China kicks off 10-day whirlwind census

CHINA kicked off a once-a-decade census yesterday, a whirlwind 10-day count that sees six million census takers scrutinise apartment blocks, scour migrant areas and scan rural villages to document massive demographic changes in the world’s most populous country.

This time they aim to count everybody. The 2000 tally put the official population at 1.295 billion people, but missed migrant workers living in cities for less than six months. In the 10 years since, there has been an extensive shift in the population base as tens of millions of migrant workers poured into urban areas looking for work.

It is the sixth time China has carried out a national census, but the first time it will count people where they live and not where their resident certificate, or hukou, is legally registered. The change will better track the demographic changes and find the true size of China’s cities, the populations of which up to now have been only estimates.