China's inland provinces are not a unified geographic entity, but an amalgam of sub-regions carved around interlocking mountain ranges and dominated by two great rivers, the Yellow and Yangtze. They encompass subtropical mountain valleys, the vast North China Plain and the desert-like Loess Plateau. To the west, the fertile but completely enclosed Sichuan Basin marks the edge of Han China and the bridge to Xinjiang and Tibet. The total area of central China (including Sichuan and Chongqing) is roughly 630,000 square miles, smaller than the U.S. state of Alaska, but it is home to 500 million people, roughly equal to the populations of the United States and Brazil combined. Unlike the United States, which enjoys vast, easily traversable lowlands connected by a single river system, the geography of China's central provinces (Hunan, Hubei, Shanxi, Anhui, Jiangxi and Henan) is rugged and extremely diverse. This has always made unifying China difficult. Today, despite Beijing's significant push to improve infrastructure connectivity within and between regions, the challenge persists. Not only does central China include a variety of geographic sub-regions, but internal divisions within many provinces make even local integration difficult. Most of China's interior provinces have highly imbalanced economic structures, with almost all secondary and tertiary industry centered around one or a small cluster of cities (usually near a river), and the remainder of the province left to localized subsistence farming. This imbalance is not unique to inland China. Coastal provinces' economies are similarly centered on key urban industrial or shipping hubs — like Shanghai, Shenzhen and Wenzhou. But the problem is compounded in central China by greater distances, both within the region and between it and the coast — still the heart of China's economy.
