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.
List of common Chinese surnames
The summary of the 2007 survey revealed China had approximately 92,881,000 Wangs (7.25% of the general population), 92,074,000 Lis (7.19%), and 87,502,000 Zhangs (6.83%). These top three surnames alone accounted for more people than Indonesia, the fourth most populous country in the world. Detailed numbers for the other surnames were not released, but it was noted that seven othersLiu, Chen, Yang, Huang, Zhao, Wu, and Zhouwere each shared by more than 20 million Chinese and twelve moreXu, Sun, Ma, Zhu, Hu, Guo, He, Gao, Lin, Luo, Zheng, and Liangwere each shared by more than 10 million. All together, the top hundred surnames accounted for 84.77% of China's population. By way of comparison, the 2000 census found the most common surname in the United StatesSmithhad fewer than 2.4 million occurrences and made up only 0.84% of the general population. The top 100 surnames accounted for only 16.4% of the US population, and reaching 89.8% of the US population required more than 150,000 surnames.According to a comprehensive survey of residential permits released by the Taiwanese Ministry of the Interior's Department of Population in 2016, Taiwan has only 1,503 surnames. The top ten surnames in Taiwan accounted for 52.77% of the general population, and the top 100 accounted for 96.56%.