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China is one of the world's oldest continuous civilizations. It has the world's longest continuously used written language system and is the home of many of the worlds inventions, including paper, the compass, gunpowder and printing.
Archaeological evidence indicates that the earliest humans in China date from 2.24 million to 250,000 years ago and a cave in Beijing has fossils dated at somewhere between 300,000 to 550,000 years.
The earliest evidence of a fully modern human in China comes from Liujiang County, where a cranium has been found and dated to approximately 67,000 years ago. Although much controversy persists over the dating of this find, a partial skeleton from Minatogawa in Japan has been dated to 18,250 years ago, so modern humans must have reached China before that time.
Rather controversially, the Peoples Republic of China is known for its intolerance of organized dissent towards the government. Dissident groups are routinely arrested and imprisoned, often for long periods of time and without trial. Incidents of torture, forced confessions and forced labour are widely reported. Freedom of assembly and association are extremely limited in many cases. For this reason the Chinese Civil Rights Action Group has been formed.