Walt Byars wrote:
The PRC population never declined absolutely by that much, and it has increased in pretty much every year other than 1960 with the GLF famine (in which it decreased by a few million). Presumably, he meant that population was 300m lower than would have been predicated by earlier trends, or by other contemporary indicators which are usually correlated with population.
According to the stats in the World Bank's World Development Indicators database (which they get from the Chinese government), the population growth rate in the 1960s was 2.1%. It fell in every subsequent decade; it's now about 0.7% a year. (The number of those under age 14 is about 50 million below where it was in 1980.) Had China's pop kept growing at the 1960s rate, they'd have 1.639 billion people instead of 1.297 billion - a difference of 343 million (that doesn't eyeball right, but it's a rounding issue). Doug
