China in Brief

China is one of the world's oldest civilizations with a chronicled history of more than 5,000 years. China has gone over a long history of primitive society, slavery society, feudal society and semi-feudal semi-colonial society and the present socialist society. In 221 BC, Qinshihuang established the Qin Dynasty, the first feudal autocracy in Chinese history, thereby unveiling a 2,000-year period of feudalism which was to last through a succession of dynasties such as the Han, Tang, Song, Yuan, Ming and Qing, a period which finally met its demise in the bourgeois democratic Revolution of 1911 by Dr. Sun Yat-sen. October 1, 1949 saw the founding of the People's Republic of China.

Population
China, the most populous country in the world, had a total population of 1,292.27 million at the end of 2003, according to the "Statistical Communiqué on National Economic and Social Development in 2003" published by the National Bureau of Statistics.
Moreover, the population density was high, with 135 people per sq km but unevenly distributed. Along the densely populated coastal areas in the east, there were more than 400 people per sq km; in the central areas, over 200; and in the sparsely populated plateaus in the west, there were less than 10 people per sq km.
The following table gives an overall view of the composition of the population of China as of the 2000 national census:
When the PRC was founded in 1949, China had a population of 541.67 million. With a stable society, production development, improvement of medical and health conditions as well as a lack of awareness of the importance of birth control, China witnessed a rapid population increase, reaching 806.71 million in 1969. In the 1970s, China began to implement a policy of family planning to control population growth, which brought the beginning of a decrease in birth rate. By the end of 2003, the birth rate stood at 12.41 per thousand with a mortality rate at 6.4 per thousand, leaving a natural growth rate of 6.01 per thousand, according to the National Statistics Bureau.