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.
Ethnic Chinese in Russia
The total ethnic Chinese population in Russia is a somewhat controversial topic. In the 2002 Census, merely 34,500 residents of Russia (both Russian and foreign citizens) self-identified as ethnic Chinese, about half of them in Western Russia (mostly Moscow). In the opinion of many Russian demographers, the census number may be an undercount; Russian demographers consider the estimate of 200,000 to 400,000, or at the very most 500,000, as the most reliable. For example, Zhanna Zayonchkovskaya, the chief of the Population Migration Laboratory of the National Economic Forecasting Institute of Russian Academy of Sciences, estimated in 2004 the total number of Chinese present in Russia at any given point (as resident or visitors) at about 400,000 persons, much smaller than ill-educated guess of 2 million that had been given by "Izvestiya". If popular media estimates such as the 2003 figure of 3.26 million were correct, Chinese would form Russia's fourth largest ethnic group after the Russians (104.1 million), Tatars (7.2 million), and Ukrainians (5.1 million).