China is by quite some distance the largest country in the world. The latest China population estimates come from the CIA World Factbook, which reports that the population of China in 2013 is 1,349,585,838.
This just includes mainland China. If you add in the population of the two Special Administrative Zones of Hong Kong and Macau, then China’s population increases from 1.34 billion to around 1.35 billion.
Largest country in the world
With a population of over 1.3 billion, China remains the largest country in the world. It is being quickly caught by its neighbour India, however, which currently has a population of 1.2 billion.
China’s population growth rate is beginning to slow, as a result of its controversial one child policy and increasing urbanisation. But India’s population is still growing at a fairly quick rate.
It is anticipated that the number of people living in China will peak at between 1.4 and 1.5 billion in around 2030, and then start slowly falling. India’s continued growth is likely to see it reaching 1.5 billion in around 2050, at which point the two countries will swap places in the world’s population charts.
China’s largest cities
You would expect that the world’s largest country would also have the world’s largest city – and you would be right.
Home to 17,836,133 people, Shanghai is the largest city in China and the largest city in the world, more than four million people larger than Istanbul of Turkey, the world’s second largest city.
Beijing, the capital city of China, is its second largest city, home to 11,716,000 people. Beijing is only the world’s fifth largest city, though, behind Istanbul, Karachi, and Mumbai.
There are three other Chinese cities with a population of more than 10 million people. Tianjin (11.1 million) and Guangzhou (also 11.1 million) are the world’s eighth and ninth most populous cities and Shenzhen (10.3 million) is the world’s twelfth largest.