| I think you should add that Beijing and Guanzhou are north-east and south-east respectively. If you say Bejing is north, people will try to find it on the map somewhere around the middle of inner Mongolia. When Chinese people think of China, they think Chengdu is the furtherest west. But when a foreigner looks at a map of China, we think Sichuan would be central China.
Possibly you could add something like: when people talk about the northeast of China they are talking about [such and such] provinces. Southwest is Yunnan, Sichuan etc. Eastern Seaboard is: etc. Because when we look at a map we see things geographically rather than demographically -- Chinese people 'don't count' Qinghai, Gansu and Xinjiang although they take about half the area of China because (comparatively) hardly anyone lives there. |
Basic Geographic Knowledge about China