The first national census since the Communist takeover was compiled in 1953, in an effort to assess the human resources available for the first five-year plan. At that time, the population of China was found to be 582,600,000. A second census, taken in 1964, showed an increase to 694,580,000; the third, in 1982, revealed a population (excluding Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan) of 1,008,180,000, making China the first nation ever to pass the billion mark. Between 1953 and 1994, the death rate dropped from 22.5 to an estimated 7.3 per 1000 population; the birthrate declined from about 45 per 1000 in 1953 to an estimated 18.1 in 1994. As a result, the net natural increase declined from about 22.5 per 1000 in 1953 to 10.8 per 1000 in 1994. Nevertheless, at that rate China would still show an annual population growth of nearly 13 million.

The decrease in fertility recorded between the 1950s and 1990s was largely effected by government efforts to promote late marriages and, more recently, to induce the Chinese family to have only one child. This program has been coupled with the continual expansion of public health facilities that provide birth-control information and contraceptive devices at little or no cost. It was officially estimated in 1984 that 70 percent of all married couples of childbearing age were using contraception, and that 24 million couples had formally pledged to have no more than one child. Abortion is legal, and social pressures to terminate a pregnancy are applied to women who already have one child or more. The national minorities have generally been excluded from the governments birth-control program, in keeping with a policy of allowing the non-Han peoples a maximum of cultural independence.

In 1980 the government reported that 65 percent of the population was under 30 years of age. Thus, a substantial proportion of the Chinese population will be of childbearing age for at least the next several decades. In September 1982, the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party declared that the nation must limit the population to 1.2 billion by the end of the century, a goal requiring an intensification of population control efforts. In 1988 the government recognized the goal as unattainable and revised it to 1.27 billion.China had an estimated 1996 population of 1,210,004,956. The population density was about 126 persons per sq km (about 327 per sq mi); this figure represents an average of a very uneven geographic distribution. The great bulk of the population is found in the 19 eastern provinces that have formed the historical heartland of China. This reflects the dissimilar historical land-use and settlement patterns of the Chinese (in the east) and the non-Han (in the west). Since the 1960s the Chinese government has promoted settlement of the lands of the western provinces and autonomous regions.

   Despite industrialization, China continues to be a predominantly rural, agricultural nation. Although major urban concentrations existed in China even before the time of the Roman Empire (44 BC-AD 476), the country as a whole has only slowly come to be urbanized. Nearly three-quarters of the population is classified as rural.

Spontaneous migration from the countryside to the city was prohibited from the mid-1950s because of the lack of productive employment for additional city dwellers. This prohibition was the outgrowth of the belief of Communist leader Mao Zedong that the class distinction between urban and rural people was a major cause of social inequality in China. During the 1960s and the first half of the 1970s, the Chinese expended considerable energy on a campaign of sending educated urban youth to the countryside for several years or even permanent settlement.This movement was intended to provide urban skills in rural areas, thereby reducing peasant interest in migrating to the city. The rustication program was downplayed after the death of Mao in 1976 and virtually eliminated by the end of 1978, at which time migration to the cities began to increase.

Residential mobility within cities is also restricted by the government. A person must have government approval and guarantee of a residence and employment before moving. Some residential movement within the major cities has resulted, however, from the large-scale destruction of old housing and its replacement by four- and five-story apartment buildings.