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South Africa's recent history has been shaped by its rich supply of
natural resources, including gold, diamonds, platinum, and coal. The
earliest colonizers were Dutch settlers called the Boers in the

eighteenth century, but the Treaty of Vienna gave the English a claim
to South Africa, and they began to push back the Boer population.
The discovery of valuable minerals in South Africa accelerated this
process, culminating in the two Boer Wars at the turn of the century.
Relations between the African natives and both sets of colonizers
were even worse, a conflict particularly vividly dramatized by the Zulu
War.

After independence, South Africa practiced apartheid, a form of official
racial segregation. The African National Congress and Nelson
Mandela, among others, resisted this policy, which was eradicated as
a political system in 1994. Although the contry faces serious social,
economic, and health-related problems, the Truth and Reconciliation
Commission that they established to deal with the aftermath of
decades of apartheid and the abuses it engendered has become a
model for other countries recovering from large-scale national
injustice.

China has been protected by its ocean, mountains, and deserts for millennia. It is one of the oldest
continuous civilizations in the world, famously the originator of paper, gunpowder, and pasta, among other
innovations. China was ruled by a succession of dynasties until a revolution in 1911 established a short-
lived republic. After a civil war in 1949, the existing Nationalist government was replaced by a communist
government under Mao Zedong. Despite persistent high levels of government control over its citizens,
China has become a major economic power as it adopts increasingly liberal economic policies. The
development of the US relationship with China is a subject of significant interest as the world's most
populous country begins to seek access to the same kinds of goods and resources enjoyed by the rest of
the developed worlds.