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The
People of China
 China
is the most populous country in the world, with
1,265.83 million (2001), about 22 percent of the world's total.
This figure does not
include many Chinese in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, Taiwan
Province and Macao.
The population density in
China is 130 people per square km.
This population,
however, is unevenly distributed. Along the densely populated east coast there are more than 400 people per sq km; in the central areas, over 200; and in
the sparsely populated plateaus in the west there are less than 10 people per sq
km.
When
New China was founded in 1949, China had a population of 541.67 million.
Owing to China's stable society, rapid production development, improvement of
medical and health conditions, insufficient awareness of the importance of
population growth control and shortage of experience, the population grew
rapidly, reaching 806.71 million in 1969.
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In the early 1970s, the Chinese
government realized that the over-rapid population growth was harmful to
economic and social development, and would cause great difficulties in the fields of employment, housing, communications, and medical care; and that
China could not effectively check the over-rapid population growth, and
alleviate the tremendous pressure that the population growth was exerting on
land, forest, and water resources, the worsening of the ecology and the
environment in the coming decades would be disastrous, thus endangering the
necessary conditions for the survival of humanity, and sustainable social and
economic development.
 Then the Chinese government began implementing a
family planning, population control and population quality improvement policy in
accordance with China's basic conditions of being a large country with a poor
economic foundation, a large population and little cultivated land, so as to
promote the coordinated development of the economy, society, resources and
environment.
Since then birth rates have steadily declined year by
year. China's birth rate dropped from 34.11 per thousand in 1969 to 16.03
per thousand at the end of 1998; and the natural growth rate decreased from
26.08 per thousand to 9.53 per thousand, thus basically realizing a change in
the population reproduction type to one characterized by low-birth, low-death
and low-increase rates.
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