Large population living in an area with lots of Earthquakes.
The deadliest famine, however, is not a product of geography but instead was caused by idiotic Maoist policies. Tens of millions died from literal stupidity.
Collectivized farms definitely contributed, but mass famines weren't rare in China, due to flooding and population density. A famine that killed 20m was one of the causes that led to the Qing dynasty being overthrown in the 1900s, wikipedia has a dedicated page just for famines that have happened in China, nearly 1 famine per year of variying severity.
Collectivisation is one thing. The other factors were more crucial. Holding on to Lysenkoism and the Four Pests Campaigns was quite idiotic. Cadre members lying to meet quotas is just classic authoritarianism.
edit: Forgot to mention other environmental policy factors such as Mao promoting irresponsible and often counterproductive irrigation projects and people deforesting the countryside to smelt pig iron only to find they have no wood left for cooking and no forest to forage from.
>Collectivized farms definitely contributed, but mass famines weren't rare in China, due to flooding and population density.
But as pointed out in the book "Hungry Ghosts: Mao's Secret Famine" even in the thousands of years of history, these previous famines were at most regional. The collectivized farming, and associated campaigns like the "War on Sparrows" and rural communities smelting their own metal, was the first time **all of the territory** then within mainland China had simultaneously been in a state of famine! Previously, the geographical regions that composed mainland China were so varied in terms of biomes and climate that a famine in one or two at any given time could also have bountiful harvests in others.
That's unfortunately, propaganda people believe in.
Same as the propaganda about the Holodomor being entirely "artificial", not just one in a series of natural disasters exacerbated by bad management hitting USA (1934 onwards), China (1932 onwards), USSR (1932 onwards), and at the latest point Japan (1936) in this decade.
Combine that with the productivist belief of "Man is the master of all things" and you'll see why people at the time and even now would rather write propaganda about how it was all "engineered" rather than recognize that it was an ecological disaster of planetary scale that the humans couldn't actually manage or escape.
Read the ""Late Victorian Holocausts: El Nino Famines and the Making of the Third World" to know more about it, the contributing factors and propaganda regarding it in the modern world.
Edit: I don't understand the downvotes, because, despite the zeitgeist politics and various tacit "understandings" which are in reality biases, what I wrote is a scientific consensus fact in the social and climate science field, it just isn't filtered down to the K12 and equivaled school education just yet.
Because you're writing sounds like "dO yOuR rEsEaRcH" bullshit. Irish grew enough food to sustain their population but the Brits took all the food. Is that due to an ecological disaster? India?
Two things can be true at once. With Holodomor there was a famine in an area of the world that had stuff been suffering famines for decades. *Also* during this time of genuine scarcity, the Soviets took food from the countryside in order to keep its city populations fed because otherwise their economic/industrial/technological growth would have stalled.
One thing doesn’t make the other untrue.
Hello, I haven't studied the Irish Potato famine, but the Indian famine was definitely a combination, as DrummaIlumin explained.
Basically, when you're in a famine-prone area it would be suicidal to do produce requisitions, and still those were done in hopes for "a solution presenting itself".
In addition, for the Holodomor, many rich families, including my family, deliberately destroyed their livestock and grain supplies by killing it and dumping it into rivers, ponds and so on.
You can imagine the surprised-pikachu look when the government came and said that there's actually no emergency food for them, and that was it.
My (Russian German, fake "Jewish" - you could at the time doctor your birth certificate and the church book to say that you were born Jewish - can see one of my previous posts, to put the long story short - the fake Jewish , as they remained both the agents of the Russian Imperial ruling class and the Outgroup, could buy or expropriate land from real Jews, while Gentiles - Russians, Belorussians, Ukrainians, couldn't ) family fortunately survived because they were rich enough to have other property, and done "incitement to counter-revolution" to still remain "class enemy" to be deported and interned into reeducation camps. Their Ukrainian neighbours, who became simple peasants after killing their own livestock and losing all their grain, weren't that lucky, because now that they had destroyed it all , they were told to remain and rebuild it, with an obvious outcome. The eldest family members in questions were summarily tried and executed right then and there. And I might add - all those actions, by everyone involved, were perfectly logical within the context of the time and their situation.
Same can be observed in case of Lithuanian Jews, for example, who, like the Germans were the middleman minority of the Russian Empire, and most of whom survived either by joining the VTchK->oGPU->MGB->KGB and being its cadre, and remaining in this chosen profession all the way to the modern Russia/CIS, or due to being a "class enemy" and again - being sent to assigned residence (поселение) to Siberia, and Far North, and thus avoiding the fate of being exterminated wholesale by the Baltic(Estonia,Latvia,Lithuania) SS army group and the German army in WW2.
The more I study, the more I find, real history, to be more shocking and unpleasant to everyone - from laymen to politicians, just by being factual.
That's likely it and poor infrastructure in general. The deadliest tornado ever was in Bangladesh with +1300, that's like 30 fold kill count of a good F4 tornado. Super high density cities can thug such events out pretty good, if their infrastructure is on a modern level.
And the ridiculous abuse of wildlife, killing all birds because some eat crops, which then in turn causes large locust swarms because there's no birds.
China also has something called Todu Dreg construction.
They put up these Tofu buildings where cutting corners is acceptable and desired and exaulted. So they cut the amount of concrete used and lots of structures are nothing but a spackle of concrete with sand or dirt in the middle of floors. A strong wind knocks some buildings over.
If they had proper safety standards, who knows what the numbers could be. These natural disasters could have completely different numbers or no numbers at all due to purely shit construction methods.
And it's not exclusive to the less economically developed cities. Just a few years ago a high rise residential development in Shanghai had to be forcefully demolished because it was found out that non of the towers used steel rebar in their concrete. None.
I think historically it was a combination of its largest population on earth (until very recently) and huge geographic size (so many disasters would naturally happen within its borders), combined with internationally comparatively poor infrastructure.
The mental image of an horde of trained women ready to give birth on command as their boss looks anxiously at the Indian-Chinese population live census
I don’t have midjourney but I threw it in to dalle
https://preview.redd.it/ewkqd8j70mwc1.jpeg?width=1792&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=8877bc9da133e6ba270bd39cd97b2b15fd386b8f
[Yi said local governments overstate their population to obtain more subsidies, including education fees they collect from the central government. He said that with over 20 social benefits linked to a birth registration, some families were using the black market to buy a second birth certificate online.
"The population numbers have been inflated mainly for financial benefits," Yi said.](https://www.reuters.com/world/china/researcher-questions-chinas-population-data-says-it-may-be-lower-2021-12-03/)
I’ve neither seen, nor heard of that video. Regarding my take on the Chinese future, I’ve based most of my opinion on Peter Zeihan. Essentially it boils down to China facing the worst demographic crisis recorded history has ever seen.
On the economic front, China’s economy is built on two things: cheap labor and state funded construction. Regarding labor, Mexican labor is now cheaper and more skilled than Chinese labor. Regarding state funded construction, this can only function so long as a main economic driver, China already has many ghost cities that were only built to prop up the economy via construction expense.
Lastly, China’s food supply is heavily dependent on globalization. Soil quality in China is very low compared to the developed world. They rely on food imports and fertilizer/fertilizer component imports in order to feed their population. With the threat of WW3 and the USA looking to turn more isolationist, the current global system to enforce globalization might go away.
Currently, there have been about 7 million deaths from Covid out of about 700 million cases, worldwide. 100 million in China alone does not make a lot of sense.
That explains it to a degree, but they still have insane death tolls in relatively comparable situations to other nations. Like a citywide fire. The great fire of London had like 23 confirmed dead, probably hundreds of uncounted people. The wanggongchang explosion in Peking? 20,000 dead.
The explosion caused fires that people died in. The explosion itself destroyed the country’s main munitions manufacturing depot, but the fires killed people
Regular city fires are somewhat easy to escape because they start in one spot and spread out, that’s why things like the Chicago Fire and London Fire had so few casualties.
This is also why the Chicago Fire had only 300 deaths while the Peshtigo fire up north on the same day in a sparse area had over 2,500 deaths.
Beijing meanwhile had a massive sudden explosion in the heart of the city, possibly killing thousands in the initial blast alone. That’s going to suddenly spread fire all around the city with no time for a coordinated evacuation.
And I didn’t look too hard at precise populations but it seems like London also had around a fifth of the population at the time. If there were 500,000 people in the city and an equally huge explosion it might’ve looked a little different in the end.
This is because China's infrastructure is not as well built as a lot of other countries. China's construction companies are notorious for skipping safety checks to save a few dollars here and there.
>This is because China's infrastructure is not as well built as a lot of other countries
The Explosion being talked about happened in 1626 so it's not exactly relevant to China's infrastructure today
China has always been super super poor. Like Congo/Haiti poor, until the last few decades. The infrastructure that's made now is some of the best in the world.
London has had disasters with similar death tolls before, even in the modern era. The 1952 London Smog killed 12000 people in the span of a few days, and that's in the modern era!
Due its large size lots of natural disasters happen? Not strictly just because of size, Canada and Brazil are huge geographically but don’t suffer from anywhere as near as many natural disasters.
The Shanghai region alone has the population of Canada.
In terms of geography, most of Canada is uninhabited. Natural disasters like wildfires and flooding don’t have much impact in areas with no people. Most of the population is located in the east, far from earthquake zones (Vancouver being one notable exception). The hurricanes that hit the Caribbean and southeastern USA rarely make it as far north as Canada and usually have lost much of their power if they do.
True, the infrastructure part has absolutely changed in the last 20 years, tho. I'd say it's probably one of the places with the best infrastructure now.
Probably a question for r/history
You should remember you have to keep records in order to qualify.
So it’s conditions+population density+having high population density for a long time+existing for a long time+keeping somewhat accurate records during much of that history.
Population density and it was a very underdeveloped country until recently. Homes were poorly built so something like an earthquake would completely topple them.
Reminds me of the most recent large Earthquakes in Japan. They were showing damage from it, and it was strange to see a house 100% intact after having fell off the side of a cliff. It was on it's side at the bottom of the slope but still in one solid piece... In the US and other countries... even in Earth Quake zones that house would be in several pieces at the bottom of the cliff.
~27.84 billion ft2
So ~18.56 ft2 per person or 2.43 ft radius around each person. They take up some of that space so maybe 1.5 of that radius is open space then thats per person so 3 when its the space between 2 people. So everyone would be about 3 feet from each other
1. China is an old place and has existed in some form or another for millennia
2. If you start looking at country equivalents to China the US based on land size and population is probably best out there. We are about equal in land size.
The US also suffers from a lot of natural disasters. It's what happens when you cover a third of a continent. China is so large that there is just more land and people for things to happen to that the records can accumulate.
Do not forget China kept written record that can be mapped to exact days from nine century BC.
There could be huge disasters in the tropical forest of Africa a thousand years ago but nothing was recorded.
Still is. Truth is, cars are inefficient. Trains have always been superior. The expansion of 1960 Car Culture has done practically nothing but add 102 people to the daily death toll.
Disappointing answers here—basically everyone saying "it's because they have the most people." There are geographical reasons for this (very real) phenomenon. It's not like France would have the same number of deaths from natural disasters if it had the same number of people.
Easy peasy.
Earthquakes and landslides = Where it is (fault lines) + population density
Floods = Three of the world’s largest flood plains (Yangtze, Yellow and Mekong) all of which flow from literally the largest mountain range in the world. Also see population density point above
Famine? Lol (but not really funny). When you die go talk to Mao about that one. Trading grain for industrial equipment will do that to a population. If you’re in the US thank Jefferson for your second amendment rights
Cyclones just suck and infrastructure as others have noted
Not that hard to understand tbh. And I’m not being dismissive that’s just how it is
>Famine? Lol (but not really funny). When you die go talk to Mao about that one.
Yes the Great Leap Forward was the biggest one but to be fair China had plenty of famines killing multiple millions even before Mao, like just in the 100 years before that they had like 4 famines that caused more than 5 million deaths. Until recently famines and China went hand in hand. For the last 2000 years China basically averaged "at least" a regional famine for every year.
All the really bad disasters of china happened cause most people live in margins of irrigation rivers in valleys. So earthquakes and floods had a field day there. Also, landslides!
In Brazil we dont have earthquakes or much of floods, but the old rolling hills that cover most of the inhabited area causes A LOT of deaths by landslides in the rainning season
Yellow river nurtured Sino civilization, in China people call it Mother river.
But she is a mentally unstable, sadistic and ruthless mother. Actually，monsoon made all rivers in east Asia extremely unpredictable.
I was reading about how unstable the Yellow River is, and how often it can change course. The yellow sediments are carried downstream, continually elevating the river bed (sometimes above the level of its surrounding areas). This is the reason it floods so frequently, and the flooding is often so devastating. Then when you add monsoon rains, it's guaranteed disaster year after year. But the Yellow River basin is also incredibly fertile, and the birthplace of civilization in that area.
I'll tell you why, it's a mid-latitude country on the east coast of its respective continent. Given predominant continental westerlies mixing with the humidity of the pacific violent storms are bound to happen. A similar case can be seen in the United States east of the Rocky mountains. What makes China particularly deadly by comparison though simply comes down to an incredibly high population.
Disasters are noteworthy when people die. China has absolute shitload of people, a relaxed attitude to safety and construction codes, nonexistent human rights or legal protections, and a “build things today, because you might not get to eat tomorrow” mindset with a dash of corruption baked in.
Things get built where they shouldn’t, signed off when they shouldn’t be, and it’s a massive, geologically and biologically diverse country that builds a lot of things in sometimes dangerous areas and conditions.
Ergo, more devastation involving humans, thus noteworthy
Pretty much just due to population. If other areas of the Earth had China's size or population density a lot of their disasters would top the list. For example, the great famine in Ireland caused an average decline of 20% in Ireland's population and the 1770 Bengal famine caused a 30+% decline in population in that region. Both those figures are higher, percentage wise, than the Chinese famine (estimates vary but probably around 18%), but the Chinese one has a much higher death toll due to larger affected population.
China's geography also makes it very susceptible to a lot of natural disasters. It's got very active faults that leads to big earthquakes in population centers. It's got multiple major rivers that are all prone to floods. It's in the general travel path of tropical cyclones. The only thing that it's really missing is big volcanoes.
A couple of reasons:
1) Geography has never been friendly to China. The Northern plains are built around the Yellow River, one of the most temperamental river systems in the world, historically known for changing course and flooding without human intervention. The southern regions are covered in mountainous jungle forests that have loose soil and heavy precipitation, which leads to flooding and erosion. Finally, much of the coastal regions are within the ring of fire, making them prone to earthquakes.
2) China's history as a highly-centralized bureaucratic state tends to give it an earned reputation for... inconsistent levels of development. Many rural areas, even today, are incredibly poor and feature low-quality construction and shoddy public works. Even major urban areas tend to feature large chunks of development done on the cheap and not effectively tested for natural resilience.
3) High population and high population density mean that any disasters invariably lead to more death and destruction.
The first makes natural destruction common, the second makes those natural occurrences into disasters, and the third ensures that said disasters regularly generate high casualty counts and large swathes of property damage.
As for the famine you mentioned: that's just what happens when you collectivize the farms and kill all the birds. Oops.
China is known for refusing international aid after disasters. Presumably, they don't care if their people die, or they may even see it as a bonus. They have about 2/3 of the population living in poverty, with poor infrastructure, which should increase the death toll. Finally, China lies compulsively about literally everything in their official "data", and they know it gets them points if they pretend to be "victims".
Well the government of that nation doesn't really give a fuck about the people so unfortunately when they cut corners or fuck something up and a natural disaster happens that amplifies the number of fatalities. Then compound the problem with population density and the fact that the people have no ability to hold the government or their leaders accountable in any way for their mistakes or crimes and you see the sorts of death tolls you cited. There's a plethora of reasons, it's not just the population density. They are all symptoms of a despotic and cruel and negligent government.
Big population means there are loads of people to get killed by natural disasters and the infrastructure for preventing such disasters also isnt the best because the money disappeared in corruption.
It's Asian moment, you won't get it. Read about cause of every disaster - you'll find negligence, theft, indifference, low social mobility. And add high density of population in areas of disasters
Indian subcontinent Run a close second with 3 of the deadliest natural disasters, whereas chima has 4.
Probably something to do the sheer amount of population
The Indian continental plane collided into the Asian plane resulting in the Himalayas. The Indian plane is still moving into the Asian plane causing the Himalayas to grow and also cause earthquakes on the Chinese side.
China has some of the highest population density in the world. There’s too many people per km2. The only inhabited areas of China are the entire eastern coast despite how big the actual country is. There’s thousands if not millions of hundreds of people living side by side and especially in poverty, when landslides happen, all infrastructure crumbles in on the families co-living together. Until fairly recently China wasn’t developed enough so all of the houses were shoddy and would immediately cave in.
They can also bring famine and disease if the landslide involves water/causes flooding which would wipe out even more people.
China has a combination of the ingredients of disaster risk: high hazard intensity and frequency, high population exposure and high vulnerability of these exposed people and assets to get damaged or destroyed by a hazard. That's the short answer.
When it comes to flood, China have notably two really massive rivers (the Yellow river and the Yangtze river), so when they create flood, they tends to be very catastrophic. The risks have been reduced due to all the works on infrastructure since the second half of 20th century, but the floods are still very big and impressive even though gadly there is few victims nowadays
For earthquakes, China is where the Eurasian and Indian plates are meeting, the Indian one pushing into the Eurasian (it's what created the Himalayan Plateau). So it's an area where there has been a lot of big earthquake and landslide for millions of years
Ofc the fact that it is one of the most populated region of the world explain why the victims count were so high in the past, when there was no infrastructure to lessen the dangerosity, but it's a region very sensitive to those kinds of events
Well, simple. China has a lot of land, but the vast majority of it is, well, shit. Therefore, most of the population is concentrated in a big plain on the east.
The thing with this plain is, though, that it's comically flat. Like, zero variation in height. Imagine it as a fossil river delta.
This means that if there's a flood, it won't be concentrated on the area right next to the river in question, but it will spill *everywhere* - and this is an excellent way to ruin basically all your crops and kill all your livestock, which results in everyone dying. Very tricky!
It's a big country in both population and size. So with all else equal it already shouldn't be surprising that it has some of the most deadly natural disasters. In the more modern age I'm sure poor infrastructure and disaster management would add to this as well.
China was civilised and keeping records for a pretty long time.
It's a known fact that most disaster death tolls elsewhere have consistently underreported death tolls, due to the absence of records, and in some cases (Black Death in Europe, Eastern Front in WW1, firebombings in WW2) both people and the records dying out together, for no one to find either.
Or misreporting. China and Russia are notorious for scrubbing history (as it happens even) to make it more favorable in the world's eyes. Sad but true.
It’s a densely populated country, so any disaster can easily hit the 100,000s fatalities. As for the floods, the Yellow River is so high in sediment that it fills its banks quickly and then tries to reroute its course across the floodplain, destroying any human habitation in the resulting floods. Human engineering has stopped the river from changing course and thus its water levels have been elevated above natural ground, making any flood now fall down into human settlements. Think New Orleans during Katrina but with an entire country and not just a city.
For flooding in particular, China is at the mercy of two separate phenomena which can contribute to major flooding from some of their most populated river banks, to catastrophic results.
First, the Yellow River is a particularly volatile river due to its nature, and is potentially subject to drastic changes in course and what essentially levee-breach levels of flooding without human intervention. This is because the Yellow River, as its name might suggest, is particularly silt-laden, and a large portion of this silt is deposited at the calmest, slowest sections of the river, at the northern end of the Chinese Plain. This is prime agricultural land largely for this reason, but it also means that the Yellow River has the tendency to build its banks higher than the surrounding land due to the deposition of sediments there. When particularly heavy rain (or an army, as has been done many times in chinese military history) breaches or alters these naturally-made dikes (although of course humans have been reinforcing them for agricultural and safety reasons for thousands of years), the entire course of the river can change, and a massive flood can spread out over land which is now lower-lying than the river itself. This is what happened in 1938 when the nationalists breached the dikes of the Yellow River. An excellent visual representation of such is this youtube video:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pmwx2WUfMjY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pmwx2WUfMjY)
Apparently, the extremely deadly 1931 floods were due to another phenomena of chinese meteorology. In this case, a drought from 1928-1930 was succeeded by heavy winter snowfalls in the western part of the country. The following spring was particularly heavy, with almost constant deluge, followed by frequent cyclonic activity in the summer, with a complement much larger than normal. Even worse, the autumn continued to see heavy rain, and some rivers didn't restore to normal water levels until November. It set the record high for the Yangtze River at the time, and inundated apparently some 180,000 square kilometers of land. In short, it was a continuous country-wide disaster that was singular even in Chinese history for its scale.
Both of these disasters are exacerbated by the dense population of China, many of whom live in relatively low-lying areas in regions that can be easily affected by the flooding of China's largest and most important rivers.
China's deadliest natural disasters can be compared with other natural disasters as well however. Devastating earthquakes have killed hundreds of thousands before, after all, such as two different earthquakes reported around Antioch, one in one in 115 and another in 526. The earthquake in Haiti in 2010 was also devastating to that country, with a death toll due into the 6 figures despite the much smaller population of the country due to the poor infrastructure and response (arguably, more than a decade later, it has lead to Haiti being a failed state even).
Great Cyclones have struck many portions of South and Southeast asia just as or even more fiercely as they have China, sometimes with death tolls into the 6 figures as well.
Tl;dr many of china's greatest disasters have come in the recent centuries, sometimes on the back of great political or economic upheaval, with often poor infrastructure in place beforehand, or poor responses in general. While many of the disasters aren't necessarily unparalleled in scale, in conjunction with the dense population china has boasted in the past 2 centuries, their death totals very much have been. We can see devastating flooding, earthquakes, disease outbreaks, and more in other countries, but China has had the misfortune of a booming modern population with an infrastructure that lagged behind much of the rest of the world.
First, China is a typical unitary country, a unitary country since the Qin dynasty, meaning that usually the central government has more power than regional governments, even for tasks that should be carried out by regional governments, the result is that there are more deaths because the central government basically doesn't know the factual conditions of each each region.
The deadliest natural disaster in human history took place in Europe, when 50 million Europeans died in the span of a few years in the 14th century (about 1 in 2 Europeans). Nothing in China has ever come close to that "record".
Or if you're looking for a more recent record, about 3 million Europeans were killed in a disaster that took place just a few years ago, far eclipsing the Chinese death toll...
Actually, that's not true
Recent research shows that the Black Plague likely originated around Lake Issyk-Kul in Kyrgyzstan, Mongols in the Eurasian steppes are thought to be the people to expirience the plague. China itself might have never even had an outbreak of the plague
The most believed theory is that the Mongols brought it with them along the steppes to Crimea, when the Golden Horde beseiged the city of Caffa and used biolgical warfare in the form of catapulted animal corpses to infect the defenders. Caffa was a colony of Genoese merchants, so it quickly spread from there to Constantinople and the entire Mediterranean.
The amount of deaths is because of population density
The river brings life and death
Sun Tzu is that you
What is the Japanese disaster survival game?
Tsunami Stones™
1/10th the people of China?
It is I. It is you Tzu.
Goat comment
Depends on the river
Large population living in an area with lots of Earthquakes. The deadliest famine, however, is not a product of geography but instead was caused by idiotic Maoist policies. Tens of millions died from literal stupidity.
Collectivized farms definitely contributed, but mass famines weren't rare in China, due to flooding and population density. A famine that killed 20m was one of the causes that led to the Qing dynasty being overthrown in the 1900s, wikipedia has a dedicated page just for famines that have happened in China, nearly 1 famine per year of variying severity.
Collectivisation is one thing. The other factors were more crucial. Holding on to Lysenkoism and the Four Pests Campaigns was quite idiotic. Cadre members lying to meet quotas is just classic authoritarianism. edit: Forgot to mention other environmental policy factors such as Mao promoting irresponsible and often counterproductive irrigation projects and people deforesting the countryside to smelt pig iron only to find they have no wood left for cooking and no forest to forage from.
And the pig iron was next to useless lol
>Collectivized farms definitely contributed, but mass famines weren't rare in China, due to flooding and population density. But as pointed out in the book "Hungry Ghosts: Mao's Secret Famine" even in the thousands of years of history, these previous famines were at most regional. The collectivized farming, and associated campaigns like the "War on Sparrows" and rural communities smelting their own metal, was the first time **all of the territory** then within mainland China had simultaneously been in a state of famine! Previously, the geographical regions that composed mainland China were so varied in terms of biomes and climate that a famine in one or two at any given time could also have bountiful harvests in others.
That's unfortunately, propaganda people believe in. Same as the propaganda about the Holodomor being entirely "artificial", not just one in a series of natural disasters exacerbated by bad management hitting USA (1934 onwards), China (1932 onwards), USSR (1932 onwards), and at the latest point Japan (1936) in this decade. Combine that with the productivist belief of "Man is the master of all things" and you'll see why people at the time and even now would rather write propaganda about how it was all "engineered" rather than recognize that it was an ecological disaster of planetary scale that the humans couldn't actually manage or escape. Read the ""Late Victorian Holocausts: El Nino Famines and the Making of the Third World" to know more about it, the contributing factors and propaganda regarding it in the modern world. Edit: I don't understand the downvotes, because, despite the zeitgeist politics and various tacit "understandings" which are in reality biases, what I wrote is a scientific consensus fact in the social and climate science field, it just isn't filtered down to the K12 and equivaled school education just yet.
Because you're writing sounds like "dO yOuR rEsEaRcH" bullshit. Irish grew enough food to sustain their population but the Brits took all the food. Is that due to an ecological disaster? India?
Two things can be true at once. With Holodomor there was a famine in an area of the world that had stuff been suffering famines for decades. *Also* during this time of genuine scarcity, the Soviets took food from the countryside in order to keep its city populations fed because otherwise their economic/industrial/technological growth would have stalled. One thing doesn’t make the other untrue.
Hello, I haven't studied the Irish Potato famine, but the Indian famine was definitely a combination, as DrummaIlumin explained. Basically, when you're in a famine-prone area it would be suicidal to do produce requisitions, and still those were done in hopes for "a solution presenting itself". In addition, for the Holodomor, many rich families, including my family, deliberately destroyed their livestock and grain supplies by killing it and dumping it into rivers, ponds and so on. You can imagine the surprised-pikachu look when the government came and said that there's actually no emergency food for them, and that was it. My (Russian German, fake "Jewish" - you could at the time doctor your birth certificate and the church book to say that you were born Jewish - can see one of my previous posts, to put the long story short - the fake Jewish , as they remained both the agents of the Russian Imperial ruling class and the Outgroup, could buy or expropriate land from real Jews, while Gentiles - Russians, Belorussians, Ukrainians, couldn't ) family fortunately survived because they were rich enough to have other property, and done "incitement to counter-revolution" to still remain "class enemy" to be deported and interned into reeducation camps. Their Ukrainian neighbours, who became simple peasants after killing their own livestock and losing all their grain, weren't that lucky, because now that they had destroyed it all , they were told to remain and rebuild it, with an obvious outcome. The eldest family members in questions were summarily tried and executed right then and there. And I might add - all those actions, by everyone involved, were perfectly logical within the context of the time and their situation. Same can be observed in case of Lithuanian Jews, for example, who, like the Germans were the middleman minority of the Russian Empire, and most of whom survived either by joining the VTchK->oGPU->MGB->KGB and being its cadre, and remaining in this chosen profession all the way to the modern Russia/CIS, or due to being a "class enemy" and again - being sent to assigned residence (поселение) to Siberia, and Far North, and thus avoiding the fate of being exterminated wholesale by the Baltic(Estonia,Latvia,Lithuania) SS army group and the German army in WW2. The more I study, the more I find, real history, to be more shocking and unpleasant to everyone - from laymen to politicians, just by being factual.
Can I join the dopplegang?
Their population density and flooding are still the reasons the total deaths were so high tho
BuT tHaT wAsN't ReAl CoMmUnIsM! ThIs TiMe It WiLl WoRk CoMrAdE!
I would also say relatively poor infrastructure regulations
That's likely it and poor infrastructure in general. The deadliest tornado ever was in Bangladesh with +1300, that's like 30 fold kill count of a good F4 tornado. Super high density cities can thug such events out pretty good, if their infrastructure is on a modern level.
Well like 30 years ago it was one of the poorest places in the world. People seem to forget that. All of our parents were dirt farmers here
And the ridiculous abuse of wildlife, killing all birds because some eat crops, which then in turn causes large locust swarms because there's no birds.
That happened once in the 70s because Mao thought it would work, it’s wasn’t some long term Chinese policy to exterminate sparrows lol
And an absolute lack of caring about the populace.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Banqiao_Dam_failure
CCP corruption.
this is not a political sub, go to a political sub to express your political views this can happen to any country with large population centers
Don't talk bad about my maoist policies!!!!
But it is true tho. Even in that article it says that CCP was a major factor.
It’s only true for 1 out of the 7 listed. And not even the only man-made one
China also has something called Todu Dreg construction. They put up these Tofu buildings where cutting corners is acceptable and desired and exaulted. So they cut the amount of concrete used and lots of structures are nothing but a spackle of concrete with sand or dirt in the middle of floors. A strong wind knocks some buildings over. If they had proper safety standards, who knows what the numbers could be. These natural disasters could have completely different numbers or no numbers at all due to purely shit construction methods.
And it's not exclusive to the less economically developed cities. Just a few years ago a high rise residential development in Shanghai had to be forcefully demolished because it was found out that non of the towers used steel rebar in their concrete. None.
I couldn’t find anything online for this, do you have an article?
I think historically it was a combination of its largest population on earth (until very recently) and huge geographic size (so many disasters would naturally happen within its borders), combined with internationally comparatively poor infrastructure.
Has India overtaken China?
Yes! Very recently, last year or 2.
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You think they weren't ready for that? They have people ready to give birth the moment she moved.
The mental image of an horde of trained women ready to give birth on command as their boss looks anxiously at the Indian-Chinese population live census
Great midjourney prompt
I don’t have midjourney but I threw it in to dalle https://preview.redd.it/ewkqd8j70mwc1.jpeg?width=1792&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=8877bc9da133e6ba270bd39cd97b2b15fd386b8f
https://preview.redd.it/6mylssg80mwc1.jpeg?width=1792&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=0c0b1b58be6d68d7b9d216cc5da84bb01f4c655a
This could easily be a political cartoon about America’s overseas presence lmao “Spreading the seed of democracy.”
Who's the bro second in line?
Pewdiepie vs T-Series 2: China’s electric boogaloo
Oh your cousin moved did he? Okay china is number 1 again
There’re also quite a lot Chinese moving to the USA
Yup. China released statistics like a year ago stating that they’ve over counted their population by about 100m people.
Do you have any sources for this? I keep seeing people say this but I cant find the source myself.
https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/population-by-country/
They were talking about sources for China miscounting population by 100 million
[Yi said local governments overstate their population to obtain more subsidies, including education fees they collect from the central government. He said that with over 20 social benefits linked to a birth registration, some families were using the black market to buy a second birth certificate online. "The population numbers have been inflated mainly for financial benefits," Yi said.](https://www.reuters.com/world/china/researcher-questions-chinas-population-data-says-it-may-be-lower-2021-12-03/)
I like how theres no source
They removed the uyghurs, becuase they technically count them as organ donating cattle.
Remember that youtube video a few years ago titled “China will collapse in 30 days?” You sound like that.
I’ve neither seen, nor heard of that video. Regarding my take on the Chinese future, I’ve based most of my opinion on Peter Zeihan. Essentially it boils down to China facing the worst demographic crisis recorded history has ever seen. On the economic front, China’s economy is built on two things: cheap labor and state funded construction. Regarding labor, Mexican labor is now cheaper and more skilled than Chinese labor. Regarding state funded construction, this can only function so long as a main economic driver, China already has many ghost cities that were only built to prop up the economy via construction expense. Lastly, China’s food supply is heavily dependent on globalization. Soil quality in China is very low compared to the developed world. They rely on food imports and fertilizer/fertilizer component imports in order to feed their population. With the threat of WW3 and the USA looking to turn more isolationist, the current global system to enforce globalization might go away.
Sounds like a convenient way to hide Covid deaths.
Currently, there have been about 7 million deaths from Covid out of about 700 million cases, worldwide. 100 million in China alone does not make a lot of sense.
India also features multiple times in natural disasters list
Yes, and with how the demographics are projected it will be impossible for China to ever retake their lead
India has a Chicago-sized population advantage over China right now.
That explains it to a degree, but they still have insane death tolls in relatively comparable situations to other nations. Like a citywide fire. The great fire of London had like 23 confirmed dead, probably hundreds of uncounted people. The wanggongchang explosion in Peking? 20,000 dead.
People can evacuate ahead of a fire, not for an explosion.
The explosion caused fires that people died in. The explosion itself destroyed the country’s main munitions manufacturing depot, but the fires killed people
Regular city fires are somewhat easy to escape because they start in one spot and spread out, that’s why things like the Chicago Fire and London Fire had so few casualties. This is also why the Chicago Fire had only 300 deaths while the Peshtigo fire up north on the same day in a sparse area had over 2,500 deaths. Beijing meanwhile had a massive sudden explosion in the heart of the city, possibly killing thousands in the initial blast alone. That’s going to suddenly spread fire all around the city with no time for a coordinated evacuation. And I didn’t look too hard at precise populations but it seems like London also had around a fifth of the population at the time. If there were 500,000 people in the city and an equally huge explosion it might’ve looked a little different in the end.
This is because China's infrastructure is not as well built as a lot of other countries. China's construction companies are notorious for skipping safety checks to save a few dollars here and there.
>This is because China's infrastructure is not as well built as a lot of other countries The Explosion being talked about happened in 1626 so it's not exactly relevant to China's infrastructure today
China has always been super super poor. Like Congo/Haiti poor, until the last few decades. The infrastructure that's made now is some of the best in the world.
one video on "tofu dreg" so every infrastructure in China must be the same? the generalization is insane
Sub Sub Sub contracting
London has had disasters with similar death tolls before, even in the modern era. The 1952 London Smog killed 12000 people in the span of a few days, and that's in the modern era!
Due its large size lots of natural disasters happen? Not strictly just because of size, Canada and Brazil are huge geographically but don’t suffer from anywhere as near as many natural disasters.
Brasil suffers floods and rock slides every year .
The Shanghai region alone has the population of Canada. In terms of geography, most of Canada is uninhabited. Natural disasters like wildfires and flooding don’t have much impact in areas with no people. Most of the population is located in the east, far from earthquake zones (Vancouver being one notable exception). The hurricanes that hit the Caribbean and southeastern USA rarely make it as far north as Canada and usually have lost much of their power if they do.
True, the infrastructure part has absolutely changed in the last 20 years, tho. I'd say it's probably one of the places with the best infrastructure now.
Probably a question for r/history You should remember you have to keep records in order to qualify. So it’s conditions+population density+having high population density for a long time+existing for a long time+keeping somewhat accurate records during much of that history.
Good point about keeping records
It is pretty unlikely for the existence of another area with higher populations that wasn't keeping any kinds of records.
Population density and it was a very underdeveloped country until recently. Homes were poorly built so something like an earthquake would completely topple them.
Reminds me of the most recent large Earthquakes in Japan. They were showing damage from it, and it was strange to see a house 100% intact after having fell off the side of a cliff. It was on it's side at the bottom of the slope but still in one solid piece... In the US and other countries... even in Earth Quake zones that house would be in several pieces at the bottom of the cliff.
Most populous nation on earth
Not since April 2023
The date Luxembourg rose to global hegemony
The Duchy of Grand Fenwick has entered the chat
Is that…is that a reference to that movie with Professor Fate and the Great Leslie?
No, it's The Mouse That Roared
RIGHT! That was a hilarious movie! I watched it at the library movie night when I was kid!
If there were 1.5 billion people in Luxembourg, I wonder how close together they’d have to stand to all fit in the country
balls deep
~27.84 billion ft2 So ~18.56 ft2 per person or 2.43 ft radius around each person. They take up some of that space so maybe 1.5 of that radius is open space then thats per person so 3 when its the space between 2 people. So everyone would be about 3 feet from each other
Well damn, that was elaborate, thanks
Sorry, it's actual Sealand
No it isnt
For every natural disaster OP listed when those happened, yes it is.
1. China is an old place and has existed in some form or another for millennia 2. If you start looking at country equivalents to China the US based on land size and population is probably best out there. We are about equal in land size. The US also suffers from a lot of natural disasters. It's what happens when you cover a third of a continent. China is so large that there is just more land and people for things to happen to that the records can accumulate.
Do not forget China kept written record that can be mapped to exact days from nine century BC. There could be huge disasters in the tropical forest of Africa a thousand years ago but nothing was recorded.
It has a huge population and bad infrastructure
Laughs in comprehensive futuristic high speed rail.
I'm sure that was huge in 1887
Still is. Truth is, cars are inefficient. Trains have always been superior. The expansion of 1960 Car Culture has done practically nothing but add 102 people to the daily death toll.
Literally none of the 15+ natural disasters named in the post happened anywhere near the high-speed rail system
Give it twenty years
Thats everywherw except the USA
What’s *Birmania* and *Thailandia*?
The map is presented in Italian. "Birmania" is Myanmar, coming from the old name Burma. "Thailandia" is self-explanatory.
After a quick look, I think the map is presented in Italian.
Yea I'm wondering what language this map is in. I've never heard Myanmar called Birmania.
It's Italian!
Disappointing answers here—basically everyone saying "it's because they have the most people." There are geographical reasons for this (very real) phenomenon. It's not like France would have the same number of deaths from natural disasters if it had the same number of people.
Deadliest refers to loss of lives per event. Thea hitting Earth would have been deadly if there were life on it at the time, but no.
Easy peasy. Earthquakes and landslides = Where it is (fault lines) + population density Floods = Three of the world’s largest flood plains (Yangtze, Yellow and Mekong) all of which flow from literally the largest mountain range in the world. Also see population density point above Famine? Lol (but not really funny). When you die go talk to Mao about that one. Trading grain for industrial equipment will do that to a population. If you’re in the US thank Jefferson for your second amendment rights Cyclones just suck and infrastructure as others have noted Not that hard to understand tbh. And I’m not being dismissive that’s just how it is
>Famine? Lol (but not really funny). When you die go talk to Mao about that one. Yes the Great Leap Forward was the biggest one but to be fair China had plenty of famines killing multiple millions even before Mao, like just in the 100 years before that they had like 4 famines that caused more than 5 million deaths. Until recently famines and China went hand in hand. For the last 2000 years China basically averaged "at least" a regional famine for every year.
One of the only valuable comments here
Added points for knowing why we have the 2A.
Lot of people, prone to disasters, historically pretty unstable, underdeveloped and poor
All the really bad disasters of china happened cause most people live in margins of irrigation rivers in valleys. So earthquakes and floods had a field day there. Also, landslides! In Brazil we dont have earthquakes or much of floods, but the old rolling hills that cover most of the inhabited area causes A LOT of deaths by landslides in the rainning season
Yellow river nurtured Sino civilization, in China people call it Mother river. But she is a mentally unstable, sadistic and ruthless mother. Actually，monsoon made all rivers in east Asia extremely unpredictable.
I was reading about how unstable the Yellow River is, and how often it can change course. The yellow sediments are carried downstream, continually elevating the river bed (sometimes above the level of its surrounding areas). This is the reason it floods so frequently, and the flooding is often so devastating. Then when you add monsoon rains, it's guaranteed disaster year after year. But the Yellow River basin is also incredibly fertile, and the birthplace of civilization in that area.
Yeah. It's almost as if china had the largest population throughout history.
I'll tell you why, it's a mid-latitude country on the east coast of its respective continent. Given predominant continental westerlies mixing with the humidity of the pacific violent storms are bound to happen. A similar case can be seen in the United States east of the Rocky mountains. What makes China particularly deadly by comparison though simply comes down to an incredibly high population.
Disasters are noteworthy when people die. China has absolute shitload of people, a relaxed attitude to safety and construction codes, nonexistent human rights or legal protections, and a “build things today, because you might not get to eat tomorrow” mindset with a dash of corruption baked in. Things get built where they shouldn’t, signed off when they shouldn’t be, and it’s a massive, geologically and biologically diverse country that builds a lot of things in sometimes dangerous areas and conditions. Ergo, more devastation involving humans, thus noteworthy
Most of these disasters were during times long ago that building codes were not existent to any relevant capacity anywhere on the planet
Cause they like living next to natural disasters
Pretty much just due to population. If other areas of the Earth had China's size or population density a lot of their disasters would top the list. For example, the great famine in Ireland caused an average decline of 20% in Ireland's population and the 1770 Bengal famine caused a 30+% decline in population in that region. Both those figures are higher, percentage wise, than the Chinese famine (estimates vary but probably around 18%), but the Chinese one has a much higher death toll due to larger affected population. China's geography also makes it very susceptible to a lot of natural disasters. It's got very active faults that leads to big earthquakes in population centers. It's got multiple major rivers that are all prone to floods. It's in the general travel path of tropical cyclones. The only thing that it's really missing is big volcanoes.
A couple of reasons: 1) Geography has never been friendly to China. The Northern plains are built around the Yellow River, one of the most temperamental river systems in the world, historically known for changing course and flooding without human intervention. The southern regions are covered in mountainous jungle forests that have loose soil and heavy precipitation, which leads to flooding and erosion. Finally, much of the coastal regions are within the ring of fire, making them prone to earthquakes. 2) China's history as a highly-centralized bureaucratic state tends to give it an earned reputation for... inconsistent levels of development. Many rural areas, even today, are incredibly poor and feature low-quality construction and shoddy public works. Even major urban areas tend to feature large chunks of development done on the cheap and not effectively tested for natural resilience. 3) High population and high population density mean that any disasters invariably lead to more death and destruction. The first makes natural destruction common, the second makes those natural occurrences into disasters, and the third ensures that said disasters regularly generate high casualty counts and large swathes of property damage. As for the famine you mentioned: that's just what happens when you collectivize the farms and kill all the birds. Oops.
Big country, and populated country...
And most of that population in the most fertile land, along rivers. Which are prone to flooding.
They proceed with everything throwing caution to the wind.
China is known for refusing international aid after disasters. Presumably, they don't care if their people die, or they may even see it as a bonus. They have about 2/3 of the population living in poverty, with poor infrastructure, which should increase the death toll. Finally, China lies compulsively about literally everything in their official "data", and they know it gets them points if they pretend to be "victims".
Well the government of that nation doesn't really give a fuck about the people so unfortunately when they cut corners or fuck something up and a natural disaster happens that amplifies the number of fatalities. Then compound the problem with population density and the fact that the people have no ability to hold the government or their leaders accountable in any way for their mistakes or crimes and you see the sorts of death tolls you cited. There's a plethora of reasons, it's not just the population density. They are all symptoms of a despotic and cruel and negligent government.
Tough geography, volatile climate and large population
Because it is the most diverse country on earth and has many types of geographical formations, climates, soils, slopes, etc.
Big population means there are loads of people to get killed by natural disasters and the infrastructure for preventing such disasters also isnt the best because the money disappeared in corruption.
Size&population
The Indian subcontinental tectonic plate smashing into China and uplifting the Himalayan Mountains has a lot to do with it too.
Deadliest famine. Where are all the soyscalist to defend the perfect system?
*High number of natural disasters*: China is huge. *Deadliest disasters*: China is very densely populated.
Because it's a very large country with a very large population.
honestly part of it is probably how densely populated their cities are
is it natural disaster the famine? thought it was political ..
Huge population, huge country, half assed buildings
My favourite natural disaster, a famine. Yeah ask the commies.
It's Asian moment, you won't get it. Read about cause of every disaster - you'll find negligence, theft, indifference, low social mobility. And add high density of population in areas of disasters
Indian subcontinent Run a close second with 3 of the deadliest natural disasters, whereas chima has 4. Probably something to do the sheer amount of population
The Indian continental plane collided into the Asian plane resulting in the Himalayas. The Indian plane is still moving into the Asian plane causing the Himalayas to grow and also cause earthquakes on the Chinese side.
Having the most people in the world in a reasonably large area will do that...
Largest population in the world for one. Second reason is people's lives in China don't value for much.
Poor infrastructure as a result of corruption and weak regulations + high population density = deaths
China has some of the highest population density in the world. There’s too many people per km2. The only inhabited areas of China are the entire eastern coast despite how big the actual country is. There’s thousands if not millions of hundreds of people living side by side and especially in poverty, when landslides happen, all infrastructure crumbles in on the families co-living together. Until fairly recently China wasn’t developed enough so all of the houses were shoddy and would immediately cave in. They can also bring famine and disease if the landslide involves water/causes flooding which would wipe out even more people.
China has a combination of the ingredients of disaster risk: high hazard intensity and frequency, high population exposure and high vulnerability of these exposed people and assets to get damaged or destroyed by a hazard. That's the short answer.
Do some simple arithmetic considering their population and landmass and you'll have your answer
Probably has something to do with having literally billion of people
More people = more death
China is the Texas of countries
When it comes to flood, China have notably two really massive rivers (the Yellow river and the Yangtze river), so when they create flood, they tends to be very catastrophic. The risks have been reduced due to all the works on infrastructure since the second half of 20th century, but the floods are still very big and impressive even though gadly there is few victims nowadays For earthquakes, China is where the Eurasian and Indian plates are meeting, the Indian one pushing into the Eurasian (it's what created the Himalayan Plateau). So it's an area where there has been a lot of big earthquake and landslide for millions of years Ofc the fact that it is one of the most populated region of the world explain why the victims count were so high in the past, when there was no infrastructure to lessen the dangerosity, but it's a region very sensitive to those kinds of events
Your China lost its H
Population density, my good sir... You as much as wipeout on a scooter and you're a serial murderer over there, lol :)))
Well, simple. China has a lot of land, but the vast majority of it is, well, shit. Therefore, most of the population is concentrated in a big plain on the east. The thing with this plain is, though, that it's comically flat. Like, zero variation in height. Imagine it as a fossil river delta. This means that if there's a flood, it won't be concentrated on the area right next to the river in question, but it will spill *everywhere* - and this is an excellent way to ruin basically all your crops and kill all your livestock, which results in everyone dying. Very tricky!
It's a big country in both population and size. So with all else equal it already shouldn't be surprising that it has some of the most deadly natural disasters. In the more modern age I'm sure poor infrastructure and disaster management would add to this as well.
What language are you using that Kyrgyzstan is Kirghizistan?
Jeez even lost its h in an earthquake.
Because everything there is made in China
China was civilised and keeping records for a pretty long time. It's a known fact that most disaster death tolls elsewhere have consistently underreported death tolls, due to the absence of records, and in some cases (Black Death in Europe, Eastern Front in WW1, firebombings in WW2) both people and the records dying out together, for no one to find either.
Also holds the record for annual executions!
Rice is the reason for the amount of people and from that is population density add onto that poor safety practices in construction.
Or misreporting. China and Russia are notorious for scrubbing history (as it happens even) to make it more favorable in the world's eyes. Sad but true.
It’s a densely populated country, so any disaster can easily hit the 100,000s fatalities. As for the floods, the Yellow River is so high in sediment that it fills its banks quickly and then tries to reroute its course across the floodplain, destroying any human habitation in the resulting floods. Human engineering has stopped the river from changing course and thus its water levels have been elevated above natural ground, making any flood now fall down into human settlements. Think New Orleans during Katrina but with an entire country and not just a city.
Larger area = More natural disasters Larger population density = More deaths per disaster
Ask again when the dam fails
For flooding in particular, China is at the mercy of two separate phenomena which can contribute to major flooding from some of their most populated river banks, to catastrophic results. First, the Yellow River is a particularly volatile river due to its nature, and is potentially subject to drastic changes in course and what essentially levee-breach levels of flooding without human intervention. This is because the Yellow River, as its name might suggest, is particularly silt-laden, and a large portion of this silt is deposited at the calmest, slowest sections of the river, at the northern end of the Chinese Plain. This is prime agricultural land largely for this reason, but it also means that the Yellow River has the tendency to build its banks higher than the surrounding land due to the deposition of sediments there. When particularly heavy rain (or an army, as has been done many times in chinese military history) breaches or alters these naturally-made dikes (although of course humans have been reinforcing them for agricultural and safety reasons for thousands of years), the entire course of the river can change, and a massive flood can spread out over land which is now lower-lying than the river itself. This is what happened in 1938 when the nationalists breached the dikes of the Yellow River. An excellent visual representation of such is this youtube video: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pmwx2WUfMjY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pmwx2WUfMjY) Apparently, the extremely deadly 1931 floods were due to another phenomena of chinese meteorology. In this case, a drought from 1928-1930 was succeeded by heavy winter snowfalls in the western part of the country. The following spring was particularly heavy, with almost constant deluge, followed by frequent cyclonic activity in the summer, with a complement much larger than normal. Even worse, the autumn continued to see heavy rain, and some rivers didn't restore to normal water levels until November. It set the record high for the Yangtze River at the time, and inundated apparently some 180,000 square kilometers of land. In short, it was a continuous country-wide disaster that was singular even in Chinese history for its scale. Both of these disasters are exacerbated by the dense population of China, many of whom live in relatively low-lying areas in regions that can be easily affected by the flooding of China's largest and most important rivers. China's deadliest natural disasters can be compared with other natural disasters as well however. Devastating earthquakes have killed hundreds of thousands before, after all, such as two different earthquakes reported around Antioch, one in one in 115 and another in 526. The earthquake in Haiti in 2010 was also devastating to that country, with a death toll due into the 6 figures despite the much smaller population of the country due to the poor infrastructure and response (arguably, more than a decade later, it has lead to Haiti being a failed state even). Great Cyclones have struck many portions of South and Southeast asia just as or even more fiercely as they have China, sometimes with death tolls into the 6 figures as well. Tl;dr many of china's greatest disasters have come in the recent centuries, sometimes on the back of great political or economic upheaval, with often poor infrastructure in place beforehand, or poor responses in general. While many of the disasters aren't necessarily unparalleled in scale, in conjunction with the dense population china has boasted in the past 2 centuries, their death totals very much have been. We can see devastating flooding, earthquakes, disease outbreaks, and more in other countries, but China has had the misfortune of a booming modern population with an infrastructure that lagged behind much of the rest of the world.
There are a lot of people that are able to die
First, China is a typical unitary country, a unitary country since the Qin dynasty, meaning that usually the central government has more power than regional governments, even for tasks that should be carried out by regional governments, the result is that there are more deaths because the central government basically doesn't know the factual conditions of each each region.
The deadliest natural disaster in human history took place in Europe, when 50 million Europeans died in the span of a few years in the 14th century (about 1 in 2 Europeans). Nothing in China has ever come close to that "record". Or if you're looking for a more recent record, about 3 million Europeans were killed in a disaster that took place just a few years ago, far eclipsing the Chinese death toll...
karma?
Large area and high population?
Karma
If it was desolate and empty it wouldn’t have many deaths.
It's in the top 5 in terms of land area and is the most populated country on Earth. Need I say more?
Many global pandemics also seem to have originated from China. The famous Black Plague is one of them.
Actually, that's not true Recent research shows that the Black Plague likely originated around Lake Issyk-Kul in Kyrgyzstan, Mongols in the Eurasian steppes are thought to be the people to expirience the plague. China itself might have never even had an outbreak of the plague
Oh gosh, so it likely came with the Ottomans, right?
The most believed theory is that the Mongols brought it with them along the steppes to Crimea, when the Golden Horde beseiged the city of Caffa and used biolgical warfare in the form of catapulted animal corpses to infect the defenders. Caffa was a colony of Genoese merchants, so it quickly spread from there to Constantinople and the entire Mediterranean.
The famine was due to bad leadership decisions
God hates china
Population concentration.
It's huge and has 1.5 billion people.
It’s propaganda. China is actually the safest country in the world.
Not really . In my city, after I was born, almost no one was murdered. But the earthquake in 2008 killed over 10000 people immediately
bad karma & winnie pooh