Answer to Map #105

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Answer: This week’s choropleth depicted the growth rates of each province of China between 2000 and 2016.

As the map makes clear, China’s population growth this century has been bifurcated: its main urban areas have grown a lot more populous, but so has its most remote regios. Meanwhile, the provinces in the middle of the country have tended to grow a lot more slowly.

Overall, China’s population has grown by just under 10%. But that overall rate is slowing dramatically thanks to China’s unique demographic challenges. From 1979 until 2016, most Chinese people were only allowed to have one child, a policy intended to quell China’s rapidly growing population. But the shifts brought on by the One-Child Policy brought on new demographic challenges, and China’s population is now aging rapidly. In January 2016, the One-Child Policy was relaxed to a Two-Child Policy.

Only two Chinese provinces have lost population since 2000. One is Chongqing (more accurately a “municipality” rather than a province) and the other is Hubei. We could have chosen to make these provinces a different color, but we opted to give you a higher degree of difficulty by just making them light.

The biggest gainers have been the main cities. Beijing grew from about 13.6 million people in 2000 to about 21.7 million people in 2016, an astonishing growth rate just over 60%. Nearby Tianjin surged from 9.8 million to 15.6 million, a growth rate of about 5.9%. China’s rapid urbanization hasn’t just affected the largest cities, but the effects of population growth in those cities are magnified on this map because those cities are administered via their own municipalities. The percentage of China’s population that lives in cities surpassed 50% for the first time in 2011. That statistic continues to rise dramatically.

But the big cities weren’t the only places to see major population growth in the first part of this century. Fourth on the list—after Beijing, Tianjin, and Shanghai—is Xinjiang, the expansive region in northwestern China officially administered as an autonomous region for the Uighur minority. Xinjiang grew from 18.5 million to 23.9 million, a growth rate of 29.9%. Tibet, China’s other very large autonomous region, grew from 26.2 million to 33.1 million, a growth rate of 26.5%. There are two issues going on here. One is that minority populations were given exemptions from the One-Child Policy, so birth rates among minority communities have been larger. The other is that the completion of new railroads into these regions, combined with government pressure to even out China’s demographics, has brought a huge influx of Han Chinese migrants from the east into the far west. This influx has greatly exacerbated ethnic tensions within China; you may have read in recent months about the government’s crackdown on Uighurs in Xinjiang, which has sent more than a million Uighurs into “re-education camps.”

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