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 people in Japan
The Chinese community has undergone a dramatic change since the PRC allowed more freedom of movement of its citizens, but it should be noted that citizens of Taiwan, Singapore and Hong Kong nationality are not counted in these figures. A study that was conducted in 1995 estimated that the Chinese population of Japan numbered 150,000, among whom between 50,000 and 100,000 could speak Chinese. In 2000, Japanese governmental statistics revealed that there were 335,575 Chinese people in Japan. Current demographic statistics reveal that these numbers have reached over 600,000 legal immigrants, although there is probably also a significant population, although of unknown number, of illegal immigrants. A significant number of Chinese people take Japanese citizenship each year and therefore disappear from these figures. As Japanese citizenship, like France, does not record ethnicity, once a person has naturalised, they are simply Japanese, so the category of Chinese-Japanese does not exist in the same was as it would in a country which recognises ethnicity. Therefore, the numbers of Japanese people who are of Chinese descent is unclear.