The fall and rise of China's population

The population of China just keeps on growing. It is the most populous country in the world. There are about 1.2 billion people on the mainland. Every fifth baby born in the world is Chinese. These facts cover pretty much everything the average citizen of the world knows about the mainland's population. They are short, snappy, simple to remember - and more than a little misleading.

The mainland population is certainly growing now, but there were periods when it shrank year by year. And as for the size of the population, some demographers believe the present total is closer to 1.3 billion than 1.2 billion. A census being prepared may give a more accurate answer.

And yes, China is now the most populous country in the world, but it is likely to lose that title to India in the first decades of the new millennium. India is shortly to produce its billionth citizen.

When people say every fifth baby born in the world is Chinese, what they really mean is that a fifth of the world's six billion population is Chinese. But we do not all have the same number of babies.

China has more citizens than India, but more babies are being produced in India. In each group of 1,000 people in China, there will be about 16 births and seven deaths a year. But in India, every group of 1,000 people will produce 26 babies, and nine people will die. In other words, China is producing about 19 million babies a year, while India is producing about 24 million. The world in total gets 80 million additional people a year.

Population growth is a remarkable thing. It took the whole of history from the emergence of the first homo sapien to the 1800s to produce the first one billion human beings. But less than two centuries later, by 1960, we had grown to three billion. These days, we add a billion people to the planet every 12 years.