The results of the seventh national census show that the total population of the country is more than 1.4 billion. The total population registered in the sixth census in 2009 was more than 1.3 billion, the fifth time in 2000 was more than 1.2 billion, the fourth time in 1990 was more than 1.1 billion, the third time in 1982 was more than 1 billion, the second time in 1964 was more than 700 million, and the first time it was more than 600 million.
The first census was held in 1953. This time was just a few years in the early years of the founding of the country. At that time, we already had more than 600 million people. This data is a bit unexpected by many people, you know, we have just experienced the War of Resistance Against Japan and the War of Liberation.
Until then, the concept we had been using was 400 million people. The more common term for 400 million people is 40 million people. We can find the shadows of 40,000 million people in many literature.
After the "July 7" incident in 1937, Pan Xiaonong and Liu Xue'an composed the patriotic song "Ballad of the Great Wall", with lyrics that read:
The Great Wall is long and long, the Inside and Outside the Great Wall is the hometown, forty million compatriots are the same, the new Great Wall is ten thousand miles long.
"Ballad of the Great Wall" is an episode of the movie "Guan Shan Wanli". "Guanshan Wanli" tells that after the "9.18" incident, a Peking opera artist in the northeast went into exile in Guannei with his wife and daughter. Among them, the young girl went missing in exile and was later adopted by a musician. At an anti-Japanese fundraising concert, the young girl sang "Ballad of the Great Wall".
Coincidentally. In 1938, the Dutchman Julius Evans made a documentary in China, Forty Thousand People. The film records the Chinese who were not afraid of life and death in the War of Resistance Against Japan.
The forty million compatriots here refer to all Chinese people. Forty million people is an estimate, but it reflects the consensus that China's population is so large.
Time goes on. In "A Chapter of Feeling", Tan Sitong wrote:
Forty million people burst into tears, where is the end of the world is Shenzhou.
Four hundred million people cry together, where is the territory of China in the vast distance! This poem guangxu twenty-two years, that is, 1896. More than a year ago, the Sino-Japanese Sino-Japanese War broke out, and the Qing government was utterly defeated and forced to sign the "Maguan Treaty", which lost power and humiliated the country, setting off a frenzy of imperialist division of China.
Tan Sitong felt this and wrote this poem with indignation.
However, forty million people have been crying for a few years. In 1900, the Eight-Nation Alliance invaded China, the city of Beijing fell completely, and Empress Dowager Cixi fled to Xi'an with the Guangxu Emperor. The following year, the Qing government signed the Treaty of Xinugu with the great powers. The treaty stipulates that China should pay 450 million taels of silver to the great powers.
This figure is said to have been made by the great powers on the basis of our total population, and each person compensated one or two pieces of silver, which was extremely humiliating. Looking back, how did the Great Powers know this number?
Strangely enough, in the same year, the Qing government published the national population statistics in the Beijing Official Daily, which was 47 million. This is also just an estimate, and there is a big error in it. Whether the Great Powers learned from it is not known.
However, the great powers have been operating in our country for decades and should know the total population. According to records, in the fourteenth year of Emperor Xuanzong Daoguang of the Qing Dynasty, that is, in 1834 AD, the total population of the country was 401,008,574 million, which was about 400 million.
This is also the first time in history that the official population has reached 400 million. This should be the source of forty million.
We know that Daoguang was Jiaqing before and Qianlong before. We often say that Kangqian was prosperous, and after this prosperous era, especially during the reign of Yongzheng, the population of the Qing Dynasty suddenly rose.
It should be known that during the Shunzhi period in the early Qing Dynasty, the number of male Ding was only 14.03 million. In the next two hundred years, it reached 400 million. There are problems with statistical methods, such as the Yongzheng Emperor spreading out the ding into acres, turning the previous population statistics into demographics, and a large number of people were excavated.
There are also factors of real population growth. It is more popular to say that sweet potatoes were introduced and promoted, increasing yields per unit area and thus feeding more people. Seeing that you don't have to worry about eating, isn't this crazy to create people? Everyone worked together to increase the population to 400 million. We all followed that line.
Whether the population during the Republic of China period was also 400 million, due to the lack of comprehensive population statistics, we do not know. However, because the concept of 400 million has been deeply rooted in the hearts of the people, we naturally use 400 million or 400 million generations to refer to the Chinese people. However, judging from the first census, the error of this data should not be small.