China in Perspective

Now and then you come across factoids about China’s population that give you pause—percentage of the planet, number of cities with more than a million people, ratio of infant boys to infant girls. The trouble is that by themselves these stats can be unwieldy and hard to get a handle on.

Recently I saw a blurb that put China’s numbers in the context of other countries. To me the comparison below is easy to digest, and therefore more stunning than the raw numbers. Courtesy of James Fallows’ blog:

If Americans want to imagine what it would take to be "strong" in the way China currently is, all we have to do is imagine moving the entire population of the Western Hemisphere into our existing borders. Every single Mexican. (Rather than enforcing the southern border, we'd require everyone to cross it, headed north.) Every Haitian, Cuban, and Jamaican. Everyone from Central America. All 190 million from Brazil. And so on. Even the Canadians.

China, by the way, is just about the same size as the United States, though a larger share of its land area is desert, mountain, or otherwise nonarable.

If we did that, we'd be up to about a billion people -- and then if we also took every single person from Nigeria, and for good measure everyone in hyper-crowded Japan too, we'd finally be up to China's 1.3 billion size. At that point, like China, we'd have tremendous scale in everything. Rich people. Big businesses. A huge work force. Countless numbers of multi-million population cities. And we would also have a tremendous amount of poverty, plus pressure on resources of every kind, from water to food to living space. Just as China does now.

Scale gives China some strengths. But it also creates tremendous challenges, as Americans would recognize if we thought about this prospect for even a minute.

Here in Thailand (which is geographically about three-quarters the size of Texas but has a population about three times as large), these numbers feel familiar. Measured either in number of square kilometers or number of people, twenty Thailands equal one China. In other words, population density here and there is about the same.

Arable land is perhaps the biggest difference—Thailand’s percentage is twice China’s. As a result the Thais have for a long time been the world’s leading exporter of rice. The Chinese produce about ten times more of it than Thailand does, but for a long time have struggled to feed themselves. Tremendous challenges indeed.