Fact or Fiction? Re-examination of Chinese Premodern Population Statistics

Despite the kind of scholarly attention that has been attracted in the field ofChinese economic history in the past half a century or so, basic quantities ofsome basic factors have remained disagreed. Chinese population is one of them.For example, for the post-1350 period, the gap between China’s own record andcontemporary estimates can be as great as 200 million souls. To make thesituation worse, since the late 1960s, estimation and guesstimation havegradually taken over while the Chinese official censuses have beensystematically thrown away almost completely.As a result, the picture of Chinese population during the premodern periodhas been messy with opinions divided widely (see Figure 1). No one can be trulysure of China’s population size despite the fact that population is commonlyregarded as one of the key economic factors in an economy. The problems hereare neither simple nor trivial.[...]