Justice"
Jul 1907: Japan and Russia split Manchuria into separate spheres of influence
Nov 1908: both Qing/Manchu emperor Guang Xu and his aunt Cixi die within 24 hours and are succeeded by another child, Puyi
1908: Xuanhuai Sheng combines iron mines and coal mines to form the economic empire of Hanyehping Iron and Coal Company
1909: China and Japan sign a treaty deciding the border between China and Korea
1909: Japan's politician Ito Hirobumi is assassinated in Manchuria by a Korean nationalist
Aug 1910: Japan annexes Korea and thereby terminates the Choson dynasty after more than five venturies of rule
1910: During the plague of Manchuria, Lien-the/ Liande Wu introduces the antiviral mask to protect from airborne diseases
1910: There are 200,000 Christians in Korea
1910: Chinese troops enter Lhasa, Tibet
1911: 60,000 people have been killed by the plague in Manchuria
1911: Bogh Haan proclaims Mongolia independent
Apr 1911: Sheng borrows money from a consortium of French, British, German and USA banks to develop railways
1911: Wuhan revolutionaries launch an uprising (the 10/10 revolution or "Xinhai Revolution") and Sun Yatsen returns to China
Feb 1912: The infant Qing emperor abdicates
1912: Tibet and Mongolia declare independence and become protectorates respectively of Britain and Russia
Jun 1912: Russian and Japanese banks join the consortium of French, British, German and USA banks
Aug 1912: Song Jiaoren, an associate of Sun, founds the Guomindang/Kuomintang (KMT) party
1912: China adopts the Gregorian calendar
1913: Song's KMT wins the majority of votes but Song is assassinated and Sun flees the country, while power is seized by the authoritarian Shikai Yuan (11 million die)
1913: China establishes the Western Returned Scholars Association (WRSA)
1913: Tibet under the 13th Dalai Lama proclaims its independence from China, a popular insurrection expels the Chinese troops, and the Dalai Lama returns to Lhasa
Feb 1913: Song's KMT wins the majority of votes
Mar 1913: Song is assassinated by Yuan and Sun flees the country, while power is seized by the authoritarian Shikai Yuan (11 million die)
1913: anarchists led by Liu Ssu-fu found the Chinese and Esperanto magazine "Min-sheng/ The People's Voice" in Canton
May 1913: Liang Qichao founds the Progressive Party
Jul 1913: Seven provincial governments declare independence
Nov 1913: Yuan bans the Kuomintang
Jan 1914: Yuan disbands the parliament
1914: China issues the yuan shikai
1914: Foreign investment in China is $1.4 billion
1914: Britain obtains Arunachal Pradesh from Tibet
Jul 1914: Sun founds the "Chinese Revolutionary Party"
Jan 1915: Japan presents China with the "21 Demands"
Dec 1915: Yunnan (south of China) secedes
1915: The first college for women opens in Nanjing, the Ginling College
1915: Chen Duxiu/ Chen Tuhsiu founds the magazine "New Youth"
1916: Japan opens the Anshan Iron & Steel Works (renamed Showa Steel Works in 1933) in Manchuria
Jun 1916: Yuan dies, is succeeded by Duan Qirui and Sun Yatsen returns to China
Jul 1917: Sun installs a dictatorship in Canton
Aug 1917: China joins World War I on the side of Britain, France, Japan and the USA, the first time ever that Chinese soldiers walk into another continent
May 1918: Sun is forced to resign and retire in Shanghai
1918: Tibet pushes the Chinese back and reaches the Yiang Tze Kiang
Mar 1919: Koreans march to protest Japanese occupation
May 1919: Students join in a protest in the Tiananmen Square of Beijing against the European powers' decision to grant German-controlled Shandong to Japan, and thus create a new nationalist Chinese movement ("May Fourth Movement")
1919: Syngman Rhee is elected president of South Korea by the independence movement in exile
1920: Duan Qirui is ousted
1920: Deng Xiao-ping and other students move to France to study
Jul 1921: Marxist intellectuals found the communist party of China with Chen Duxiu/ Tu-hsiu as secretary general
1921: Swedish archeologist Johan Gunnar Andersson discovers a neolithic village in Yangshao, Henan province
1922: at the Washington Conference with Britain and the USA, Japan accepts to return disputed territories to China
Jan 1923: the Communists and the Guomindang ally in Canton under the leadership of Sun Yatsen and the supervision of Soviet agent Borodin, while the Guomindang's military commander Chiang Kaishek/Jiang Jieshi is trained in the Soviet Union
1924: Warlord Yuxiang Feng seizes Beijing
1924: The first United Front is established between the communist party and the Guomindang
1924: The Central Bank of China is established in Canton
May 1924: A treaty confirms Mongolia into the sphere of influence of the Soviet Union
Mar 1925: Sun dies of cancer and Ching-wei/Jingwei Wang succeeds him at the helm of the Kuomintang
Jun 1926: Chiang Kaishek/Jiang Jieshi becomes the chief commander of the Kuomintang
Jul 1926: Jiang's Guomindang launches a military campaign to fight the warlords and reunify China ("northern expedition")
Dec 1926: The nationalist government moves from Canton to Wuhan
1927: A young communist leader, Mao Zedong, organizes the Autumn Harvest Uprising, which fails
1927: Deng Xiao-ping returns to China
April 1927: Chiang Kai-shek's Guomindang troops take Shanghai, and Chiang Kai-shek establishes his capital at Nanjing/Nanking
Aug 1927: Civil war erupts between Chiang Kai-shek's Guomindang and the communists, with the leaders of the Communist Party being executed or driven to the countryside
1927: Chen Duxiu/ Tu-hsiu, accused of Trotskyism, is replaced by Li Lisan as secretary general of the Communist Party
1927: Peng Pai opens a soviet in Hai-Lu-Feng that pioneers rural militarized communism and terror
1927: Communist terror in Jingxi kills 186,000 people between 1927 and 1931
1928: Chiang Kai-shek defeats the northern warlords and takes Beijing (hundreds of thousands die), the beginning of the "Nanking Decade"
1928: The Japanese Kwantung army kills the Manchurian warlord before he can ally with Chiang Kaishek
1929: Chen Duxiu/ Tu-hsiu is expelled from the Communist Party
1930: Manchuria (China's northeastern region) has 34 million people
Sep 1931: The Japanese army provokes the "Mukden incident" and invades Manchuria without consulting with the Wakatsuki government (1.1 million Chinese die)
1931: Peng Pai is executed and Mao has to apologize to the communist party for the terrorist excesses of the previous four years
1931: Floods kill 3.7 million people
Nov 1931: Mao proclaims the Chinese Republic of Soviets
1932: the Japanese army invades Harbin
Mar 1932: the Japanese install former Manchu emperor Puyj as head of the puppet state of Manchukuo with capital is Changchun
1933: the Japanese army invades Hebei
May 1933: Germany sends general Hans von Seeckt as a military advisor to China
Apr 1934: Germany sends general Alexander von Falkenhausen as a military advisor to China
1934: Japan installs the last Qing emperor, Puyi, as the Kangde emperor of Manchukuo
See the timetable of World War II
1933: The 13th Dalai Lama of Tibet dies
1934: in order to avoid persecution by Chiang, Mao Zedong leads the "Long March" of the communist "Red Army" (170,000 die)
1936: Japan invades the northern province of Suiyuan
Jul 1937: A clash between Chinese and Japanese troops ("Marco Polo Incident") lead to a general war
1937: The Chinese economy experience hyper-inflation (that would last until 1949)
1937: Mao moves the headquarters of the communist government to Yan'an / Yenan
1937: The United Front is revived after Chiang Kai-Shek is kidnapped and forced to ally with the communists in a war of national survival against the Japanese invaders (the "Xian Incident")
Oct 1937: Mao orders the Communist Party to avoid direct confrontation with the Japanese invaders and instead to carry out guerrilla warfare against Chiang's troops
Dec 1937: Japan captures Nanjing (350,000 Chinese are killed and 100,000 women are raped during the "rape of Nanking")
1938: Japan opens the first wartime facility for "sexual comfort" in Nanjing
Oct 1938: Japan captures Canton
1938: Chongqing is made capital by the Kuomingtan
1938: Lee Byung-chull founds the trading company Samsung in South Korea, mostly selling vegetables
Mar 1938: Japan installs a puppet regime in Nanjing
1938: Japan installs five puppet regimes in China (Manchukuo, Inner Mongolia, Beijing, Nanjing, Taiwan)
1940: Tenzin Gyatso becomes the 14th Dalai Lama of Tibet
1941: USA pilots ("flying tigers") help the KMT
1941: A famine in Henan province will kill 2-3 million people in three years
1941: Japan attacks the USA that enters the war on the side of the KMT
Oct 1942: Mao launches the Yan'an Rectification Campaign, the first great purge of the Chinese Communist Party
1943: Cairo Conference between Roosevelt, Churchill and Chiang Kaishek
July 1943: A "campaign of salvation" is launched by Kang Sheng of the Communist Party against political opponents of Mao
April 1944: Mao has to apologize for the excesses of Kang Sheng's "campaign of salvation"
1945: the USA tries to mediate between KMT and Communists but the KMT attacks the Communists
1945: World War II ends and Japan is forced to retreat (20 million Chinese dead) and Taiwan returns to China after 50 years
1945: Hong Kong's population is 600,000
August 1945: at the end of World War II the Korean peninsula is occupied by the Soviet Union (north) and the USA (south)
1946: Independence leader Syngman Rhee assumes power in South Korea
1946: China switches to driving on the right
January 1946: The leader of North Korean opposition, Cho Man Sik, is arrested (and executed a few months later), the beginning of purges in North Korea that will lead to more than 100,000 executions and the death of 1.5 million people in concentration camps until 1994
1946: China recognizes Mongolia but not Tibet nor Xinjiang
1946: The Far Eastern Economic Review begins publication in Hong Kong
1946: Civil war between Chiang and Mao continues, with Chiang (southern China and northern cities) helped by the USA and Mao (northern countryside) helped by the Soviet Union
1946: The Far Eastern Economic Review of Hong Kong shuts down
1946: During the "agrarian revolution" of 1946-52 the communists execute between 2 and 5 million landowners who collaborated with Japan and send six million to labor camps
Dec 1946: Tibetan representatives attend the Chinese (Kuomintang) constitutional assembly in Nanjing as observers
1947: an uprising in Taiwan ("2/28 uprising") against the Kuomintang leaves thousands dead
1947: Tibet requests India to return land annexed by India as part of several Indian states
1947: Chung Ju-yung founds Hyundai in South Korea
1947: Koo In-Hwoi founds the plastic manufacturing company Lak-Hui (later LG) in South Korea
Apr 1948: A paramilitary organization tied to general Syngman Rhee kills 30,000 people in Cheju, South Korea
1948: The Kuomintang captures Puyi's cousin Eastern Jewel and publicly executes her while Puyi lives in exile in the Soviet Union
May 1948: Syngman Rhee's party wins national elections in South Korea
May 1948: Mao's communists surround Changchun ("Siege of Changchun")
Aug 1948: Syngman Rhee is declared president of the newly independent South Korea
Sep 1948: communist North Korea declares independence under its leader Kim Il Sung, chosen by the Soviet Union
Oct 1948: Changchun surrenders to Mao's communists after 160,000 people have starved to death
1948: More than 100,000 people die in the communist siege of Changchun
1949: Chiang and his KMT government flee to Taiwan, followed by about one million "mainlanders", while Mao Zedong proclaims the People's Republic of China (1.2 million have died in three years)
1949: Zhou Enlai is appointed premier of Communist China, while Mao retains the chairmanship of the communist party
Dec 1949: Mao travels abroad for the first time, to Russia
Mar 1950: Mao's China and Tibet hold talks in India
June 1950: communist North Korea (with approval from Stalin) attacks capitalist South Korea, but the invasion fails after USA intervention
1950: The Soviet Union extradites former emperor and traitor Puyi to Mao's China
July 1950: Mao orders the persecution of "counter-revolutionaries" of the cities, which causes the deaths of 710,000 people and the deportation of 2.5 million people to "reeducation camps"
July 1950: US general Hobart Gay orders to shoot Korean refugees and more than 250 civilians are killed at No Gun Ri
Oct 1950: Mao's China invades Tibet
1950: Hong Kong's population is 2.5 million thanks to the exodus from China
1950: South Korea kills thousands of communists (Bodo League massacre)
1950: Communist China annexes Xinjiang/Sinkiang (eastern Turkestan)
Sep 1950: United Nations troops led by the USA push back North Korean troops from South Korea
Oct 1950: China enters North Korea and pushes back the USA
1951: Communist China annexes Tibet/ Xizang
Feb 1951: The South Korean military kills more than 700 civilians (Geochang massacre)
1951: The communists conduct mass trials against "counterrevolutionaries"
1952: Mao orders the persecution of landlords which causes the deaths of about one million people
1952: Mao's China institutes the college entrance exam gaokao
1953: The communist party launches the first five-year plan with the aims of industrialization, collectivization of agriculture, and political centralization
July 1953: Korea is permanently partitioned across the DMV (54 thousand USA soldiers, 415 thousand South Koreans including 58 thousand soldiers, 400 thousand Chinese soldiers, two million North Koreans have died including 520 thousand soldiers)
1953: the population of mainland (communist) China is 583 million
1953: Taiwan (non-communist China) begins an economic miracle that will turn it into one of the richest countries in Asia and the second most powerful economy after Japan
1953: Workers discover the neolithic village of Banpo near Xian
1954: Deng Xiao-ping is appointed secretary general of the communist party
Dec 1954: mutual defense treaty between the USA and Taiwan
1954: political prisoners are held in a vast network of labor camps (the "laogai"), mostly in Qinghai, Xinjiang, Tibet, Inner Mongolia and Northern Manchuria
1956: Mao's China bombs the Batang monastery in Tibet killing more than 2,000 monks and pilgrims
1956: Mao adopts class struggle as a defining tenet of communist rule
May 1957: Mao launches the "Hundred Flowers Campaign", another campaign to liquidate political opposition in the cities
1957: Mao's China opens the Wuhan Yangtze bridge
1957: The Asian flu, first identified in Guizhou, kills more than one million people worldwide
Dec 1957: Mao launches the "Great Leap Forward" (mass mobilization and collectivization of the farms to increase crop production and steel production, which causes widespread deforestation and widespread use of pesticides)
May 1958 : Mao launches the "Four Pests campaign" to eliminate rats, flies, mosquitoes and sparrows, causing the near-extinction of the sparrow, the main predator of locusts and insects, causing a significant drop in agricultural output
1958: The Khampas of eastern Tibet stage an insurrection against China
1958: Mao's China publishes the Pinyin system of Romanized Chinese, invented mainly by Zhou Youguang
1958: The USA deploys nuclear weapons to South Korea
1959: 38 million Chinese starve to death because of the 1959-62 famine caused by the "Great Leap Forward" (the population of Communist China declined by 4.5%)
1959: Mao's close assistant Rui Li is jailed for criticizing the Great Leap Forward
1959: The Tibetan uprising against the Chinese fails in Lhasa and the Dalai Lama flees to India (87,000 Tibetans killed)
1959: Liu Shaoqi replaces Mao as president, while Lin Biao becomes minister of defense (head of the army) and launches purges in the military
July 1959: Peng Dehuai criticizes Mao's "Great Leap Forward"
March 1959: Tibetans riot against Chinese occupation (87,000 dead) and the Dalai Lama flees to India ("Tibetans were... crucified, buried alive, dismembered and beheaded")
Jun 1959: Mao launches Project 596, an independent nuclear project, after Nikita Khrushchev stops helping China's atomic program
Dec 1959: Released from prison, former emperor Puyi is given a job as street sweeper
1960: Communist China arrests protesting students including Lin Zhao
1960: East Asia ties sub-Saharan Africa for the lowest GDP per capita in the world
1960: Communist China launches its first ballistic missile
Apr 1960: Student protests cause the resignation of Rhee in South Korea
May 1961: General Park Chung-hee stages a coup in South Korea at a time when half of the country's GDP is USA aid
May 1961: China's president Liu Shaoqi conducts 44 days of field research in Hunan province about the causes of the famine
1961: China sends aid to Albania
1961: China's population has declined to 658,590,000, 14 millione less than in 1959
1962: Mao breaks with the Soviet Union
Feb 1962: At a conference of 7,000 communist party officials, China's president Liu presents the conclusions of his study on the causes of the great famine, blaming mainly the Great Leap Forward (the "7000 Cadres Conference")
1962: Following the catastrophe of the Great Leap Forward, Mao loses power to president Liu Shaoqi and to his collaborator Deng Xiaoping
Oct 1962: China attacks India in Ladaq and in the northeast frontier killing 2000 Indian soldiers
Oct 1964: Communist China conducts its first atomic test and becomes the fifth nuclear power, the first one in Asia
1964: Mao regains absolute power
1964: South Korea launches a plan to improve exports
1964: The population of Tibet has decreased from 2.8 million in 1953 to 2.5 million in 1964
June 1966: A dazebao by philosophy teacher Nie Yuanzi invites students to organize and liquidate the revisionists
August 1966: Mao ("One is always right to revolt") defends the students that are revolting against their own teachers who had encouraged and defended them
May 1966: Mao and his wife Jiang Qing launch the "Cultural Revolution" (call upon students to form units of "Red Guards" and rebel against authority): about one million people die in the next three years, the Great Wall is destroyed, 2692 Tibetan monasteries are destroyed, Shaoqi Liu and XiaoPing Deng are ousted
1966: Youstol Dispage
1966: LG produces South Korea's first television set
January 1967: Maoists and Liuists fight for power, starting in Shanghai (second phase of the Cultural Revolution)
May 1967: Maoist rebels in Wuhan fight the "Million Heroes" (conservatives) armed by the army
July 1967: Civil war erupts in Canton
1967: Kim Woo-chong founds Daewoo in South Korea to export clothing
Sep 1967: Mao changes course and employs army to put down the Red Guards
Apr 1968: Communist China executes dissident Lin Zhao
Jul 1968: The Hong Kong flu is first reported in Hong Kong and will kill about 750,000 people worldwide
Jul 1968: The army restores order in communist China (end of the Cultural Revolution)
August 1968: Order is restored with reprisals in Guangxi (100,000 die), Guangdong (40,000 die), etc (Hua Guofeng is nicknamed "the butcher of Hunan")
1969: Chinese and Soviet troops clash along the border
1969: 20 million Chinese are sent to the countryside
1969: Chinese troops crush an insurrection in Tibet
1969: Samsung-Sanyo Electronics established in South Korea
1969: Liu Shaoqi dies insane
1970: Communist China launches its first satellite
1970: South Korea opens its first "autobahn", the Seoul-Pusan expressway, mostly built by Hyundai
1970: a South Korean ferry sinks in the Korea Strait killing 308 people replace
Sep 1971: Lin Biao, first in line to succeed Mao, dies in an airplane crash in Mongolia on his way to exile, and Zhou Enlai replaces him as second most powerful man in mainland China
Oct 1971: Communist China takes over the seat at the United Nations that was held by Taiwan (non-communist China)
Feb 1971: USA president Richard Nixon visits Communist China
Sep 1972: Japanese prime minister Kakuei Tanaka meets with Chinese premier Zhou Enlai
1973: Thousands of tons of precious Tibetan sculptures have been melted by Chinese foundries, and thousands of gold and silver relics have been transported to Beijing
1973: The Mawangdui medical manuscripts of the 2nd century BC are discovered
1973: The government of Taiwan creates the Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI)
1973: South Korea launches an industrialization plan (shipbuilding, electronics, steel, machinery, metals, chemicals) and POSCO begins South Korea's production of steel
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1974: Zhou Enlai rehabilitates Deng Xiaoping
1974: Peng Dehuai dies of cancer
1974: South Korea's Hyundai builds its first ship
1974: Farmers discover the terracotta soldiers of Xian
1975: the Shimantan Dam collapses in the Henan province, killing 85,000 people and causing the subsequent death of about 100,000 people
1975: Chiang Kai-shek dies and is succeeded as dictator of Taiwan (non-communist China) by his son Chiang Ching-kuo/ Jiang Jingguo
1975: Zhao Ziyang pioneers capitalism in Sichuan province of mainland China
January 1975: Zhou Enlai, at the fourth Congress, outlines a program of Four Modernizations (agriculture, industry, army, science)
1975: Chiang Kai-shek dies and is succeeded as dictator of Taiwan (non-communist China) by his son Chiang Ching-kuo
January 1976: Zhou Enlai dies
April 1976: Widespread demonstrations for the death of Zhou Enlai are crushed by the army
1976: Hyundai introduces its first car
1976: The tomb of Fu Hao is discovered in Anyang
Sep 1976: Mao dies
Oct 1976: Hua Guofeng seizes power after ousting the "Shanghai Four" or "Gang of Four" (led by Mao's widow Jiang Qing)
1976: mass demonstrations against the communist party
1976: Tangshan earthquake
1976: China begins a campaign to resettle ethnic Chinese in Tibet
1977: Deng Xiaoping engineers the "Beijing Spring" of political liberation and reinstates the college entrance examination
1977: A scientific accident in China causes the H1N1 pandemic that kills 700,000 people around the world
1978: Japan and China sign a peace treaty
Nov 1978: Deng Xiaoping visits Singapore
Dec 1978: The third Plenum of the 11th Party Congress ushers in capitalist-style economic reform, as Hua Guofeng relinquishes power to Deng Xiaoping, creating 12 state companies to control imports and exports and "Special Economic Zones" in southern China to imitate Singapore's success ("Period of Reform and Opening"), as China's GDP is less than $150 billion
Dec 1978: Dissenters write controversial opinions on the "Democracy Wall" of Beijing (notably "The Fifth Modernization" by Wei Jingsheng)
Jan 1979: The USA recognizes mainland China instead of Taiwan as the sole legitimate government of China
1979: Rui Li is released from prison/exile
1979: Border war with Vietnam
1979: The government of mainland China introduces the one-child policy in cities to reduce population growth
March 1979: Wei Jingsheng is arrested
Oct 1979: Park Chung-hee of South Korea is assassinated
1979: China opens Tibet to foreign tourists
July 1979: Deng Xiaoping turns the fishing village of Shenzhen near Hong Kong into a "Special Economic Zone" (SEZ) to experiment with foreign investment and export manufacturing
Oct 1979: Hua travels to Western Europe, the first leader of mainland China to visit the West since 1949
Dec 1979: Singapore and China sign a trade agreement
1980: month-long trial of the "Gang of Four" (Mao associates)
Apr 1980: Another general, Chun Doo-hwan, seizes power in South Korea, pro-democracy demonstrations erupt, thousands of political dissindets are arrested including Kim Dae-jung
May 1980: South Korea's paramilitary forces kill hundreds of protesters in Kwangju
Dec 1980: Taiwan's minister Li Kuo-ting establishes the Hsinchu Science Park
1980: The USA grants mainland China most-favored-nation status, i.e. access to US investors, technology and market
1980: The population of China is one billion.
Feb 1980: Hu Yaobang delivers a six-hour speech on Sha Yexin's play "If I Were for Real"
Sep 1980: Deng Xiaoping replaces Hua Guofeng with Zhao Ziyang as premier of Communist China
1980: Secretary general Hu Yaobang admits past atrocities during a visit to Tibet
1980: Pro-democracy politician Kim Young-sam is banned from politics in South Korea
1980: The Chinese Communist Party introduces the "Rules on Intra-Party Political Life" to prevent any Mao-style cult of personality
1981: the Communist Party formally condemns Mao for the economic disasters from 1957 till his death, and blames Lin Biao and Mao's widow Jiang Qing for the excesses of the Cultural Revolution
Jun 1981: Deng introduces the "second resolution" ("The Resolution on Certain Questions in the History of our Party") criticizing Mao's "errors" during the Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1976, which led to millions of deaths and Hua Guofeng is replaced by Hu Yaobang as as party chairman
1981: Deng Xiaoping seizes power and launches pseudo-capitalistic economic reforms
1981: East Asia has the highest poverty rate in the world
1982: Deng Xiaoping begins to dismantle the communes and allows peasants to grow and sell produce
1982: Chun Doo-hwan allows South Korean dissident Kim Dae-jung to go in exile in the USA
1982: China adopts a new constitution that limits the president to two consecutive terms
Sep 1983: The Soviet Union shoots down a Korean airliner killing 269 people
Oct 1983: South Korean officials are murdered by North Korean agents in Burma
Oct 1983: Mainland China launches an Anti-Spiritual Pollution Campaign wanted to curb Western-inspired ideals
Oct 1984: Mainland China enacts reforms that limit the interference of government officials in the management of companies
1984: Daim Zainuddin is appointed finance minister of Malaysia
1984: Liu Chuanzhi of the Chinese Academy of Sciences founds a privately-run but state-owned company, Legend (later Lenovo), to sell IBM's personal computers in China
1985: South Korea is one of the "Asian tigers" whose economy booms
1985: The growth rate in mainland China was 9.4% between 1978 and 1995
1985: Jiang Zemin becomes mayor of Shangai and oversees the spectacular economic development of the city
1986: the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) is formed in Taiwan (non-communist China)
Dec 1986: Students in Beijing demonstrate in favor of democracy, inspired by a speech by Fang Lizi, a physicist at USTC
Jun 1989: Fang Lizi and his wife ask for asylum at the US embassy
Oct 1987: Another insurrection is Tibet is crushed by the Chinese, and the government establishes a special school in Beijing to educate the reincarnate Tibetan lamas
1987: Taiwan lifts martial law after four decades
Nov 1987: A Korean Airlines flights crashes in the sea due to a bomb planted by North Korean agents (115 dead)
Nov 1987: Hu Yaobang, Communist China's main reformer, is forced to resign from the post of general secretary of the Communist Party, and Deng replaces him with Zhao while appointing Li Peng as premier of China replacing Zhao
Dec 1987: South Korea becomes a democracy under president Roh Tae-woo, Chun's appointed heir, who wins elections against Kim Young-sam and Kim Dae-jung
1988: Deng appoints Shangkun Yang as president of mainland China
Jan 1988: Chiang Ching-kuo/ Jiang Jingguo dies and is succeeded by his vicepresident Teng-hui Lee
1988: About 60% of India's adults are illiterate compared with about 22% of Chinese
Mar 1989: Chinese governor Hu Jintao declares martial law in occupied Tibet after three days of rioting and anti-Chinese pogroms by Tibetans
Apr 1989: following the death of reformist leader Hu Yaobang, students join in a pro-democracy protest in the Tiananmen Square of Beijing
Jun 1989: Chinese Premier Li Peng declares martial law and sends the army to crush the Tiananmen Square protests and Zhao Ziyang (willing to negotiate with the students) is removed as prime minister
1989: Mainland China has almost 22,000 joint ventures with foreign companies, including 952 with USA firms
1989: Mainland China opens Zhongguancun Science Park, China's version of "Silicon Valley"
1989: the Dalai Lama of Tibet is awarded the Nobel Prize for peace
1989: Taiwan's per capita GDP is $7,500 while mainland China's per capita GDP is $350
1989: South Korea's per capita GDP is $4,500 while mainland North Korea's per capita GDP is less than $1,000
1990: the Shanghai stock exchange is established
1990: More than 60% of the people of mainland China live in extreme poverty
1990: Teng-hui Lee introduces multiparty democracy in Taiwan
1990: Shanghai has 10,000 factories and accounts for 1/6 of China's GDP
1990: China's Lenovo introduces its first homemade computer when the market is dominated by IBM, HP and Compaq
1990: China accounts for just 3% of global manufacturing output
1991: Communist China joins the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC)
1991: Mao's widow Jiang Qing commits suicide
1991: Shanghai is opened to capitalism
1991: Wang Lequan is appointed governor of Xinjiang province and proceeds to suppress Islam and the Uighur language, while mordernizing industry and transportation
1991: the panchen lama of Tibet dies, opening a conflict with China over the appointment of the successor
1991: The USA withdraws nuclear weapons from South Korea
Jan 1992: South Korea and North Korea sign the "Declaration of the Denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula", and the USA withdraws its nuclear weapons
1992: Communist China launches a program to put men into space
1992: Communist China and South Korea normalize relations
1992: Xiaoping Deng embarks on his "Southern Tour" to Shenzhen in order to revive flagging economic reforms, and coins the term "socialist market economy"
1992: Hongzhi Li founds the religious movement Falun Gong
1992: Taiwan holds its first democratic elections
1992: South Korea's Samsung becomes the largest producer of memory chips in the world
1992: the religious sect Fulan Gong is founded by Li Hongzhi
1992: Deng forces mainland China's president Shangkun Yang and his half-brother Baibing Yang to retire
1993: Jiang Zemin is appointed president of Communist China
Feb 1993: Opposition leader Kim Young-sam who won democratic elections becomes the first civilian president of South Korea
1993: The world's largest bronze Buddha statue opens at the Po Lin monastery in Hong Kong
1993: Stock markets are established in Shanghai and Shenzhen
1994: Communist China's gross domestic product grows at an average annual rate of about 10%, the highest in the world, between 1994 and 2000
1994: North Korea's leader Kim Il Sung dies and is succeeded by his son Kim Jong Il, the communist world's first hereditary transfer of power
Dec 1994: A fire in a Xinjiang theater kills 325 people including 288 schoolchildren because the crowd is told to wait for Community Party officials to leave first ("Karamay fire")
1995: South Korean conglomerate LG acquires Zenith
Dec 1995: South Korean arrests former presidents Chun Doo-hwan and Roh Tae-woo for corruption and murder
1995: China's economy only accounts for 2% of the world's economy
1996: South Korean conglomerate Samsung builds a factory in Texas, one of the largest foreign investments in the history of the USA
1996: The Avian flu H5N1 is isolated from a farmed goose in Guangdong Province
1996: China has 56,678 kms of rail lines, India has 62,915 kms
1996: Teng-hui Lee wins the first democratic election in Taiwan, which is also the first democratic election in the history of China
1996: China, Russia and three (later four) former Soviet republics (Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan) form the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO)
1997: Deng dies and Jiang Zemin, who was already ruling Communist China, becomes the sole leader
1997: Britain cedes Hong Kong back to Communist China, and Jiang Zemin appoints Tung Chee-hwa as chief executive of the city (Hong Kong's GDP is about 20% of the size of the mainland economy)
1997: Jiang Zemin legalizes private enterprise and unveils a plan to privatize Communist China's state-owned enterprises
Feb 1997: riots erupt between Uighurs and Chinese in Yining (Xinjiang province of mainland China)
Nov 1997: Wei Jingsheng is exiled to the USA
1997: Lenovo passes IBM to become China's main vendor of personal computers
1997: Hwang Jang Yop, the architect of North Korea's "juche" strategy, is the first high-level official to seek asylum in South Korea
1997: China launches the "Great Firewall of China" to censor the Internet
1991: Former Shanghai mayor Rongji Zhu is appointed is promoted to the central government of China and enacts economic reforms
Mar 1998: Former Shanghai mayor Rongji Zhu is appointed prime minister of Communist China, replacing Li Peng, and proceeds to overhaul state-owned companies
1998: Xiao Yang becomes president of the Supreme People's Court of mainland China and greatly reduces the rate of death sentences
1998: Kim Dae-jung is elected president of South Korea
1998: The growth rate in mainland China was 11.2% between 1990 and 1998
1998: Pakistan provides North Korea with nuclear technology in exchange for missile technology
1998: South Korea's Samsung introduces the world's first digital television set
1999: Chen Shui-bian becomes the first democratically elected president of Taiwan and the first to advocate independence from Communist China
May 1999: the USA sells missile and satellite technology to communist China
1999: Jack Ma founds Alibaba
Jul 1999: China bands the religious movement Falun Gong
1999: Daewoo, the second largest conglomerate in South Korea with interests in about 100 countries, goes bankrupt
1999: the world's largest Tibetan tangka is completed (a 1,500 square meter, 1,000 kg scroll)
1999: Mainland China arrests Uighur activist Rebiya Kadeer
1999: a ferry sinks killing over 275 near Yantai
1999: China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia and Tajikistan form the Shanghai Five organization
Dec 1999: Portugal returns Macau to China
2000: Shanghai has 14 million people, Beijing 12.5 million, Chengdu 10 million
2000: Binxing Fang begins work on the "Great Firewall of China", that would block millions of websites including www.scaruffi.com
2000: Mainland China ranks eight in the world for papers published in scientific magazines
2000: Kim Dae-jung of South Korea meets with Kim Jong-il of North Korea, the first time that the leaders of the two Koreas meet
2000: The "Midi Music Festival" is held in Beijing, the first music festival in China
Jul 2000: A welding accident sets off a fire at a club in Luoyang, China, killing 309 people.
Dec 2000: China sentences civil-rights activist Huang Qi (founder of 64 Tianwang) to jail
2001: Jiang Zemin invites capitalists in the Chinese communist party
2001: Venezuela becomes the first Latin American country to enter into a "strategic development partnership" with China
2001: China's Communist Party admits capitalists as members
2001: Mainland China purges several officials after discovering a smuggling ring in Fujian province
2001: China joins the World Trade Organization
2001: Uzbekistan joins the Shanghai Five organization, which is then renamed Shanghai Cooperation Organisation
2001: China executes more than 20 Uighur militants declaring them affiliated with Al Qaeda
2002: Jiang Zemin resigns and Hu Jintao succeeds him, the first peaceful transition of power since 1949
2002: South Korea's Samsung is the second semiconductor manufacturer in the world after Intel
2002: Japan and South Korea combined deliver 75% of the world's shipbuilding
Dec 2002: 140,000 Chinese workers die in work-related accidents in one year
2002: A magnetic levitation train is inaugurated in Shanghai, the fastest train in the world
2002: Tenzin Delek Rinpoche and other Tibetan leaders are arrested by the government of mainland China
2002: North Korea admits that is developing nuclear weapons in violation of a treaty with the USA
Nov 2002: At the 16th Communist Party Congress, Rui Li calls for political reform
2003: Yang Bin, China's second richest man, is sentenced to 13 years in prison for tax evasion
2003: Roh Moo-hyun wins the election in South Korea with a program that calls for US withdrawal and negotiations with North Korea
2003: Serial killer Xinhai Yang is arrested in China after killing 67 people
2003: Serial killer Qiang Wang is arrested in China after killing 42 people
2003: 130 people die in a South Korean subway fire set by a madman
Mar 2003: Wen Jiabao is appointed prime minister of Communist China, replacing Zhu Rongji
Nov 2002: A new type of pneumonia, severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), spreads out of Guangdong province in Communist China
2002: Mainland China ratifies the policy of "Three Represents" that welcomes private entrepreneurs into the Communist Party
2003: Communist China quarantines 10,000 people in Nanjing to control the spread of the SARS virus
2003: Communist China's "Three Gorges Dam" on the Yangtze (2.3 km long and 185 meters tall), the world's largest dam, becomes operational
2003: Communist China sends a man in space, Yang Liwei, the third country to do so after the USSR and the USA, and announces plans to send a man to the moon by 2020
2003: about 200 people die of an explosion at a gas field in Chongqing
2003: Communist China's economy grows 9.1% in 2003
Jun 2003: 813 people have died of SARS, mainly in China, Taiwan, Canada and Singapore
2003: Car manufacturer BYD is founded in Shenzen
2003: Liu Xiaobo becomes president of the Chinese chapter of an international organization of writers
2004: Roh Moo-hyun is impeached in South Korea for illegal actions
2004: China becomes South Korea's main trading partner ahead of the USA and Japan
2004: China opens the first Confucius Institutes, starting with Seoul, and the first in the USA, at the University of Maryland
Dec 2004: 107,000 Chinese die in road accidents in one year
2004: Russia and China settle all border disputes, mostly favoring China
2004: The high-speed monorail Shanghai Maglev Train (built by Germany's Transrapid) opens
2004: Mainland China announces a "science city" in Hefei, capital of the Anhui province
2004: president Chen Shui-bian of Taiwan is re-elected by very few votes after a man tried to kill him, sparking protests in the island
2004: 150 passengers die in a train collision in North Korea
2004: "Taipei 101" becomes the tallest skyscraper in the world, unseating Malaysia's Petronas Towers
2004: South Korea's per-capita GDP passes Taiwan's to become the second in Asia after Japan
2004: Between 1980 and 2004 the size of China's economy has increased seven times
2004: Mainland China opens its first Confucius Institute (in South Korea)
2005: North Korea announces that it has nuclear weapons and pulls out of nuclear talks
2005: a mine explosion kills more than 200 people in communist China
2005: Hong Kong's chief executive Tung Chee-hwa resigns after pro-democracy protests
2005: China and India sign a treaty in which China gives up any claim on the state of Sikkim
2005: there are more than 300 skyscrapers in Shangai (up from one in 1985)
2005: Shenzhen's population is 12 million (up from 1.7 in 1990)
2005: two Chinese astronauts orbit Earth for five days
2005: Hu Yaobang is rehabilitated by Communist China
2005: 100 tons of toxic material contaminate rivers in China (near Harbin) and Russia
2005: Hong Kong holds the largest pro-democracy demonstration ever in the history of mainland China
2005: Mainland China's trade surplus triples in one year to a record $102 billion, and mainland China becomes the world's third-largest foreign trader after the United States and Germany with trade of $1.4 trillion, as well as second only to Japan for foreign currency reserves ($794 billion)
2005: Mainland China becomes the fourth world economy after the USA, Japan and Germany
2005: China's Lenovo acquires IBM's personal computer business
Nov 2005: China's artist Ai Weiwei starts a blog critical of the government
2006: The US search engine Google accepts to cooperate with the government of mainland China in censoring the world-wide web
2006: China arrests Shanghai's Communist Party chief Chen Liangyu for corruption
2006: the Beijing government does not even mention the 40th anniversary of Mao's "Cultural Revolution"
2006: a railway connection between mainland China and Tibet is inaugurated (the 1,140km Golmud-Lhasa being the world's highest)
2006: North Korea announces its first nuclear test
2006: 15 years after opening to capitalism, Shanghai surpasses Shenzhen and the Pearl River Delta as China's primary industrial zone
Jan 2006: Mainland China joins the World Trade Organisation
Feb 2006: China's State Council issues a document titled "National Medium- and Long-Term Plan for the Development of Science and Technology (2006-2020)" that promotes "zizhu chuangxin" (indigenous innovation)
2007: Mainland China shoots a missile to destroy an orbiting satellite
2007: Beijing introduces the first bikesharing program in Mainland China, 12 years after it was invented in Copenhagen
2007: The growth rate in mainland China was 9.9% between 1999 and 2007
2007: China overtakes all European countries and becomes the third economic power after USA and Japan
2007: Mainland China's per-capita GDP is $2,500, while Taiwan's is $17,000 and Japan's is $38,559
2007: an edition in modern Chinese of "The Analects of Confucius" becomes the all-time bestselling book in mainland China
2007: the USA and South Korea sign a free-trade treaty
2007: Mainland China overtakes the USA to become the world's second largest exporter (after Germany) and overtakes Canada to become the main exporter to the USA
2007: Mainland China's exports to Europe surpass mainland China's exports to the USA
2007: Mainland China overtakes the USA as the world's main polluter
2007: For the first time since 1951 a train crosses the border between North and South Korea
2007: Lee Myung-bak wins the election in South Korea despite being under investigation for corruption
2007: Mainland China attracts almost $83 billions of foreign industrial investment in 2007, the highest amount of any country in the world
2007: dissident Hu Jia is jailed for criticizing the Communist Party
2007: 150,000 Chinese are studying abroad
2007: The world's largest vendors of personal computers are HP, Dell, Taiwan's Acer, China's Lenovo and Japan's Toshiba
2007: Mainland China's GDP growth rate peaks at 14%
2007: Yongkang Zhou becomes the third most powerful person of mainland China, his deputy Jianzhu Meng becomes minister and Guoqiang He is elevated to the standing committee, thus curbing president Hu's power
Sep 2007: Jihua Ling, a close ally of president Hu, is appointed director of the General Office of the Communist Party
Oct 2007: Shanghai's Composite Stock Market Index reaches an all-time high of 6124
2008: Taiwan's opposition party Kuomintang (KMT), that wants closer ties with mainland China, wins a landslide victory in parliamentary polls
2008: Shenzhen has ten million people
2008: Tibetan protesters and Chinese civilians are killed and hundred of Tibetans are arrested in pro-independence riots
2008: An earthquake kills more than 60,000 people in mainland China
2008: Opposition leader Ma Ying-jeou wins Taiwan's presidential elections
2008: Mainland China and Taiwan sign a deal to launch regular flights between the two countries
2008: Chinese policemen kill five Islamist militants in Xinjiang
2008: Two people are killed by bombs placed on buses in Kunming
2008: Mainland China inaugurates its first high-speed railway, from Beijing to Tianjin, 44 years after Japan's Shinkansen
May 2008: An earthquake kills more than 60,000 people in China's province Sichuan
Aug 2008: Uighur Islamic separatists kill 23 Chinese policemen in East Turkestan (Xinjiang)
Aug 2008: The Olympic Games are held in mainland China
Nov 2008: Chinese exports fall for the first time in seven years
Nov 2008: Mainland China publishes a policy paper advocating tighter ties with Latin America (paper)
Dec 2008: The Shanghai stock market loses almost 65% in 2008
Dec 2008: Mainland China holds an estimated $1 trillion in USA government debt
Dec 2008: Mainland China has 115,000 state-owned companies
2008: Korean auto-maker Hyundai becomes the fourth-largest automaker in the world behind Toyota, General Motors and Volkswagen
2008: Former Google executive Kai-fu Lee founds Innovation Works in mainland China
2008: Nearly 180,000 Chinese students leave mainland China for universities abroad, a 25% increase over the previous year
Jul 2008: China arrests civil-rights activist Huang Qi (founder of 64 Tianwang) to jail for the second time
2009: The government of mainland China injects a $4 trillion stimulus package into the economy to offset the international financial crisis
Mar 2009: Bank of China's governor Zhou Xiaochuan proposes that international trade be based on a global currency instead of the dollar
Apr 2009: China and Argentina sign a $10.2 billion currency swap deal to help stabilize the Argentine peso
May 2009: former South Korean president Roh Moo-hyun, accused of corruption, commits suicide
May 2009: Mainland China shuts down Ai Weiwei's blog
May 2009: Mainland China buys $22 billion worth of Australian mining operations
Jun 2009: Mainland China mandates censorship software on all computers sold in mainland China
Jun 2009: Pro-democracy advocate Liu Xiaobo is jailed by mainland China after he and other prominent intellectuals circulate Charter o8, a political manifesto calling for democracy in China
Jul 2009: three Uighurs from the province of Xinjiang set themselves on fire in Beijing and ethnic violence in Xinjiang between Uighurs and Hans kills 197 people (for which several Muslims are sentenced to death)
Jul 2009: Folowing the Urumqi riots, China bans Facebook which is used by the rioters
Jul 2009: fearing an aging population, Shanghai repeals the one-child only policy
Dec 2009: A gas pipeline between Turkmenistan and mainland China is inaugurated, bypassing Russia
Dec 2009: Mainland China limits the creation and viewing of websites by its citizens
Dec 2009: Mainland China passes Germany as the world's top exporter ($1.2 trillion a year) and mainland China passes Canada as the USA top exporter
2009: Mainland China's car market becomes the world's largest (for the first time more new cars are sold in mainland China than in the USA)
2009: Mainland China's Inner Mongolia has become the country's largest producer of coal and the world's largest producer of rare earths
2009: Mainland China bans the social network Facebook
Jan 2010: The USA sells Patriot air defense rockets to Taiwan
Jan 2010: Google discloses that hackers affiliated with the Chinese Communist Party have launched cyberattacks against several US corporations (Operation Aurora)
Jan 2010: Google exits China after discovering a China-based hacking attack that targeted Google's intellectual property and Chinese dissidents
2010: Mainland China bans the search engine Google
2010: The first oil pipeline from Russia to China is completed
May 2010: North Korea sinks a South Korean warship, causing the death of 46 sailors
Jun 2010: Chinese workers led by Tan Guocheng go on strike at a Honda plant
Jun 2010: Mainland China surpasses the USA to become the world's biggest energy consumer
Jun 2010: General Motors sells more cars in mainland China than in the USA
Aug 2010: A bomb set off by a Uighur kills seven people in Aksu, Xinjiang, mainland China
Sep 2010: Kim Jong Il's youngest son Kim Jong-Un is appointed to succeed his father as North Korea's leader
Sep 2010: Mainland China produces 95% of the rare earths of the world and stops shipments to Japan over a territorial dispute
Oct 2010: Rui Li signs an open letter to the Standing Committee calling for greater press freedom
Nov 2010: North Korea shells the South Korean island of Yeonpyeong killing two civilians
Dec 2010: The first study to include Chinese students finds that Chinese students outperform the rest of the world in Science, Reading and Math
Dec 2010: Mainland China pressures countries to boycott the Nobel Prize ceremony after the peace price is awarded to jailed dissident Liu Xiaobo
Dec 2010: The social network Renren reaches 100 million users in mainland China, where Facebook and Twitter are banned
Dec 2010: Village advocate Qian Yunhui who was fighting illegal land seizures is killed in a mysterious truck accident
Dec 2010: Mainland China (GDP of $5.75 trillion) overtakes Japan (GDP of $5.39 trillion) as the world's second largest economy after the USA, although mainland China's GDP per head ($4,500) is only 11% of Japan's ($40,000)
2010: The European Union becomes mainland China's biggest export market, while the USA remains the European Union's biggest export market
2010: The USA has become mainland China's second-largest export market and mainland China has become the USA's third-largest export market and the fastest-growing one
2010: Mainland China holds about $1.6 trillion in Treasury bonds of the USA
2010: There are about 200,000 people in gulags throughout North Korea
2010: South Korea's Hyundai-Kia passes Ford to become the fourth automaker in the world after Toyota, General Motors and Volkswagen
2010: Mainland China's trade with Central Asian countries exceed Russia's for the first time
Mar 2011: A Tibetan monk sets himself on fire in Sichuan, starting protests centered around the monastery of Kirti
2011: A Huazhong University of Science and Technology student, "Hanjunyi", throws a shoe at Binxing Fang, the architect of the "Great Firewall of China"
2011: Mainland China bans the search engine Google
Apr 2011: Russia and mainland China allow the United Nations Security Council to vote a resolution which authorized NATO military attacks in Libya to protect anti-government protesters, but do not allow a similar resolution against Syria that is also killing hundreds of protesters
Apr 2011: Mainland China creates the State Internet Information Office to censor the Internet
Apr 2011: Mainland China arrests artist Ai Weiwei
May 2011: Mainland China cracks down on young people trying to organize protests (the "jasmine revolution")
May 2011: Ethnic Mongols stage a protest in Inner Mongolia of Mainland China
Jun 2011: Vietnam and mainland China trade accusations over oil exploration in the South China Sea
Jun 2011: Mainland China invests in the port of Piraeus of Greece
Jul 2011: 18 people are killed suring political unrest in China's Uighur region
Jul 2011: Mainland China introduces regulations that require bars, restaurants, hotels and bookstores to install Web monitoring software
2011: The USA has 413 billionaires, mainland China has 115 billionaires, Russia 101, India 55, Germany 52, Britain 32, Brazil 30, and Japan 26
Jul 2011: A high-speed train crashes in mainland China killing 40 people
Jul 2011: Dozens of people are killed in riots in Western China (Uighurs)
Sep 2011: Russia and mainland China are the only countries to support Syria's crackdown on dissidents while even Syria's ally Iran distances itself from Assad's regime
Sep 2011: Several Tibetan monks set themselves on fire in Kirti
Oct 2011: The USA signs free-trade treaties with Colombia, Panama and South Korea
Oct 2011: The world's population is 7 billion up from 1 billion in 1850 and less than 3 billion in 1950.
Oct 2011: 20-year-old Tibetan nun Tenzin Wangmo set herself on fire in Mainland China
Dec 2011: Mainland China owns $800 billion of euro zone government bonds
Dec 2011: Mainland China's foreign exchange reserves are worth $3.2 trillion or 5% of the world's GDP
Dec 2011: North Korea's leader Jong-il Kim dies and is succeeded by his son Jong-un Kim
Dec 2011: Chinese writer Chen Wei is jailed for nine years by a court in Sichuan for "inciting subversion" through pro-democracy essays.
Dec 2011: Zulian Lin leads popular protests against corrupt officials in the small village of Wukan
2011: The USA spends $739bn in defense while China spends $90bn
2011: South Korea reports three cases of patients infected with the deadly fungus Candida auris
Jan 2012: In one year 15 Tibetan monks have set themselves on fire to protest Chinese occupation
2012: Keith Alexander, director of the National Security Agency, calls trade with China "the greatest transfer of wealth in history" because of all the ways that China cheats the USA
2012: Hong Kong students form the protest group Scholarism
2012: China's exports have increased from $38 billion in 1980 (1% of world exports) to $4.2 trillion in 2012 (115 of world exports)
Feb 2012: Lijun Wang, police chief of Chongqing, seeks asylum in the US of Chengdu, bringing evidence that implicates Xilai Bo, Chongqing's Communist Party chief, and his wife in the murder of British businessman Neil Heywood, but is denied asylum
Mar 2012: Xilai Bo, the populist leader of the southwestern megacity of Chongqing, is removed from power, the first major purge in years, and later sentenced to life imprisonment
Mar 2012: Jihua Ling's only son dies when he crashes his Ferrari while engaging in sexual activities with two women
May 2012: Two monks that set themselves on fire in Lhasa bring to 36 the number of self-immolations in Tibet since march 2011
Jun 2012: Hong Kong holds huge protests against its newly appointed leader Leung Chun-ying
Aug 2012: A teenager kills eight people with a knife in northeast China
Aug 2012: Bo's wife Gu Kailai, convicted of murdering British businessman Neil Heywood, is sentenced to life imprisonment
Sep 2012: Anti-Japanese protests erupt in mainland China over contested islands
Sep 2012: Jihua Ling, a close ally of departing president Hu, is demoted from director of the General Office of the Communist Party
Sep 2012: China launches its first aircraft carrier
Nov 2012: The Chinese Communist Party elects a new president, Jinping Xi
Nov 2012: Several Tibetans set themselves on fire in Gansu, Sichuan and Qinghai provinces of mainland China to protest Chinese occupation
Dec 2012: Park Geun-hye, the daughter of former dictator Park Chung-hee, wins South Korean elections and becomes the first female president of the country
Dec 2012: China opens the world's longest high-speed rail route, linking Beijing with Guangzhou
Feb 2013: Chey Tae-won, head of South Korea's conglomerate SK, is jailed for embezzlement
Feb 2013: A report by US cyber-security firm Mandiant documents cyber-attacks by China's People's Liberation Army (Unit 61398) targeting US organizations
Mar 2013: Jiabao Wen retires from prime minister of mainland China and is replaced by Keqiang Li
2013: Only 2% of the people of mainland China live in extreme poverty
2013: On the 100th anniversary of the Western Returned Scholars Association, now also known as the Overseas-Educated Scholars Association of China (OESAC), Xi declares that members must serve to the country through the study-abroad
Mar 2013: 83 miners are buried alive at a gold mine in China's Tibet
Apr 2013: Uighur separatists attack mainland China's security forces in Kashgar leaving 21 dead
Apr 2013: Xi's right-hand man Li Zhanshu publishes "Document No. 9 - Communique on the Current State of the Ideological Sphere" that instructs the Communist Party to fight the forces of Western liberalism in a language reminiscent of Mao's Cultural Revolution
Jun 2013: A fire at a poultry processing plant in Dehui in Jilin province kills at least 119 people
Jun 2013: Riots kill at least 35 people in China's western region of Xinjiang
Jun 2013: China's ICBC tops the list of the world's top 1,000 banks
Sep 2013: Lijun Wang is sentenced to life imprisonment, the first member of the Politburo Standing Committee to be ousted since Zhao Ziyang in 1989 and the first member to be put on trial since the Gang of Four
Sep 2013: China's president Jinping Xi announces the creation of the Belt and Road Initiative, a vast program of infrastructure investment to link China with Central Asia, the Middle East, Africa and Europe
Oct 2013: Uighur separatist group East Turkestan Islamic Movement explodes a car bomb in Beijing killing the three people in the car and two bystanders
Nov 2013: Diego Guelar, Argentina's ambassador to the USA, publishes the book "The Silent Invasion" about the China's economic colonization of South America
Nov 2013: Nine Uighur attackers and two Chinese policemen are killed in Xinjiang province
Nov 2013: Baidu's founder Robin Li is the richest man in China
Dec 2013: Eight Muslim militiamen are killed after trying to attack a police station in China's Xinjiang
Dec 2013: Zhou Yongkang is arrested for corruption and later sentenced to life in prison
2013: China unveils the Silk Road Economic Belt or "One Belt One Road" (OBOR) initiative
Jan 2014: China arrests Ji Jianye, the mayor of Nanjing, as well as billionaire Zhu Xingliang for corruption
Feb 2014: Uighur separatists from Xinjiang armed with knives storm the railway station in the southwest Chinese city of Kunming and kill 31 people
2014: China forms the China-Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) forum that includes every country in the Americas with the exception of Canada and the USA
Mar 2014: Students and civic groups organize protests in Taiwan against a trade agreement by the ruling Kuomintang party that increases relationships with mainland China ("Sunflower movement")
Apr 2014: A bomb by Islamic separatists kills 3 people at an Urumqi train station
Apr 2014: Xi vists Xinjiang province and demands "absolutely no mercy" for Uighur militants
May 2014: Angry at China for moving a drilling rig into Vietnamese waters, mobs of Vietnamese people set on fire 15 foreign-owned factories
May 2014: Uighur separatists attack a market in Chinese occupied Urumqi, leaving 39 people dead
May 2014: A state-owned Chinese oil company tows an oil rig off the coast of Vietnam causing anti-Chinese riots in Vietnam
May 2014: Liu Han, a Chinese tycoon close to China's former security chief Zhou Yongkang, is sentenced to death
Jun 2014: Mainland China sentences to prison anticorruption activists Liu Ping and Wei Zhongping
Jun 2014: China restricts Islamic fasting for anyone employed in government
Jun 2014: For the first time since 1949 an official delegation from mainland China visits Taiwan
Jun 2014: After Canada arrests Su Bin for extradition to the USA where he is wanted for espionage, two Christian missionaries from Canada, Kevin and Julia Garratt, are arrested in China and accused of spying
Jul 2014: During protests against the Chinese government 59 Muslims are killed by security forces and 37 civilians are killed by the protesters in the towns of Elixku and Huangdi of Xinjiang province
Jul 2014: An earthquake in Yunnan province kills 600 people
Sep 2014: China commits 700 troops to defend oilfields in South Sunda
Sep 2014: Chinese president Xi Jinping and India's prime minister Narendra Modi sign an agreement for China to build high-speed trains and to set up industrial parks in Gujarat and Maharashtra
Sep 2014: The Occupy Central movement (or "Umbrella Movement"), led by 19-year-old Joshua Wong and others, organizes month-long pro-democracy demonstrations in Hong Kong after the Chinese government announced that it will restrict candidates at elections
Sep 2014: Ilham Tohti is sentenced to life in jail for supporting the Uighur separatists
Sep 2014: 100 "rioters", six civilians and four police officers are killed in eastern China's Xinjiang during riots between police and Uighur separatists
Oct 2014: Following the demonstrations in Hong Kong, China bans Instagram
Oct 2014: Paraphrasing Stalin, Xi proclaims that "Art and literature is the engineering that molds the human soul; art and literary workers are the engineers of the human soul"
Nov 2014: Russia and China sign a colossal oil and gas deal, using the Chinese yuan as the trading currency
Nov 2014: Taiwan's pro-independence Democratic Progressive Party wins elections
Nov 2014: Mainland China arrests activist lawyer Xia Lin
Dec 2014: Under threat from anonymous hackers, Sony Pictures cancels the release of a film on North Korea's dictatorship, while South Korea publishes a white paper denouncing that North Korea has 6,000 "cyberwarriors" and has nuclear capabilities to strike the USA
Dec 2014: Jihua Ling, director of the United Front Work Department, is arrested for corruption and later sentenced to life imprisonment
2014: China launches the project OBOR ("One Belt One Road") to construct a number of land and sea arteries with the rest of Asia and Europe
2014: A train from Spain to eastern China completes the second longest round-trip journey ever made
2014: Real-estate billionaire Guo Wengui flees China and moves to the USA
Sep 2014: China blocks the app Instagram
Dec 2014: China's first data exchange opens in the southwestern city of Guiyang
2014: China's share of global rare earths output peaks at 86%
2015: Chinese oil conglomerate CEFC opens its European headquarters in Prague
Jan 2015: An explosion in a chemical warehouse kills 173 people in Tianjin
Feb 2015: China releases Christian missionaire Julia Garratt
Mar 2015: A woman becomes the 137th known person to set herself on fire in Tibet to protest the Chinese occupation since 2009
Apr 2015: China and Pakistan unveil a network of roads, railway and pipelines that will connect Gwadar in Pakistan to China's Xinjiang The projects will give China direct access to the Indian Ocean
Apr 2015: North Korea's defense minister Hyon Yong-chol and 15 senior officials are executed
Apr 2015: Gao Yu, the journalist who leaked "Document No. 9" to the West is sentenced to seven years in prison
Jun 2015: 18 people are killed when Uighurs attack a police station in China's Muslim city of Kashgar
Jun 2015: China inaugurates the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), a rival to the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank funded by 50 countries including Britain, Germany, Australia and South Korea but not Japan nor the USA
2015: China's has become the main importer of Middle Eastern oil (51% of its oil imports, 16% from Saudi Arabia alone)
2015: India and Pakistan join the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation with Russia and China and Central Asian countries
May 2015: Xi at the Central United Front Work Conference calls the United Front a "magic weapon" to eliminate threats to the Communist Party and calls for the United Front Work Department (UFWD) to influence ethnic Chinese communities living outside China
Jun 2015: China passes a law that increases the government's control over ordinary lives including online
Aug 2015: China's stocks lose about 40% in two months, causing panic selling in markets across Asia
Aug 2015: Chinese artist Ai Weiwei flees China for Germany
Aug 2015: A chemical explosion in Tianjin kills 173 people
Sep 2015: Chinese police makes 19,000 triad arrests in Hong Kong, Macau and Guangdong
Oct 2015: China repeals the one-child policy
Oct 2015: Five publishers associated with the Causeway Bay bookshop and the Mighty Current publishing house in Hong Kong are arrested between October and December 2015
Nov 2015: The Commercial Aircraft Corp. of China (COMAC) unveils the first Chinese-made big passenger airplane
Nov 2015: For the first time the leaders of Taiwan and mainland China meet (Taiwan's president Ying-jeou Ma and mainland China's president Jinping Xi)
Dec 2015: After a landslide kills more than 70 people in Shenzhen, a local politician kills himself
Dec 2015: The owner of a mine where dozens of miners died in an accident kills himself
Dec 2015: China's economy grows by 6.9% in 2015, its slowest growth rate in 26 years, and China's total debt reaches a record 277% of GDP
2015: South Korea records 186 cases of MERS, the most outside the Middle East
2015: For the first time since 1981 China's steel production declines
2015: China produces 803 million tons of steel, more than 50% of the world's total
2015: China's debt hits 250% of GDP
2015: The average number of hours worked in China per worker in 2015 was 2,432 hours and 1,767 in the USA, 1,372 in Germany and 1,495 in France
2015: China accounts for 24% of global manufacturing output, manufacturing accounts for almost 36% of China's GDP and wages have increased 12% per year on average since 2001
2015: Four of the five biggest banks in the world are Chinese
2015: China's economy accounts for 17% of the world's economy
Oct 2015: China hosts officials from 11 Latin American countries for a 10-day forum on military logistics titled "Strengthening Mutual Understanding for Win-Win Cooperation."
Oct 2015: Mainland China hosts officials from 11 Latin American countries for a military workshop
Dec 2015: Guangchang Guo, one of mainland China's richest men, is detained
2015: China has become South America's top trading partner, surpassing the USA
Jan 2016: A slowing economy sends the Chinese stock market crashing
Jan 2016: Ing-wen Tsai of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) is elected Taiwan's first female president
Feb 2016: The first train to connect China and Iran takes 14 days through Kazakstan and Turkmenistan
Feb 2016: China deploys surface-to-air missiles on a disputed island in the South China Sea that is claimed by both Vietnam and Taiwan
Feb 2016: Zhiqiang Ren is banned from social media after criticizing Xi's speech that the media's duty is to serve the Communist Party
Mar 2016: Chinese journalist Shaolei Yu denounces president Xi's censorship in a resignation letter
Mar 2016: Su Bin surrenders to the USA and pleads guilty to stealing military data and sending them to China
Apr 2016: Joshua Wong launches a new political party in Hong Kong, Demosisto, demanding self-determination for Hong Kong
Apr 2016: The death of student Wei Zexi after treatment at a military hospital reveals a large number of military hospitals that rent space to fake doctors
Jun 2016: Chinese anti-corruption activist Zulian Lin is arrested on trumped-up charges of corruption
Jul 2016: The USA begins deploying an anti-missile system in South Korea
Jul 2016: The Philippines win a legal case against China's annexation of the Scarborough Shoal in the South China Sea at the international tribunal of the Hague
Jul 2016: The Chinese government cracks down on political activists and human-rights lawyers
Aug 2016: China tests the Transit Elevated Bus (TEB) in Qinhuangdao City
Aug 2016: The Communist Party's document "Opinions on Strengthening the Construction of WRSA/OESAC" asks the Western Returned Scholars Association (WRSA) to exert political guidance and organizational incorporation on foreign Chinese talents
Aug 2016: Chen Quanguo becames the boss of Xinjiang and proceeds to create reeducation camps for Muslims
Sep 2016: Chinese police launch a raid against the "protest" village of Wukan after arresting its elected leader on corruption charges
Sep 2016: Yang Qingpei kills his parents and 17 neighbours
Sep 2016: Mainland China sentences human-rights lawyer Xia Lin to 12 years of prison
Sep 2016: China releases Christian missionaire Kevin Garratt after 775 days in detention
Oct 2016: Pro-independence activists Sixtus Leung and Yau Wai-ching are elected to Hong Kong's parliament but refuse to pledge allegiance to China and are therefore banned from the parliament
Nov 2016: Protesters demand the resignations of South Korea's president Geun-hye Park, involved in the corruption scandal of her friend Soon-sil Choi
Dec 2016: South Korea's parliament impeach president Geun-hye Park and appoints Hwang Kyo-ahn interim president
2016: Chinese football clubs spend $363 million to sign up European and Latin American football stars
2016: Mainland China destroys about 5,000 mosques in Xinjiang province
Dec 2016: Ecuador inaugurates a giant dam in the jungle, Coca Codo Sinclair, financed and built by China
Dec 2016: 35 people die in China of the avian flu H7N9
Feb 2017: North Korean dictator's brother Jong-nam Kim is assassinated in Malaysia
Mar 2017: The USA starts deploying the THAAD (Terminal High Altitude Area Defense) antimissile system in South Korea, and China reacts by punishing South Korea's businesses
2017: Chinese oil conglomerate CEFC purchases a $9.1 billion stake in the Russian state-controlled oil giant Rosneft
Mar 2017: South Korea's president Geun-hye Park is forced to resign because of her role in a corruption scandal involving her close friend Soon-sil Choi.
Mar 2017: Kazakhstan-based activists Qydyrali Oraz and Serikzhan Bilash (a naturalized Kazakh citizen born in the Chinese region of Xinjiang) found the organization Atajurt to protect ethnic Kazakhs detained in Chinese concentration camps
Mar 2017: China announces the construction of a new city near Beijing, Xiongan
Apr 2017: China's first air carrier is tested
Apr 2017: A train from Britain to eastern China completes the second longest round-trip journey ever made
Apr 2017: An oil pipeline from a Myanmar port to China becomes operational, bypassing the Malacca Strait
Apr 2017: China's Xinjiang province introduces the "de-extremification" program against Uigurs, including restrictions on which names children can have, punishment for refusing to watch public radio and television programmes, wearing burkas, having a long beard, and resisting national policies
May 2017: Moon Jae-in is elected president of South Korea
May 2017: Google holds in Wuzhen a match between its A.I. system AlphaGo and the world's champion of go
May 2017: North Korea conducts a nuclear test just when China is holding a meeting of the OBOR ("One Belt One Road") with dozens of world leaders
Jul 2017: Mainland China sets up its first military base outside Asia, in Djibouti
Jul 2017: Sun Zhengcai, Communist Party secretary of Chongqing, and the youngest member of the 18th Politburo of the Communist Party of China, is arrested for corruption and then sentenced to life imprisonment
Aug 2017: North Korea shoots a long-range missile over Japan
Aug 2017: The US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency warns that Chinese-made drones by DJI are "providing US critical infrastructure and law enforcement data to the Chinese government"
Sep 2017: While China is preparing to open the BRICS meeting, North Korea tests a hydrogen bomb
Sep 2017: North Korea's dictator Jong-Un Kim and the USA's president Donald Trump trade insults, Trump calling Kim "rocket man" and Kim calling Trump a "dotard"
Oct 2017: Hundreds of Chinese-Kazakh refugees pressure Kazakhstan's government to protect persecuted Muslims China's Xinjiang province
Nov 2017: multi-billionaire Jianming Ye, CEO of CEFC China Energy, is accused in the USA of paying bribes to African leaders, and his representative Patrick Ho Chi-ping is arrested
Nov 2017: China and South Korea re-normalize relations
Nov 2017: Multi-billionaire Jianming Ye, CEO of CEFC China Energy, is accused in the USA of paying bribes to African leaders, and his representative Chi-ping "Patrick" Ho is arrested in the USA
Dec 2017: Mainland China has the world's largest high-speed rail network (about 25,000 kms)
Dec 2017: Mainland China has 700 million internet users
Dec 2017: Mainland China's mobile payments is about $13 trillion, the world's largest volume
Dec 2017: Sri Lanka leases the Hambantota port to China and the surrounding land for 99 years
2017: China sells $500 billion worth of goods to the USA in 2017, accounting for about 25% of its total exports and about 4% of GDP (total GPD is $12 trillion)
2017: China's GDP reaches $12 trillion
Jan 2018: The French newspaper Le Monde Afrique publishes a report according to which the African Union’s computers have been hacked for five years by China
Jan 2018: The International Monetary Fund approves China’s renminbi as a "main world currency"
Feb 2018: North Korea and South Korea march together at the Winter Olympics, while the USA snubs North Korea at the opening ceremony
Mar 2018: Mainland China removes the two-term limit for president Xi
Mar 2018: Mainland China arrests CEFC `s chairman Jianming Ye, involved in an international corruption scandal
Mar 2018: Mainland China opens a space mission control station in Argentina
Mar 2018: South Korea arrests former president Lee Myung-bak on charges of corruption
Mar 2018: China posts a current-account deficit for the first time in modern times
Mar 2018: China inaugurates a space mission control station in Argentina
Mar 2018: multi-billionaire Jianming Ye disappears
Mar 2018: China opens a space station in Argentina
Mar 2018: Amnesty International estimates that one million Uighurs are detained by China in "reeducation camps" in Xinjiang province
Mar 2018: Mainland China places propaganda activities about religious groups, ethnic minorities, and the Chinese diaspora under the control of the United Front Work Department
Apr 2018: South Korea's former president Geun-hye Park is sentenced to jail for corruption
Apr 2018: China's State Council issues a top-secret document, "Reinforcing and Improving Islam Work in the New Situation"
Apr 2018: North Korea's dictator Jong-un Kim meets South Korea's president Jae-in Moon face to face and therefore becomes the first leader to step into South Korea
Apr 2018: The USA introduces sanctions against ZTE, a $17 billion telecom firm that employs 75,000 workers and heavily depends on semiconductor components made in the USA (China still imports 90% of its semiconductor components)
Apr 2018: A man kills nine schoolchildren at a middle school in Mizhi county in Shaanxi province
May 2018: Zhengcai Sun, a former member of the politburo, is sentenced to life in prison for corruption
Jun 2018: US president Trump and North Korean dictator Jong-un Kim meet in Singapore, the first meeting ever between the leaders of the two countries
2018: Dozens of P2P-lending platforms crash
Jul 2018: Sayragul Sauytbay, a Chinese national and an ethnic Kazakh who crossed illegally into Kazakhstan, testifies in court about the reeducation camps for Uygurs in China's northwestern Xinjiang Province
Jul 2018: Ecuador issues an arrest warrant for ex-president Rafael Correa, who has fled to Belgium, while former vice-president Jorge Glas-Espinel, former electricity minister Aleksey Mosquera and even former anti-corruption official Carlos Polit are jailed for taking bribes from Brazilian construction firm Odebrecht to build the giant Chinese-funded Coca Codo Sinclair dam, and more than 7,000 cracks have been discovered in the dam’s machinery
Aug 2018: South Korea's impeached and ousted president Geun-hye Park is sentenced to 25 years in prison for collecting bribes from Samsung
Sep 2018: Mainland China arrests the chief of China's Interpol, Meng Hongwei
Sep 2018: Russia's state-controlled Rossiya Segodnya news agency and China's state-controlled China Media Group sign a cooperation agreement in Vladivostok to promote alternatives to Western liberal democracy
Oct 2018: A 55-km bridge connecting Hong Kong to mainland China opens
Oct 2018: Jack Ma is mainland China's richest man
Oct 2018: Meng Hongwei, the president of Interpol, is arrested and later sentenced to 13 years in prison for "corruption"
Nov 2018: The USA issues a warrant for the extradiction of Meng Wanzhou, the daughter of the founder of Chinese telecoms giant Huawei and its global chief financial officer, and she is placed under house arrest in Canada
Dec 2018: The FBI reveals "China's non-traditional espionage against the USA"
Dec 2018: Chinese scientist He Jiankui announces the birth of the first gene-edited babies
Dec 2018: After Canada detains Chinese telecom executive Meng Wanzhou for extradition to the USA, China arrests two Canadians (former diplomat Michael Kovrig and businessman Michael Spavor) on accusations of harming national security
2018: China builds more skyscrapers in 2018 than any other country or at any other time in history (88 buildings measuring at least 200 meters)
2018: A poll shows that 84% of Taiwanese do not recognize the "one China principle", i.e. are not in favor of reunification with mainland China
2018: For the first time in 70 years, mainland China's population shrinks
2018: Tibet has the highest GDP growth of all CHinese provinces, 10%, and double-digit growth for the 26th consecutive year
2018: The Longhua Science and Technology Park in Shenzhen ("Foxconn City") employs about 300,000 workers
Jan 2019: China detains Australian-Chinese blogger Yang Hengjun
Jan 2019: China's Chang'e-4 becomes the first spacecraft ever to land on the far side of the moon
Feb 2019: Fearing for the life of Uighur musician Abdurehim Heyit, Turkey demands that mainland China shuts down the concentration camps in Xinjiang province
Mar 2019: Anti-Chinese activist Serikzhan Bilash, who exposed China's concentration camps for Muslims, is arrested in Kazakhstan
Mar 2019: China, on behalf of Pakistan, vetoes a United Nations measure to blacklist Masood Azhar, the founder of Pakistan-based terrorist group Jaish-e-Mohammed, responsible for the 2001 attack on India’s parliament, of the 2008 Mumbai terrorist attacks and of the 2019 Kashmir attacks
Mar 2019: An entrepreneur who sued the mainland government, Zhao Faqi, disappears after losing his case, the popular blogger who supported him, Cui Yongyuan, is indicted of crimes, and the lone dissenting judge of the Supreme People's Court, Wang Linqing, is forced to confess a crime on television and arrested for "leaking state secrets"
Mar 2019: Between December and February, China's authorities have shut down more than 140,000 blogs and deleted more than 500,000 articles (according to official Chinese media http://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1133759.shtml )
May 2019: A "trade war" between the USA and China escalates with restrictions on what technology China can buy from the USA, notably on Google's software for China's Huawei
May 2019: China holds $1.11 trillion of US debt
Jun 2019: More than one million people protest in Hong Kong against an extradition law, the biggest protest in 30 years
Jun 2019: The total market value of China's listed Internet companies is $1.41 trillion
Jul 2019: China sentences to jail for the third time the civil-rights activist Huang Qi (founder of 64 Tianwang)
Jul 2019: China is ranked 14th most innovative nations by the World Intellectual Property Organization's Global Innovation Index but Shenzhen-Hong Kong ranks second after Tokyo-Yokohama "top science and technology cluster" and Beijing fourth after Seoul ahead of the San Francisco Bay Area
Jul 2019: Fortune magazine's Global 500 Companies includes 119 Chinese firms versus 121 US firms
Aug 2019: North Korea tests missiles capable of striking all of Japan and South Korea, including eight US military bases in those countries
Sep 2019: A man kills eight schoolchildren at an elementary school in Chaoyangpo village of Enshi city in Hubei province
Sep 2019: After three months of protests Hong Kong's leader Carrie Lam withdraws a bill that would allow the extradition of criminal suspects to mainland China, but protesters now also demand democratic elections
Oct 2019: Jinping Xi calls for China to "accelerate" blockchain development
Oct 2019: A poll by the Election Study Center of National Chengchi University shows that only 10.3% of Taiwanese support unification with China
Nov 2019: A Chinese official leaks 403 pages of internal documents about the mass detention facilities in Xinjiang province to the New York Times, including an account of how Yongzhi Wang, former party secretary of Yarkand, a county in southern Xinjiang, disobeyed orders
2019: Per capita income in China is $10,000 and $30,000 in Taiwan
2019: China's greenhouse gas emissions exceed those of all developed nations combined in 2019 as China (17.9% of the world's population) contributes 27% of total emissions, the USA 11% and India 6.6%
2019: Electricity production in China comes from coal (62%), renewables (30%), nuclear (5%) and gas (3%)
2019: China’s aeronautic scientist Wu Zhe sends an airship, "Cloud Chaser", around the world flying at 20,000 meters of altitude
Jan 2020: The coronavirus Covid-19 spreads from Wuhan to the rest of China, leading the government to isolate entire cities, after the doctor who raised the alarm, Wenliang Li, has been forced by the police to sign a confession that he spread false rumors
Feb 2020: The USA charges four military officers of China for a 2017 cyber-attack on credit rating firm Equifax
Mar 2020: China's GDP shrinks 6.8% in the first quarter, its first ever quarterly contraction since it started publishing GDP data in 1992
Apr 2020: The covid-19 epidemic ends in China
Apr 2020: Hong Kong arrests 13 pro-democracy activists who organized the 2019 protests
Apr 2020: China provokes incidents with Vietnam, Malaysia and the Philippines in the South China Sea, including the sinking of a Vietnamese fishing boat, prompting the US and Australia to deploy warships to the area
Apr 2020: China begins testing its digital currency, the e-RMB
May 2020: China enacts a law to suppress subversion, secession and terrorism in Hong Kong
Jun 2020: Chinese troops kill 20 Indian soldiers in the disputed Galwan Valley
Jun 2020: India bans Chinese smartphone apps like TikTok and WeChat
Jun 2020: China retaliates against Australia's call for an international investigation into the origin of the covid pandemic, bans imports of Australian coal
Jun 2020: China imposes a security law on Hong Kong and appoints Yanxiong Zheng as Hong Kong security chief, de facto terminating the "one country two systems" model agreed with Britain in 1997
Jul 2020: A bus driver in the province of Guizhou, desperate after the government ordered the demolition of his home, drives his bus into a lake killing 21 people
Jul 2020: The USA reaffirms that most of China's claims in the South China Sea are illegal and dispatches military units
Aug 2020: Hong Kong arrests several activists for violating the new security law, including best-known democracy activist Agnes Chow and publisher Jimmy Lai, and arrest warrants are issued even for US citizens like Samuel Chu
Aug 2020: As relations with Australia deteriorate, China detains Australian journalist Cheng Lei
Sep 2020: Trump tries to ban China's app Wechat
Sep 2020: China sentences dissident Ren Zhiqiang to 18 years in prison for corruption
Sep 2020: China announces a plan to be carbon neutral by 2060
Sep 2020: Real-estate tycoon Zhiqiang Ren is sentenced to prison on corruption charges after he makes fun of Jinping Xi
Oct 2020: China becomes the first major economy to recover from covid-19
Oct 2020: Jack Ma disappears after criticizing the government of mainland China
Oct 2020: China builds a village inside Bhutan's territory
Nov 2020: All the Hong Kong pro-democracy lawmakers resign after China bans four of them
Nov 2020: Fifteen countries of the Asia-Pacific (China, South Korea, Japan, Australia, New Zealand and the ASEAN countries) sign the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), the world's largest trading bloc, covering almost a third of the world's economy
Dec 2020: The unmanned space mission Chang'e-5 plants the Chinese flag on the Moon
Dec 2020: Hong Kong pro-democracy tycoon Jimmy Lai is arrested
Dec 2020: The European Union and China sign a trade deal
Dec 2020: A Chinese spacecraft brings to Earth the first Moon rocks since 1976
2020: Between 2009 and 2020 China's billionaires have increased their wealth by 1,146%, the largest percentage in the world
2020: For the first time in its history, South Korea records more deaths than births in one year
2020: Amnesty International reports that a record number of journalists were jailed in China in 2020, including reporters who covered the covid-19 pandemic in Wuhan
2020: China is the only major country whose economy grows in 2020, although only by 2.3%
2020: China adds 12.5 million babies in 2020, a 15% decline from 2019, and the lowest number of births in 20 years
2020: China accounts for three-fourths of the new coal plants commissioned in the world
2020: Only 12 million babies are born in China in 2020, the lowest number of births since 1961
2020: China accounts for around 65% of global Bitcoin production
2020: The wealthiest 1% of China's population holds one third of China's wealth, about the same share as in the USA, and China's Gini Coefficient is 0.47, worse than the USA's 0.41
2020: The fertility rate of China falls to 1.3 children per woman below Japan's and second only to South Korea's
2020: China owns 36.7% of global rare-earth reserves, ahead of Vietnam and Brazil's 18%
2020: China produces 140,000 tonnes of rare earths, the USA produces 38,000 tonnes, Myanmar 30,000 tonnes and Madagascar 8,000 tonnes
2020: China consumes more than half of the world’s coal (the most carbon-intensive fossil fuel) while India accounts for about 11% of the world’s coal use, followed by the US at 6%, and coal accounts for 56.8% of China’s domestic energy generation, down from 72.4% in 1985, but China's CO2 emissions from coal exceed 7 billion metric tons compared with Europe and the USA which are both under 2
2020: More than half of Iran's exports of oil go to China
Jan 2021: Hong Kong police arrest 53 former lawmakers and activists in the largest move against the city's pro-democracy movement since China imposed a new national security law
Feb 2021: The Cyberspace Administration of China requires bloggers to obtain a government-approved credential if they want to write on a wide range of political subjects
Feb 2021: China's stock market surpasses the 2007 record high
Mar 2021: China and Russia announce a joint project to build a lunar space station
Mar 2021: China and Iran sign a 25-year commercial deal
Mar 2021: A train derails in eastern Taiwan, killing 48 people
May 2021: China lands its Zhurong rover on Mars
May 2021: 21 ultra-marathon runners die due to extreme weather in north-western China's Gansu province
May 2021: China's Zhurong rover lands on Mars
Jun 2021: China sends the first crew members to its space station Tianhe, or Heavenly Harmony
May 2021: China allows people to have three children
Jun 2021: Hong Kong's pro-democracy newspaper "Apple Daily" terminates operations after several of its journalists are harassed by authorities
Jun 2021: China shuts down Bitcoin mining operations in Sichuan province and China's central bank orders banks and Internet payments platforms to stop supporting cryptocurrency
Jul 2021: China sends billionaire Sun Dawu to prison for "picking quarrels and provoking trouble"
Jul 2021: Pro-democracy protester Tong Ying-kit is sentenced to nine years in prison in the first prosecution under Hong Kong's new "national security law"
Jul 2021: Facebook removes more than 600 accounts created by China that spread covid disinformation on behalf of a non-existent Swiss biologist named Wilson Edwards
Aug 2021: China sentences Canadian citizen Michael Spavor to 11 years in jail on spying charges
Sep 2021: China bans all cryptocurrency transactions and mining
Sep 2021: China's ban on Australian coal causes a shortage that causes an energy crisis that disrupt factory production
Aug 2021: China sentences Canadian citizen Michael Spavor to 11 years in jail on spying charges
Aug 2021: Famous actress Zhao Wei disappears and is erased from the Chinese Internet, the beginning of a crackdown on Internet celebrities by China's Communist Party
Sep 2021: The USA drops the extradiction request of Huawei's Meng Wanzhou, Canada releases her, and China returns the two Canadians who had been imprisoned, Michael Spavor and Michael Kovrig
Oct 2021: 46 people die in a fire at a 13-storey tower block in southern Taiwan's city of Kaohsiung
Nov 2021: Vladimir Putin and Jinping Xi are the only world leaders not to attend the G20 meeting in Roma
Nov 2021: China's Producer Price Index jumps 13.5% from previous year, a 26-year high
Nov 2021: China is the first nation ever to tests a nuclear-capable hypersonic missile that can circumnavigate the globe
Nov 2021: Pro-independence and pro-democracy Hong Kong student Tony Chung is sentenced to jail under the new security law that forbids talk of Hong Kong independence
Nov 2021: Chinese tennis player Peng Shuai accuses a top government official of sexual assault and then disappears
Dec 2021: Hong Kong's pro-democracy Stand News shuts down following a police raid and arrests of writers
Dec 2021: A report by Reporters Without Borders ranks China as "the world's biggest captor of journalists" with at least 127 reporters under arrest, including 10 journalists guilty of reporting about the covid-19 crisis in Wuhan and including former lawyer Zhang Zhan who documented life in Wuhan during the lockdown
Dec 2021: Hong Kong's authority removes the "Pillar of Shame", a statue at the University of Hong Kong commemorating the Tiananmen Square massacre
Dec 2021: China's economy grows 8.1% in 2021
2021: China's trade with the USA is $657 billion, with the European Union $828 billion, and with Russia $147 billion
2021: Chainalysis estimastes that North Korean hackers stole $400m of cryptocurrency in 2021
2021: About 30% of the revenues of US semiconductor companies come from sales to China, which imports more than $400 billion worth of chips in 2021
2021: China’s share of the world's GDP is 155 compared with 3% in 1961, while the USA’s share decreased from 39% to 24%
Feb 2022: China aligns with Russia when Russia invades Ukraine
Feb 2022: Conservative candidate Suk-yeol Yoon of the People Power Party is elected president of South Korea
Mar 2022: North Korean hackers Lazarus carry out a massive cryptocurrency heist worth $615 million targeting players of online game Axie Infinity
Mar 2022: Someone deliberately crashes China Eastern Airlines Flight 5735 killing all 132 people on board
Apr 2022: Following protests against prime minister Manasseh Sogavare and Chinese interests, the Solomon Islands sign a security agreement with China allowing China
May 2022: China appoints former security chief John Lee, widely despised for his crackdown on protesters, as new leader of Hong Kong
Jun 2022: Russia and China open a cross-border bridge over the Amur River linking Blagoveshchensk and Heihe
Jun 2022: China launches its first domestically built air carrier, the Fujian
Jun 2022: 200 thousand people have left Hong Kong since the introduction of the 2020 security law, mostly to Britain, Australia and Canada
Jul 2022: The heads of British and US security services jointly warn against Chinese cyber espionage aimed at stealing Western technology
Jul 2022: Chinese hacker ChinaDan offers data on one billion Chinese citizens for 10 Bitcoin
Jul 2022: China posts a record trade surplus of $101 billion, with an annual increase of 18%
Jul 2022: The Langya henipavirus spreads in Shandong and Henan provinces
Aug 2022: Nancy Pelosi, house speaker of the USA, visits Taiwan, the highest-ranking US official in 25 years to visit Taiwan, greatly increasing tensions between the USA and China over the future of Taiwan
Aug 2022: China records its most “extreme high temperature events” since 1961
Sep 2022: The United Nations Human Rights Office publishes a report of serious human rights violations in Xinjiang province
Sep 2022: Three police chiefs (Daoan Gong, former police chief of Shanghai, Huilin Deng, former police chief of Chongqing, and Xinyun Liu, former police chief of Shanxi province) as well as Zhenghua Fu, China's former justice minister, are jailed for corruption
Sep 2022: Between 1987 and 2021, at least 162 Chinese scientists who had received scientific training at Los Alamos National Laboratory returned to China to work on Chinese research projects
Oct 2022: Taiwanese billionaire Robert Tsao offers to create a civilian army to defend from an invasion from mainland China
Oct 2022: Mainland China replaces Keqiang Li with Qiang Li as prime minister
Oct 2022: Xi becomes the first person since Mao to be reappointed president for a third term, and no woman is included in the new politburo
Oct 2022: 154 people die crushed in a stampede in the Itaewon district of South Korea's capital Seoul during Halloween celebrations
Nov 2022: A fire kills 38 workers in a factory in Anyang in Henan province
Nov 2022: The first large protests in more than 30 years spread in China and they are against the covid lockdowns that still affect tens of millions of people
Nov 2022: China sends the first permanent astronauts to its space station Tianhe
Dec 2022: China's population falls for the first time since 1961 (9.56 million births in one year versus 10.41 million deaths, with a median age of 37.9, higher than that of the USA, 34 million more males than females, and fertility rate at 1.18, well below the replacement rate of 2.1)
Jan 2023: An avalanche kills at least 28 people in Tibet
2022: North Korea-backed hackers steal $1.7bn of crypto in 2022
2022: China exports $536bn worth of goods to the USA while the USA exports $154bn of goods to China
2022: Over 30 years the share of Middle Eastern exports going to China and India has climbed from 5% to 26%, while the share sent to Europe and America has fallen from 34% to 16%, with China taking less than 1% of Saudi Arabia's crude oil in 1990 and India less than 3% and those figures being 28% and 12% in 2021
Jan 2023: China’s lowest-ever temperature, -53 degrees, is recorded in a town near the border with Russia
Feb 2023: The USA detects and shoots down high-altitude Chinese spy balloons flying over the US territory
Apr 2023: India passes China to become the most populous country in the world ith 1.4 billion people
Apr 2023: China inaugurates a rail line connecting the Chinese city of Kunming with Laos' capital Vientiane
Apr 2023: A fire at a hospital kills 29 people in Beijing
May 2023: China debuts the first domestically-manufactured passenger jet, the C919, built by the Commercial Aviation Corporation of China (Comac)
Jun 2023: A fire at a restaurant kills 31 people in Yinchuan (Gansu)
Jul 2023: Record-setting heat waves hit simultaneously North America, southern Europe and China
Jul 2023: China’s highest-ever temperature, 52.2 degrees, is recorded in Xinjiang
Jul 2023: China's youth unemployment reaches 21%, the consumer price index falls by 0.3% (a sign of deflation) and prices of existing homes in 100 cities have fallen an average of 14% from their peak of August 2021
Aug 2023: The USA, Japan and South Korea forge a defense pact aimed at deterring Chinese and North Korean aggression
Aug 2023: The average annual income of mainland China is $12,850 while Taiwan's is $22,000
Sep 2023: Taiwan unveils its first-ever domestically produced submarine
Oct 2023: China arrests for bribery the chairman of the Bank of China, Liu Liange Seven others were injured in the explosion in the northwestern city of Yinchua
Nov 2023: 2.6 million Chinese apply to civil-service exams for 37,100 available posts
Nov 2023: A fire kills 26 people in Lvliang (Shanxi)
Dec 2023: Beijing records the coldest month ever
2023: China had added 37 nuclear reactors in ten years
2023: China’s population shrinks for the second straight year, down two million to 1,409,670,000
2023: Hong Kong’s Hang Seng stock market is the worst-performing major market in the world during 2023
2023: Millions of donkeys are killed each year in poor countries to supply traditional Chinese medicine with donkey skin used to make "ejiao"
2023: China invests in "green tech" 38% of the world total
2023: Mexico overtakes China to becomes the number-one exporter to the USA
Jan 2024: Ching-te "William" Lai wins presidential elections in Taiwan
Jan 2024: A fire kills 39 people in Xinyu (Jiangxi)
Jan 2024: The Shanghai, Hong Kong and Shenzhen stock markets crash near 2015 lows and Chinese stocks have lost $6 trillion in 3 years while US equities have gained more than $5 trillion; the market capitalization of China's and Hong Kong's stock markets combined is $15 trillion, $34 trillion less than the US stock markets NYSE+Nasdaq
Apr 2024: China’s first home-built passenger jet, the C919, makes its inaugural flight
May 2024: Hong Kong convicts 14 democracy campaigners of subversion
Jun 2024: China's space probe Chang'e-6 returns to Earth with rocks from the far side of the Moon
Jul 2024: China's life expectancy passes the USA's to 78 years
Nov 2024: China sentences pro-democracy leaders Benny Tai and Joshua Wong to jail
Nov 2024: Peru inaugurates the Chancay megaport built by Chinese company Cosco Shipping
Nov 2024: 200,000 people bike from Zhengzhou to Kaifeng
Nov 2024: 35 people are killed when a car ploughs into a crowd in China's Zhuhai
Nov 2024: 8 people are stabbed to death by a 21-year-old man at a Wuxi college
Nov 2024: South Korea's president Suk-yeol Yoon, mired in a series of scandals and having lost parliamentary elections to the Democratic Party, declares emergency martial law
2024: China's GDP per capita ($13,000) is about four times India's ($2,500)
TM, ®, Copyright © 2018 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.

• Kai-shek Chiang/ Zhongzheng Jiang 1950-75
• Chia-kan Yen 1975-78
• Ching-kuo Chiang 1978-88
• Teng-hui Lee 1988-2000
• Shui-bian Chen 2000-2008 (first democratically elected president in the history of China)
• Ying-jeou Ma 2008-2016
• Ing-wen Tsai 2016-2023
• Ching-te "William" Lai 2024-

• ZeDong Mao: 1949 - 1976
• Xiaoping Deng: 1978 - 1992 (de facto supreme leader)
• Zemin Jiang: 1993 - 2003
• Jintao Hu: 2004 - 2012
• Jinping Xi: 2013 -