Land use in China
China has four times the population of the U.S., within roughly the same area. With 1.3 billion inhabitants, 20% of the world’s population lives in China. While the rate of population growth has been declining for decades, the total number of inhabitants has been growing and is expected to do so through 2030. China’s urban population is growing rapidly; between 1950 and 2009, the percentage of the population living in urban areas quadrupled from 14% to 48%. Meanwhile, the rural population is declining, opening the landscape in areas that are not urbanized. The forests and farming land of eastern China support far more people and major cities than do the grasslands, deserts, and high mountain regions of the west.
Chinese Indonesians
Past estimates on the exact number of Chinese Indonesians relied on the 1930 Dutch East Indies census, which collected direct information on ethnicity. This census reported 1.23 million self-identified ethnic Chinese living in the colony, representing 2.03 percent of the total population, and was perceived to be an accurate account of the group's population. Ethnic information would not be collected again until the 2000 census and so was deduced from other census data, such as language spoken and religious affiliation, during the intermediate years. In an early survey of the Chinese Indonesian minority, anthropologist [[G. William Skinner]] estimated that between 2.3 million (2.4 percent) and 2.6 million (2.7 percent) lived in Indonesia in 1961. Former foreign minister [[Adam Malik]] provided a figure of 5 million in a report published in the "[[Harian Indonesia]]" daily in 1973. Many media and academic sources subsequently estimated between 4 and 5 percent of the total population as ethnic Chinese regardless of the year. Estimates during the 2000s have placed the figure between 6 and 7 million, and the [[Overseas Compatriot Affairs Commission]] of the Republic of China estimated a population as high as 7.67 million in 2006.