For Quick Alerts
Subscribe Now  
For Quick Alerts
ALLOW NOTIFICATIONS  
For Daily Alerts
Oneindia App Download

Is it India or China? Debate over world’s most populous nation begins with a bang

According to a scholar, India is the world's most populous nation and not China.

By Oneindia Staff Writer
|
Google Oneindia News

Beijing, May 26: Let's us quiz you first. Which is the world's most populous country? China. Right? No, wrong. According to a US-based researcher of Chinese-origin, India has beaten the neighbouring country to emerge as the world's largest nation.

The bold claim by Yi Fuxian, a researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, during an event at China's Peking University on Monday has sparked a new controversy over its "authenticity" across the world and especially in China.

population

According to the South China Morning Post, Yi suggested that China had only 377.6 million new births from 1991 to 2016, much lesser than the official figure of 464.8 million. This meant that China's official population estimate, currently at 1.38 billion, was wrong, Yi said.

That would make it 1.29 billion, and lower than India's estimated 1.32 billion population, according to Yi.

All these years, experts told us that India would outsmart China in terms of population by 2022. However, if Yi's estimate is correct, then India has achieved the "feat" almost six years before the scheduled time.

The latest case on population has widespread implication--both in India and China--suggest observers. As far as India is concerned, more people are not a very good news as the nation is still fighting various economic and developmental problems, the biggest among them are poverty and food crisis.

For China, it means that the population "slowdown" in the country is much worse than estimated. Thus the role of the government has come under the scanner especially its "draconian" family planning programme "one child policy" which has been scrapped only two years ago.

Yi, considered as a fierce critic of Chinese population control measures, since long in his writing stressed that country's policies were limiting its economic growth. Thus China could never compete with the United States.

He also suggested that China could soon have a negative birthrate and a declining population, like its neighbour Japan.

This is not for the first time when Yi has accused the Chinese government of providing "false" population data. In his book, Big Country with an Empty Nest--in 2013, Yi took a critical look at China's family-planning policies.

Yi stressed that he was sure the estimates were wrong far earlier. "In 2003, I knew China official announcement population data is much higher than the real population," Yi told The Washington Post.

His book, Big Country with an Empty Nest, first published in 2007, was initially banned in mainland China. He told the New York Times that he was warned in 2010 he faced arrest if he returned home after helping his sister-in-law escape a state-ordered forced abortion.

However, not all agree with Yi.

"His numbers should not be taken at face value," Wang Feng, a demographer from the University of California, Irvine, told the Guardian. Feng, who has previously warned that China was heading toward a "demographic precipice," said he believed the government's population numbers were accurate.

OneIndia News

For Daily Alerts
Get Instant News Updates
Enable
x
Notification Settings X
Time Settings
Done
Clear Notification X
Do you want to clear all the notifications from your inbox?
Settings X
X