I think the answer may lie in geological aspects. The Indus River (root of the name India), the Ganges and the Yangtze river originate from the Himalayas/Tibetan Basin. Both the Himalayas and the Tibetan Basin are new mountain ranges (geological time wise) and have nutrient rich soil/rocks (because they are new and have not been washed/eroded). The rivers from these mountain ranges carry plant nutrients with them throughout the year.
Historically the plains where these rivers deposit rich nutrients have been the bread baskets or rice baskets.
The rivers in North America do not seem to have this benefit.
The answer to this question generally comes down to two things: energy and water. The parts of east Asia that is China’s breadbasket has both of those things in abundance. This allows for increased yields which leads to higher population potential.
One of the real issues here is the simplest. Time. Humans have been in China for essentially all of our existence. Even before modern humans evolved, there were hominids doing their thing on those floodplains.
In North America, however, humans have only been around for maybe 20,000 years? Even then, two things kept the population from meeting its old world cousins. First, a diaspora is a lot more hazardous to a population than settlements. The fact that humans were spreading increased the death factor. Second, only a small initial population came into the Americas to spread out and grow. While 20,000 years ago China may have been growing from 1,000,000 humans the Americas would have been growing from 5,000?
Ooo. That Dr Axe site looks pretty wonky. It throws around names like Medical University of South Carolina - where I’ve been treated - and University of Maryland but it is woefully short on actual citations.
And, honestly, any health care thing that references Dr Oz has to go on the ‘silly and pointless’ pile. It’s not every healthcare practitioner that gets summoned before congress for his quackery and his potential negative health impacts.
He appears to lack knowledge of basic chemistry - railing against heavy metals (good, mostly) while selling a product that contains heavy metals (bad, mostly).
In addition, he appears to lack any form of knowledge of physics, confusing ionizing and non-ionizing radiation.
You can cherry pick examples easily enough. I mean, hey, that natural herbal medicine also includes thinking you can grind up tigers into dick pills. About as well founded as astrology.
I think there might be something to this, but I don’t agree with all your details. The An Lushan Rebellion, the Three Kingdoms War and the Mongol conquests all happened in the last 2000 years, and all killed millions of people. BUT, even before those happened, China had a huge, growing population. It might have been that the land lent itself to growth, as others have said; then China had a long time to grow, as others have said, and theses trends became self-reinforcing over time. China developed a sophisticated society that could support a large population earlier than anywhere else, and just kept on growing.
All these cultural explanations are nonsense. China has had a large population for thousands of years because China has had the most productive farmland in the world for thousands of years. India and China had larger and denser populations than Europe because Indian and Chinese farmland was more productive than European farmland.
All the other cultural explanations proposed above are a consequence of higher population, not the cause.
Note that this concerns China proper…the lands in and around the Yangtze and Yellow rivers, not Manchuria, Mongolia, Central Asia, or Tibet. Those lands are obviously less productive, ranging into outright uninhabitable.
Also Lizard’s point as well - China has suffered horrendous population losses on several occasions, it is just that a) it started from a very dense base and b) it was always able to rebound relatively quickly because its productive capacity is enormous.
I was talking historically - like 1000s or more years ago. As far as I know, wheat came later to China than rice. This site says something to that effect :
That’s because China as annexed lots of less-dense areas. “Core” China, though, is roughly the same size as “core” India*, and has roughly the same population.
*Politics aside, by India here I think we should be referring to “historical” India, meaning India, Pakistan and Bangladesh.
That’s nice but there is zero evidence acupuncture is real medicine. Old superstition is still superstition. This has nothing to do with it at all.
The reason there are so many people in China is food. It matters not what your medicine is like; if you can’t eat, you die. China is, geographically, exactly where you would expect the world’s population to be the greatest; it has been populated for time immemorial and had every possible advantage in terms of growing food. Excellent soil, lots of water, temperate weather, the right crops. China would be immensely populated if they got their medicinal advice from Bill and Ted.
If we start getting into ludicrous arguments about culture and medicine I can point out any number of obvious counterexamples. Nigeria doesn’t have Eastern medicine, why is it so heavily populated? The medicine in Australia is excellent, so why is it so thinly populated? Why is western China, presumably with access to the same culture of medicine, thinly populated, as compared to “China proper”? The answer, in every case, comes down to access to food.
Well, I guess my thinking has been strongly influenced by the case of my hair dresser who, about 20 years ago, was diagnosed with cervical cancer. After getting that diagnosis and treatment options from two purely western doctors, she went to an Asian doctor who practiced holistic eastern medicine as well and our standard western medicine. His treatment cured her of her cervical cancer without surgery, chemotherapy, or radiation treatments, and it hasn’t returned in all of these intervening years.
Maybe she just got lucky. There are cases of cancer going into remission for no apparent medical reason.
Dr. Kathryn Hall, Director of Placebo Genetics at Harvard Medical School’s Program in Placebo Studies, talked about how **acupuncture ** helped her tennis elbow and how she has continued the treatment despite all the modern scientific evidence against it. This was on Adam ruins everything podcast.
Per her, traditional scientific methods of screen treatments miss the individuality of each “subject” and although she specifically insisted on not using the term “wholistic”, she said there is strong evidence of mind/brain interaction as to how medicines or placebos work. Hear the podcast if you get some time.
So, as you say, she received treatment from a holistic doctor. Also, her cancer went into remission. But you don’t know if those things are actually connected.
Does that doctor have the cure to cervical cancer? Does every patient who sees him see consistent and reliable remission of their cancer? Does he do this purely with “natural” herbs and acupuncture, and no use of “Western” medicine?
If not, then it seems kind of foolish to insist that “Eastern” medicine is more advanced and doubly so that your hairdresser’s cancer remission is evidence of that fact.
But they do kill off most of the insects.