Why the Chinese are the most populous people on Earth?

I was wondering how the Chinese ended up being the most populous people? Did they have less wars, better hygiene, more sexual drive then other nations?
Were they more secluded, did they miss out on pandemics?

 

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As Czechoslovakia (pop. 13 mio, 1921 est.) splitted into two countries, its population becomes 10 mio (Czech Republic, 2009 est.) and 5 mio (Slovakia, 2001 est.). Just like China, I guess it has to do with how powerful the same emperor can occupy and integrate a vast amound of land. Has to do also with similarity in language or culture of people in one region. How do you make 1 country out of people who speaks German, French, Spanish, etc.??? Why does USA and Mexico aren't 1 country?Learn from Indonesian people, we have over 700 ethnic languages

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List of countries by population growth rate per 2005-2010. China's rank is #156 (UN list) or #148 (CIA World Factbook list).

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The first three (Russia, Antarctica, and Canada) have greater areas than China, but too cold to live compared to China:

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Kira, even if you compare whole Europe as one country to China, China still wins handsomely. So how come Europe doesn't have 1 billion people? The same with North America.

Also, comparing current growth is rather irrelevant since the question was how did China get here, not what is happening right now. Obviously their growth slowed down, but they still beat pretty much every European country....

So your posts didn't answer the question... We could also throw in India into the question, why Chinese and Indians are the most, instead of let's say South Americans or Africans?

 

They stayed to themselves well

 

Country/Region------Population---------Area (km2)----Density (per km2)
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
China---------------1,337,052,499-------9,596,961---------139
EU------------------501,259,840-------4,324,782---------115

It's about the same. China isn't the most dense country in the world. Monaco is over 100 times denser than them! (population density of Monaco = 16923 people/km2).

Total population is about where people draw countries border (~ an ability of a country to occupy big land)

 

Coz they don't want Russia and Turkey to be part of them. J/k

To answer the OP question properly, probably we have to know the world population distribution some 1000 years ago.

 

I mean, Syz, let say you have a strawberry cake, and then you divide them into pieces (like the one below). Which piece will contain more strawberry?? Of course the biggest piece (however, in the example below, each cakes contain 3 pieces of strawberry because they are divided equally big):

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Not really. You could add Russia to Europe and you would still be only half of the Chinese. Not to mention China has 3-4 huge areas that are almost completely unpopulated. So the livable land's density is about 250 people per square km.

Here, we could cut China in 2, leave the Western part alone and we would still have like 800 million Chinese on the Eastern part which easily matches Europe's size:

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So the question again, how come that they are the most populous and not the French, Russians or Americans???

 

Now attempting to answer my own question, here is what I have found on the net:

"Chinese civilization, at more than 8000 years old, is one of the
oldest in the world. They settled their lands earlier, produced
agriculture, vast food stores and became advanced in technology and
medicine long before most civilizations, so have had a much longer
time than most other cultures to become populous.
Another reason is that, before its many population booms, much
of China was (and still is, though not compared with the population) a
very fertile and resource rich area. The more resources there are,
the more people a land can support, at least in the short term. "

So they had an early start compared to other civilizations, a huge fertile land that was able to support many people and early technological advantages...I am not sure but it is a safe bet that even 2000 years ago, comparing similar size geographical areas there and in Europe, the Chinese had way more people...

 

I have explained above that Russia (and Canada and Antarctica) are too cold to live even if they are bigger than China.. (really, who wants to live in Antarctica even if you can have all the land for yourself??). Also, it's not so interesting to ask why a country has more population than others, because country is a man-made geographical area. Now if you look at South Asian, they are more populous then the Chinese:

Region-----------------Population---------Area (km2)----Density (per km2)
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
China-------------------1,337,052,499-------9,596,961---------139
South Asia-------------1,591,694,334-------4,490,233---------355

South Asia (sorted by population):

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China had a variety of very good factors for its growth.

First is its environment, the location of the country is in warm climate mainly allowing for huge agricultural supply of food.

Second is the nationality...look at Chinese...look at how much different they look from say the South Asians downstairs or Russians upstairs. The Chinese look different and have a culture that defines them which makes them very strong united nation for many millenia.

 

I have to agree that the number of a population also has to do with how old the civilization is. Among oldest civilizations are Chinese, the people that live in Indus valley (their descendants are the Indian, Pakistani, etc), the poeople that live in the Nil valley in Egypt, and those that live in the today’s Iraq and Iran (babilonian? persian?).

So, there is almost 1.6 billions South Asian, over 1.3 billions Chinese, possibly 1 billion African, and then some other billions white people.. hemm..

 

Didn't see your post, hayyyy..... welcome back, draqon!!

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Still running?

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I agree about the thing with the climate. I think the farther a population from the equator, the less they grow (in number). The very first civilization are the one that live in valleys with big rivers taht can irrigate their crops (the tropics and subtropics areas).

Also, I still think it has a lot to do with how an emperor able to expand its territory. We know how successful the Mongolian emperors (Genghis khan, Kubilai Khan) conquered the today’s China, Mongolia, and part of Russia.

Location of Mongol Empire:

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Explain please the part about Mongolian Emperors conquiring parts of Russia (it was more like a 300 year control of the country). Also Mongolia is not exactly China.

 

In the animated map above, post #16 (source). Or, if I take a screenshot of location of today's Russia and previous Mongol empire:

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yeah I know about Mongol Empire, but the thing about this Empire is that Russian people still lived in it and not the Mongols.

 

Syzygys,
you have still failed completely to address kira's excellent point about population density. Europe has roughly the same population density as China. It is therefore, by one defintion of the word, as populous as China. Why are you ignoring this key issue?