The ‘numbering’ of people used to be resented in ancient times as presumptuous, unlucky and only meant as a means of further fiscal extortion. The taking of a census for purely scientific, demographic purposes is something quite modern and goes back to the ‘counting of heads’, required by democracy, practised for the first time in 1790 by the United States; Great Britain following suit with a first census in 1801. Subsequently most other countries have likewise introduced the system of a decennial census; but there are important exceptions still, the most serious one being that of China, which is quite innocent of any reliable nation-wide statistics of any sort.

To say anything about China’s population one is therefore left to shrewd guesses, scientific approximations or a lively imagination. The Imperial Government ordered a census to be taken in 1895 and 1910, which yielded a total of 377 and 316 million inhabitants respectively. The Republic, if only on account of the endemic warfare which has bedevilled its existence from the very start, has had to content itself with ‘Post Office Estimates’, which in 1920 suggested 428 and in 1930 445 millions as China’s total population. Finally in 1932 the Government came out with a fiat declaring 475 millions to be the right figure; against which W. F. Wilcox of the American Statistical Association in its Journal for 1980 maintained that 342 millions was the most he could concede.

C. P. Fitzgerald by a painstaking computation of cities actually occupied at different periods of Chinese history arrived at a grand total of 130 millions as China’s population under the T’ang Dynasty in 618 A.D. (China Journal of 1932).