Stats

The results of the 2010 census are in. It's official: China has 1.341 billion people, up 6.3 million from last year. On the right are some of them.

A bit of research reveals that China has the world's oldest surviving census data: apparently there was one over 4,000 years ago, and another is recorded to have taken place in the autumn of 2 AD. The latter is widely believed by scholars to be quite accurate; it showed that there were 57.67 million people registered in 12.36 million households. By 1953 the population of China was 594 million. Mind-boggling then that in just over 50 years the population more than doubled even with the one-child policy of recent years. That's enough stats for one day.