This claim was made popular by being said in the movie The Social Network. It exactly says:

> Did you know there are more people with genius IQs living in China than there are people of any kind living in the United States?

Many movies take liberties with facts. This particular quote is not factually correct – or more precisely, it has to be qualified much more than it is here. While there may be more people with scores above 130 (using the IQ cutoffs of the WAIS-III test) living in China than there are people in the United States, there’s not enough data available to claim that about people with “genius IQs,” defined as those exceeding
It sounds mind-blowing, almost impossible actually, but let's check the facts.

In theory, the statement could be true. According to the UN, in 2015 the United States had an estimated population of 322 million people, while China, according to the World Bank, had approximately 1.4 billion. If we consider that the distribution of high IQs follows a normal or Gaussian distribution, we could estimate the number of people with