India Joins China as Member of the Billion-Population Club

By HENRY CHU

March 29, 2001 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

BEIJING —

It’s official: China remains the nation with more people than any other, while India has become the second country to surpass the 1-billion mark.

Census data released by both nations this week confirm the remarkable fact that the two Asian neighbors account for more than a third of all humanity.

China boasts a population of 1.27 billion while India has 1.03 billion, official figures say. Each country has more people within its borders than existed on the entire planet about the time American revolutionaries met to sign the Declaration of Independence.

The new numbers attest to the monumental tasks confronting both China and India as they try to feed and clothe their citizens and, at the same time, catch up with the developed, wired world. Both nations face huge challenges from diverse subsets of society, from frustrated bachelors in search of wives to silver-haired retirees in need of affordable medical care.

Together, the two Asian giants added about 300 million people--more than live in the U.S.--to the world tally in the last 10 years.

“It’s unprecedented in human history, the kind of population growth that we’ve seen during the 20th century,” said Gary Gardner, director of research at the Worldwatch Institute in Washington. “The bulk of the world’s population is in Asia. And the bulk of the increase in world population is in Asia as well.”

China’s share of the past decade’s increase was 132 million people. Despite the large number, it marks a decline in the country’s annual population growth rate, from 1.47% in 1990 to 1.07% now.

Officials attribute the drop to the country’s controversial “one-child” policy, which restricts urban couples to one child and rural couples to two if the firstborn is a girl.

“The census results prove that China’s family-planning policy is very effective,” Zhu Zhixin, director of China’s National Bureau of Statistics, told reporters Wednesday.

The overall count met the Communist regime’s goal of keeping population below 1.3 billion at the turn of the century, Zhu said. Outside experts had predicted that the figure might reach as high as 1.5 billion, especially as enforcement of the one-child policy has become more sporadic, with loopholes, corruption and outright defiance undermining its effectiveness.

Zhu acknowledged that census takers had difficulty counting the country’s “floating population” of migrant workers, believed to number at least 100 million, and may have missed youngsters whose parents did not report them for fear of punishment for having more than one child.

But the undercount was not serious, Zhu said. The survey’s margin of error was less than 2%, well within international norms for an accurate tally, he added.

As a whole, Chinese society is better-educated than ever, with literacy for people 15 and older up to 93%. College-educated residents have swelled in number, although their proportion of the populace remains small in comparison with developed countries.

Following the path of industrialized nations, more and more Chinese are moving out of the countryside to the cities. Within the last decade, the proportion of urbanites rose by nearly 10 percentage points to about 36%, or 456 million people.

But this still leaves more than 800 million farmers, many of whom barely eke out a living on a shrinking supply of arable land. “Increasing industrialization will reduce the [amount of] farmland,” which may in turn force China to import more food in the future, said Gardner, the Worldwatch research director.

China’s peasant farmers exceed the entire population of Europe--a staggering statistic that helps explain why the government here, worried at the prospect of rural unrest, has delayed entry to the World Trade Organization by demanding greater flexibility in subsidizing farmers. Competition from foreign agribusiness after WTO accession is expected to throw millions of Chinese farmers out of work.

In step with rising health standards, China has also witnessed a rise in the number of its senior citizens. Those over 65 now make up 7% of the population, an increase that comes as traditional social safety nets for the elderly--state welfare, adult children and grandchildren--are severely weakened because of market reforms and smaller family sizes.

What was once a nation of extended clans has become one of households of less than 3.4 people, down from 4.0 in 1990.

“It is necessary for us to adopt policies to cope with the fast growth of the aged population in the future,” said Zhu, the statistics bureau director.

And one of China’s most persistent social problems, the dearth of women, continues. The overall sex ratio is still skewed at about 107 males per 100 females.

More important, the ratio at birth remains severely off-kilter, at about 117 boys to 100 girls in 1999, probably because of a high incidence of sex-selective abortion, which is now illegal. Demographers warn of social problems ahead as more and more single men compete for fewer and fewer brides.

In India, too, a lopsided gender ratio has resulted in 35.5 million more males than females. The outlook for the future is grim: Provisional census figures released in New Delhi this week show that the number of girls under 6 years of age has fallen further, from 945 girls per 1,000 boys a decade ago to just 927 now.

Overall, India’s annual population growth rate, like China’s, has declined, from 2.14% a decade ago to 1.93%. The slowdown is apparently the largest in half a century.

Indian officials and experts hailed the reduction as “a major achievement.” They credited family-planning programs that stress contraception, spread catchy slogans like “small family, happy family” through the mass media and even offer cash incentives to couples to keep family size down.

Literacy levels in India, as in China, are also rising, officials said.

The censuses in the two countries were massive undertakings. Last fall, 6 million census takers and field supervisors fanned out across China to add up the population, from Beijing to Lhasa. The results provide a snapshot of the country as of Nov. 1, 2000.

In India, the population survey required 2 million census workers. The new figures show the country’s status as of March 1 this year.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Most Populous Nations

1. China: 1,270,000,000

2. India: 1,030,000,000

3. United States: 281,421,906

4. Indonesia: 224,784,210

5. Brazil: 172,860,370

6. Russia: 146,001,176

7. Pakistan: 141,553,775

8. Bangladesh: 129,194,224

9. Japan: 126,549,976