Distribution of Chinese Population

Abstract

China is an ancient country and one of the places of origin of the human species. On this land our ancestors lived and multiplied for hundreds of thousands of years. Throughout the ages, owing to natural, social, economic, and other factors, the Chinese people were mostly concentrated in the southeastern part of the country. Some Chinese scholars indicated before the birth of New China that if a straight line were drawn from Aihui (present-day city of Heihe) in northeast China’s Heilongjiang Province to Tengchong in southwest China’s Yunnan Province, thereby dividing the country into the southeastern and northwestern parts, then the former, covering an area of about 1.55 million square miles (4 million square kilometers) or 36 percent of the total territory, was inhabited by 440 million people, or 96 percent of China’s total population at that time, while the northwestern half, which accounted for 64 percent of the total territory, was inhabited by 18 million people, or only 4 percent of the nation’s population at that time (Hu 1935). This shows that the distribution of China’s population was very uneven.