(08-14-2021, 08:52 PM)John J. Xenakis Wrote: ** 14-Aug-2021 World View: Population Density delusion
Apparently I've been deluded on the subject of population density.
For years, China has had a one-child policy to prevent overpopulation.
And I've always been under the delusion that this was because China
was the most densely populated country in the world, at least among
the big countries.
And I was aware that China's population is four times as high as
America's population, in a smaller area.
But it turns out that India has a much higher population density than
China: 424/sqkm for India vs 149/sqkm for China.
In fact, there are 82 countries, large and small, with higher
population densities than China, as can be seen from the following web
page:
https://worldpopulationreview.com/countr...by-density
Pakistan, for example, has 255/sqkm. The UK is at 281/sqkm. Vietnam
is at 296/sqkm. Japan is at 334/sqkm. South Korea is at 512/sqkm.
So OK, I've been deluded all these years. But now I wonder, what the
hell is the big deal with China? None of these other countries had a
"one child" policy. Why did China?
Wstern tourists in China rarely travel to the large, thinly-populated parts of the PRC that have few people -- and little to attract foreigners. Tibet is quirky to the extent that it remains culturally Tibetan, but even there the populated area is mostly around Lhasa, a tiny area of Tibet that can support a fairly-dense population. The Tibetan Plateau, the Tarim Basin, Inner Mongolia, and western Manchuria are either high mountains or very arid cold deserts or near-deserts.
China extends from the tropical South (Hainan, somewhat comparable to South Florida) to the subarctic region bordering on southeastern Siberia in Manchuria (basically middle-Quebec north of Quebec city with colder, drier winters. You will notice that aside from the St. Lawrence Valley in Quebec Province, zones of dense population in the US and Canada fade into near-oblivion north of about the middle of New Hampshire (Mr. X, you should be familiar with this, Toronto, roughly Saginaw and Muskegon in Michigan, Green Bay, and the Twin Cities. Go farther than this, and you will see where the corn belt has given way to the wheat belt, and in turn the potato belt. North of that, where rainfall is adequate, is forest. I see that in Michigan. West of about Lincoln, Nebraska and either Fort Worth or San Antonio, farming gives way to ranching and population densities drop off dramatically.
The vast majority of the population of the People's Republic of China lives from about Beijing southward and only as far west as the eastern part of the Tibetan plateau. Much territory of the PRC is essentially a cold version of the Australian Outback, and, yes, Australia is one of the most thinly-populated large countries in the world (Argentina, Canada, Mongolia, Saudi Arabia, and a bunch of countries almost exclusively in the Sahara excepted). Much of the PRC is too cold or too dry for any intense agriculture except in comparative oases. Outside of those high mountains and cold deserts or near-deserts, China is densely populated much like western Europe, Japan, South Korea, India, or the urban centers of the northeastern quadrant of the USA.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.
