Meeting government targets has not always been a matter for congratulation in post-revolutionary China.
Chairman Mao Zedong's steelmaking decree brought the country to a standstill during the Great Leap Forward and qualifies as one of the great political blunders of all time. The bird extermination programme resulted in a plague of insects and failed harvests. And it is pointless to pretend that the apparent success of the one-child policy will not create as many problems as it solves.
Yet without a strategy to halt a population explosion, Beijing might have been unable to feed its multitudes. In cities, the policy was so ruthlessly pursued that it is regarded by the international community as another black mark on the mainland's human rights record. Nevertheless, it has liberated the urban population from poverty, put food on tables even in still-deprived rural areas, increased the literacy rate and raised education levels. It has improved health and increased longevity, leaving social engineers of the future facing acute problems posed by having more elderly among the 1.265 billion population - the figure, revealed yesterday, of last year's census - than young people able to care for them.
The extended family, the very backbone of the nation, is disappearing. There is a ratio of almost 117 men to every 100 women, thanks to continuing female infanticide and illegal gender selection. It will be extremely difficult to construct any form of social safety net if there is a decrease in taxpayers and a boom in retired people without savings to tide them over what could be decades of retirement. In rural areas, kidnapping young women as brides for surplus men is already a thriving trade.
Even the acknowledged degree of error in the census could be wildly out, with a floating population of 200 million and widespread corruption among officials charged with carrying out population policy. In distant provinces, where 'the mountains are high and the emperor is far away', many families have far exceeded the two children allowed in rural areas. The original one billion target by the turn of the century has been overtaken by India.
This month, the United Nations warned that population was a global problem, and that nine out of 10 people would live in the poorest countries within 50 years. The 15 nations of the European Union recorded a population growth of 343,000 last year, a figure India matched within a week. The social changes that these predictions suggest are so vast it is impossible to foresee them all. But a new multicultural world order seems the very least that these conditions will impose.