This came up a lot at last night Olympics watching party. I feel there is some misconception here. People wonder why China and India have so many people.
Actually if you combine all the people in Europe, North America, South America and Australia together, you count all the European descents, the number might be about the same or even more than China or India.
Europe is about the same size as China or India (if you include Pakistan, Bangladesh, and maybe some other traditional India territory), and they have about the same long history. So it makes sense that after a few thousands of years they have about the same number of people. What is different is that European descents are very spread out across the globe and thus don’t appear to be that many people while Chinese and Indian are mostly concentrated in one country. I guess this is why we have this myth.
Actually there were many people died in China in the last two hundred years under the invasion and occupation by the west, while the west enjoyed the prosperity and the luxury to build their democracy. Luckily we survived. But how about the native Americans? How about Africa?
I don’t have all the numbers here. Someone interested might provide numbers for this. But I guess this should be enough to clear the so called "Why China has so many people?" myth.
Out of curiosity, I found this from wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population
As you can see from 1750 to 1950 the percentage of Asia population is continuously decreasing and and that of European and Americas combined are continuously increasing. The percentage of Africa population is also decreasing a lot, and I don’t assume that is solely because they "moved" to Americas and Europe. It is only after 1950 (the time the western powers start withdrawing from the Asia) did the percentage of Asia population start increasing. See this chart, and you get what I mean.
Ok, myth solved. I guess.
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