06.26.07
People Mountain People Sea
There is a Chinese idiom (人山人海 ren2 shan1 ren2 hai3) which literally means “people mountain people sea.” The figurative meaning of this is “There are a lot of people” in a particular area. As one would guess, this idiom is used quite often in China. Every so often I like to remind myself how truly enormous the population of China is. Here’s a little statistical analysis where I ranked the world’s most populous countries, but counted each Chinese province as its own country. The listings in red are Chinese provinces. The rest are all independent nations. Statistics courtesy of wikipedia.
| 1 | India | 1,169,016,000 |
| 2 | United States | 302,500,000 |
| 3 | Indonesia | 231,627,000 |
| 4 | Brazil | 186,800,000 |
| 5 | Pakistan | 163,630,000 |
| 6 | Bangladesh | 158,665,000 |
| 7 | Nigeria | 148,093,000 |
| 8 | Russia | 142,499,000 |
| 9 | Japan | 127,720,000 |
| 10 | Mexico | 103,263,388 |
| 11 | Henan | 97,170,000 |
| 12 | Shandong | 91,800,000 |
| 13 | Philippines | 88,706,300 |
| 14 | Vietnam | 87,375,000 |
| 15 | Sichuan | 87,250,000 |
| 16 | Guangdong | 83,040,000 |
| 17 | Germany | 82,400,996 |
| 18 | Ethiopia | 77,127,000 |
| 19 | Egypt | 75,498,000 |
| 20 | Turkey | 74,822,000 |
| 21 | Jiangsu | 74,330,000 |
| 22 | Iran | 71,208,000 |
| 23 | Hebei | 68,090,000 |
| 24 | Hunan | 66,980,000 |
| 25 | Anhui | 64,610,000 |
| 26 | France (including overseas France | 64,102,140 |
| 27 | Thailand | 62,828,706 |
| 28 | Congo-Kinshasa | 62,636,000 |
| 29 | United Kingdom | 60,209,500 |
| 30 | Hubei | 60,160,000 |
| 31 | Italy | 59,093.092 |
| 32 | Myanmar | 48,798,000 |
| 33 | South Africa | 48,577,000 |
| 34 | Guangxi | 48,890,000 |
| 35 | South Korea | 48,244,000 |
| 36 | Zhejiang | 47,200,000 |
| 37 | Ukraine | 46,205,000 |
| 38 | Spain | 45,116,894 |
| 39 | Yunnan | 44,150,000 |
| 40 | Jiangxi | 42,840,000 |
| 41 | Columbia | 42,770,000 |
| 42 | Liaoning | 42,170,000 |
| 43 | Tanzania | 40,454,400 |
| 44 | Argentina | 39,531,000 |
| 45 | Guizhou | 39,040,000 |
| 46 | Sudan | 38,560,000 |
| 47 | Heilongjiang | 38,170,000 |
| 48 | Poland | 38,132,277 |
| 49 | Kenya | 37,538,000 |
| 50 | Shaanxi | 37,050,000 |
| 51 | Fujian | 35,110,000 |
| 52 | Algeria | 33,858,000 |
| 53 | Shanxi | 33,350,000 |
| 54 | Canada | 32,934,400 |
| 55 | Morocco | 31,224,000 |
| 56 | Chongqing (municipality) | 31,220,000 |
| 57 | Uganda | 30,884,000 |
| 58 | Iraq | 28,993,000 |
| 59 | Nepal | 28,196,000 |
| 60 | Peru | 27,903,000 |
| 61 | Venezuela | 27,657,000 |
| 62 | Uzbekistan | 27,372,000 |
| 63 | Afghanistan | 27,145,000 |
| 64 | Malaysia | 27,140,000 |
| 65 | Jilin | 27,090,000 |
| 66 | Gansu | 26,190,000 |
| 67 | Saudi Arabia | 24,735,000 |
| 68 | Inner Mongolia | 23,840,000 |
| 69 | North Korea | 23,790,000 |
| 70 | Ghana | 23,478,000 |
Food for thought:
-Of the 70 “countries” on this list, 23 of them are Chinese provinces.
-Henan, Shandong, Sichuan, and Guangdong all have larger populations than the most populous European state, Germany.
-Fujian has roughly the same population as Canada.
-There are 8 Chinese provinces with populations larger than France.
China is definitely people mountain people sea!
Yu
said,
June 26, 2007 at 2:43 am
Well, first of all… what’s the total population of China (some of us don’t like math, and some places, like Shanghai, were not listed….
And second, how exactly did you access that little website called wikipedia??? I miss it so much. But alas, there seems to be a sort of hiccup with the system.
james
said,
June 26, 2007 at 3:32 am
Cool idea. Yet for some reason, people always quickly assume that more people equals better. This is absolutely not the case. For example; here in Shandong, which according to these stats has 91 million people, the largest city Qingdao with 7 million people, has about as much culture as a backwards town in the US with only 250,000 people.
One thing it definitely does equal is tons of cheap labour!
Benjamin Ross
said,
June 26, 2007 at 8:58 am
@Yu
The official total population of China is just over 1.3 billion, however, most people will tell you the real population is probably over 1.5 billion. This is due to the large amount of unreported children (due to the Family Planning policy) as well as the general difficulty of obtaining accurate statistics in remote areas. The population totals above are official totals as well, so it’s likely they too are 10-15% lower than the real counts.
Matt Schiavenza
said,
June 26, 2007 at 9:10 am
Wikipedia has recently been unblocked by the Nanny, so enjoy it while it lasts. Otherwise, you can just use a proxy to get around it if (when) it gets firewalled again.
T.
said,
June 26, 2007 at 9:44 am
If Wikipedia is GFW’d again, you can use answers.com too.
Therese
said,
June 26, 2007 at 10:09 am
It seems that Shanxi’s population is closer to that of Canada than Fujian’s is closer to that of Canada….
Echo
said,
June 26, 2007 at 11:22 am
Hi Ben, I heard your story from a friend who has visited your blog. And generally I come to like reading your blog now. I am an English editor for a magazine named “The World of Chinese” that aims to introduce China to the world. We will introduce the foreigners who live in China in the coming issue. Would you like to share your story with us? My email address is echozhaolei@163.com. We could talk about that in detail. Thank you. –Echo
Mylea Mei
said,
June 26, 2007 at 11:25 pm
I am impressed by the ways Ben observes China. I long for more stories from him.
cheer
said,
June 28, 2007 at 12:54 pm
ha““I live in sichuan.
China Law Blog
said,
June 29, 2007 at 8:52 am
Great list. Reminds me of a graphic I saw on the Freakonomics blog a few weeks ago, showing a map of the United States with the name of the country with a similar GDP as the state. For example, my state, Washington, was labeled Turkey, because the state’s GDP is about the same as Turkey’s It was cool too.
Jeremy
said,
June 29, 2007 at 11:33 am
人山人海 is the first 成语 (four character Chinese expression, often with deep meaning and a story behind it) I learned, although it is more literal than most.
I’ve noticed Wikopedia is on again, off again in China. Last night was the first time I could access Technorati from China, so the pendulum may be swinging in our direction once more.
Jeremy Yeh
said,
June 29, 2007 at 11:15 pm
yeah,china is really renshanrenhai! when i told a uruguayan friend that china has a population of 1.3 billion people,fukien 35 million and foochow 6 million,he really had a big wow! cuz there are only 3 million in uruguay.
Jenn
said,
June 30, 2007 at 9:21 pm
Wow. Mixing the province populations with country populations really puts it into perspective. No wonder I feel occassionally claustrophobic.
Although, I notice it a lot less than when I first arrived. Empty seems strange.
Handan
said,
July 12, 2007 at 6:10 pm
Ben, assume your audience knows little about Chinese provinces and add parallel colume of land size if you would…
Simon
said,
August 23, 2007 at 4:11 am
But if you divided, say, India up into States (provinces) then a large number would be Indian! You can’t divide up one large number, leave another large number whole and say “wow, what a lot of components of the large number there are”!