Most countries with larger landmass have most of its landmass barely usable due to climate: Russia, Canada, Australia, Algeria. Most others from top 10 largest countries are doing OK: USA, India, Brazil.
China has a unique combination of very long subtropical shorelines, a decent amount of arable inland, and a very large population.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agriculture_in_India
"India's arable land... is the second largest in the world, after the United States. Its gross irrigated crop area... is the largest in the world."
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agriculture_in_China
"Although China's agricultural output is the largest in the world, only 12.6% of its total land area can be cultivated. China's arable land, which represents 10% of the total arable land in the world, supports over 20% of the world's population."
There are however several other large population nations. There's no reason for eg one billion to be a cut-off point or similar. There are only 14 nations with 100m or more people, a sufficiently rare group to look at the nations that fall within it.
The parent's point: "I'm not convinced that landmass and population are fundamental requirements for economic prosperity" - is spot on. They're not requirements at all (just ask Denmark, Belgium, Singapore, Israel, Austria and Ireland) and outsized population is clearly not a booster.
Among nations with at least one million people, the median is around 11.x million population wise. So 100m stands as 9x larger, a very considerable gap in size.
The majority of countries with large populations have done poorly economically. Great economic success with a very large population is a rare exception:
(shown with per capita output rank)
China #67 ($9608), 1.4b people | India #142 ($2036), 1.37b people | Indonesia #115 ($3871), 269m people | Brazil #73 ($8968), 212m people | Pakistan #148 ($1555), 204m people | Nigeria #141 ($2049), 201m people | Bangladesh #144 ($1745), 168m people | Russia #60 ($11327), 144m people | Mexico #66 ($9807), 132m people | Ethiopia #168 ($853), 110m people | Philippines #127 ($3104), 108m people | Egypt #130 ($2573), 101m people | Vietnam #131 ($2551), 97m people
Among the 15 nations with 97m+ people, there are only two standouts:
US #8 ($62606), 330m people | Japan #24 ($39306), 126m people
The poor performance doesn't stop at 100m either, it continues for most other large population nations below 100m as well. Including: Thailand, DR Congo, Turkey, Iran, Tanzania, South Africa, Myanmar, Kenya, Colombia, Uganda, Ukraine, Iraq, Afghanistan, Morocco, Peru, Uzbekistan, Venezuela, Malaysia, Angola, Mozambique, Ghana, Nepal, Madagascar, Yemen, North Korea, Côte d'Ivoire, Cameroon
Between the 100m and 25m population line, you have around 40 nations. At least 26 of those are between very poor and moderately poor.
Here is how the highest per capita output countries rank in total territorial area:
Luxembourg (#167), Switzerland (#132), Norway (#67), Ireland (#118), Iceland (#106), Qatar (#158), Singapore (#175), US (#4), Denmark (#130), Australia (#6), Sweden (#55), Netherlands (#131), Austria (#113), Finland (#64), Germany (#62), Belgium (#136), Canada (#2), France (#42), UK (#78), Israel (#149), New Zealand (#75), UAE (#114), Japan (#61), Italy (#71), South Korea (#107)
Having a lot of territory to look after, is more often an immense burden.
Argentina: 2.780 sqkm.
Kazakhstan: 2.724 sqkm.
It's pretty close.
I don’t think there are 2 places in mainland US that have as distinct cultures as pretty much every region of China has from each other (primarily because everyone speaks English in the US, while people speak different languages in different regions of China).
In India, the unifying language is English, though it isn’t as widespread in India as mandarin is in China.
No, the use of the term “dialect” is propaganda from the diversity-denying central government; describing Chinese languages as “dialects” is a gross abuse of the English word “dialect”, comparable to saying that French, Portuguese, and Romanian are all just dialects of Latin. “Chinese” consists of many mutually unintelligible languages (hundreds?), each of which has multiple dialects.
Mandarin works well enough as a lingua franca because (a) there has been a tremendous effort to force it on the population and suppress local culture (e.g. forcing children to speak it in school, force mass media to use it, etc.), and (b) there has been a massive internal migration in China so that a large proportion of the population is no longer living in their native land.
In some ways it is similar to the way young people from different European countries now speak English as a common language.
Mandarin gets you far for work or life in China in most Chinese cities. It stops working that great once you get to heavy minority areas outside big cities.
In a similar way, as a not-great Spanish/French speaker, I can understand lots of Italian words and grammatical constructions, and often get the gist of random Italian quotations that pop up in books written in English.
Doesn’t make them the same language.
Maybe you are underestimating how close Romance languages are.
In any event, I think everyone would agree that Sichuanese is much closer to Beijing Mandarin than other Chinese languages (like Xiang, Wu, Hakka, Min, etc. etc.).
Here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varieties_of_Chinese
Officially sichuanese isn’t even considered another variety of Chinese (nor are any other western Chinese dialects). It’s even just called southwest mandarin: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southwestern_Mandarin
The page specifically for chengdu mandarin doesn’t mention anything about 50%...https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chengdu-Chongqing_dialect
Russia and Canada. I wouldn't want to call Canada an inhospitable frozen wasteland, but I'm happy to say that about Russia. I suppose on reflection China has a lot of deserts, but I suspect given the population difference that China has a massive edge on quality farmland.
If you look at the wiki page for landmass [0] China actually has a startling abundance of land and has 20% of the worlds population. It doesn't really have much competition on the land+people front.
With fundamentals that good, they really don't need to get much right to become a superpower. They needed to get something right, but realistically they aren't transparent enough for us to know what.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependen...
Every country that has these (north america, non-communist europe, japan, south korea, singapore, taiwan, hongkong, israel) is a developed country.
Every country that has not, is not.
Having oil helps a little, also.
> how they managed to fall so low
There are countries with even larger landmass, and countries with roughly the same population, whose economies are doing worse than China, so I'm not convinced that landmass and population are fundamental requirements for economic prosperity. I should add that I'm not an economist in any shape or form and I'm happy to be proven wrong since I believe this is an interesting topic.