In 2023, the average population density of Beijing municipality was 1,331 people per square kilometer, slightly less than in the previous year. Beijing municipality includes the city center and the relatively large urban area around the city. The population density in different districts of Beijing municipality varies greatly.

China is a vast and diverse country and population density in different regions varies greatly. In 2023, the estimated population density of the administrative area of Shanghai municipality reached about 3,922 inhabitants per square kilometer, whereas statistically only around three people were living on one square kilometer in Tibet. Population distribution in China China's population is unevenly distributed across the country: while most people are living in the southeastern half of the country, the northwestern half – which includes the provinces and autonomous regions of Tibet, Xinjiang, Qinghai, Gansu, and Inner Mongolia – is only sparsely populated. Even the inhabitants of a single province might be unequally distributed within its borders. This is significantly influenced by the geography of each region, and is especially the case in the Guangdong, Fujian, or Sichuan provinces due to their mountain ranges. The Chinese provinces with the largest absolute population size are Guangdong in the south, Shandong in the east and Henan in Central China. Urbanization and city population Urbanization is one of the main factors which have been reshaping China over the last four decades. However, when comparing the size of cities and urban population density, one has to bear in mind that data often refers to the administrative area of cities or urban units, which might be much larger than the contiguous built-up area of that city. The administrative area of Beijing municipality, for example, includes large rural districts, where only around 200 inhabitants are living per square kilometer on average, while roughly 20,000 residents per square kilometer are living in the two central city districts. This is the main reason for the huge difference in population density between the four Chinese municipalities Beijing, Tianjin, Shanghai, and Chongqing shown in many population statistics.

In 2022, the estimated population density of China was around 150.42 people per square kilometer. That year, China's population size declined for the first time in decades. Although China is the most populous country in the world, its overall population density is not much higher than the average population density in Asia. Uneven population distribution China is one of the largest countries in terms of land area, and its population density figures vary dramatically from region to region. Overall, the coastal regions in the East and Southeast have the highest population densities, as they belong to the more economically developed regions of the country. These coastal regions also have a higher urbanization rate. On the contrary, the regions in the West are covered with mountain landscapes which are not suitable for the development of big cities. Populous cities in China Several Chinese cities rank among the most populous cities in the world. According to estimates, Beijing and Shanghai will rank among the top ten megacities in the world by 2030. Both cities are also the largest Chinese cities in terms of land area. The previous colonial regions, Macao and Hong Kong, are two of the most densely populated cities in the world.

Chart and table of population level and growth rate for the Beijing, China metro area from 1950 to 2025. United Nations population projections are also included through the year 2035.

In 2023, around 22.6 percent of the population of Beijing municipality in China were 60 years old or older. The share of people aged 65 or older amounted to 15.9 percent. The share of old people will further grow in the future as the median age of the population is gradually rising.

In 2022, the average resident population density in the Shanghai municipality was 3,905 people per square kilometer. This figure remained largely unchanged in the recent five years.

As of 2023, about 10.1 percent of the population in Beijing was between 30 and 34 years of age, whereas only 1.6 percent were aged 85 and above. Beijing is the capital city of China and after Shanghai, the second largest city in the country. Beijing’s age distribution A broad age distribution of Beijing’s inhabitants reveals that a comparatively large share of the total population is of working age, while few children live in the city. This gap becomes even more obvious when looking at the age distribution by five-year groups: While the age cohorts between 25 and 39 accounts for 28 percent of the population, the age group between 0 and 19 accounts for only 14.6 percent. Two main reasons are responsible for this gap: On the one hand, many young people in their early working years move to the city and search for job opportunities; on the other hand, the motivation for having children in the city is low, mostly due to economic reasons. Many migrant workers from outside the city even leave their children behind when searching for better jobs in the city. Not only is the national average age distribution more balanced in this regard, but also that of many other larger cities. Prospects for the future In recent years, Beijing’s municipal government was determined to limit population inflow into the city. At the same time, former national measures of birth control were gradually relaxed and restrictions for migrants to take their children with them were partially lifted, which already had a positive effect on the number of children in the youngest age cohorts. However, given the very high costs of living in Beijing and its low attractiveness to family-oriented people, it is very likely that the average age of the population will increase quickly, leading to all the challenges and opportunities of a rapidly aging society.

Chart and table of population level and growth rate for the Shanghai, China metro area from 1950 to 2025. United Nations population projections are also included through the year 2035.

In 2023, around 21.86 million permanent residents were living in the administrative area of Beijing municipality. Back in 2017, the Beijing municipal government had announced plans to limit Beijing's population to 23 million by 2020 in order to mitigate the contradiction between rapid population growth and resource and environment restrictions.

According to the age distribution of China's population in 2024, approximately 68.6 percent of the population were in their working age between 15 and 64 years of age. Retirees aged 65 years and above made up about 15.6 percent of the total population. Age distribution in China As can be seen from this statistic, the age pyramid in China has been gradually shifting towards older demographics during the past decade. Mainly due to low birth rates in China, the age group of 0 to 14 year-olds has remained at around 16 to 17 percent since 2010, whereas the age groups 65 years and over have seen growth of nearly seven percentage points. Thus, the median age of the Chinese population has been constantly rising since 1970 and is forecast to reach 52 years by 2050. Accompanied by a slightly growing mortality rate of more than 7 per thousand, China is showing strong signs of an aging population. China's aging society The impact of this severe change in demographics is the subject of an ongoing scientific discussion. Rising standards of living in China contain the demand for better health care and pension insurance for retirees, which will be hard to meet with the social insurance system in China still being in its infancy. Per capita expenditure on medical care and services of urban households has grown more than ninefold since 2000 with a clear and distinctive upward trend for the near future. As for social security spending, public pension expenditure is forecast to take up approximately nine percent of China's GDP by 2050.

In 2024, about 60.9 percent of the Chinese population was between 16 and 59 years old. Apart from the information given on broad age groups in this statistic, some more information is provided by a timeline for the age distribution and a population breakdown by smaller age groups. Demographic development in China China ranked as the second most populous country in the world with a population of nearly 1.41 billion as of mid 2024, surpassed only by India. As the world population reached more than eight billion in mid 2024, China represented almost one fifth of the global population. China's population increased exponentially between the 1950s and the early 1980s due to Mao Zedong's population policy. To tackle the problem of overpopulation, a one-child policy was implemented in 1979. Since then, China's population growth has slowed from more than two percent per annum in the 1970s to around 0.5 percent per annum in the 2000s, and finally turned negative in 2022. China's aging population One outcome of the strict population policy is the acceleration of demographic aging trends. According to the United Nations, China's population median age has more than doubled over the last five decades, from 18 years in 1970 to 37.5 years in 2020. Few countries have aged faster than China. The dramatic aging of the population is matched by slower growth. The total fertility rate, measuring the number of children a woman can expect to have in her life, stood at just around 1.2 children. This incremental decline in labor force could lead to future challenges for the Chinese government, causing instability in current health care and social insurance mechanisms. To learn more about demographic development of the rural and urban population in China, please take a look at our reports on population in China and aging population in China.

Dataset for the textbook Computational Methods and GIS Applications in Social Science (3rd Edition), 2023 Fahui Wang, Lingbo Liu Main Book Citation: Wang, F., & Liu, L. (2023). Computational Methods and GIS Applications in Social Science (3rd ed.). CRC Press. https://doi.org/10.1201/9781003292302 KNIME Lab Manual Citation: Liu, L., & Wang, F. (2023). Computational Methods and GIS Applications in Social Science - Lab Manual. CRC Press. https://doi.org/10.1201/9781003304357 KNIME Hub Dataset and Workflow for Computational Methods and GIS Applications in Social Science-Lab Manual Update Log If Python package not found in Package Management, use ArcGIS Pro's Python Command Prompt to install them, e.g., conda install -c conda-forge python-igraph leidenalg NetworkCommDetPro in CMGIS-V3-Tools was updated on July 10,2024 Add spatial adjacency table into Florida on June 29,2024 The dataset and tool for ABM Crime Simulation were updated on August 3, 2023, The toolkits in CMGIS-V3-Tools was updated on August 3rd,2023. Report Issues on GitHub https://github.com/UrbanGISer/Computational-Methods-and-GIS-Applications-in-Social-Science Following the website of Fahui Wang : http://faculty.lsu.edu/fahui Contents Chapter 1. Getting Started with ArcGIS: Data Management and Basic Spatial Analysis Tools Case Study 1: Mapping and Analyzing Population Density Pattern in Baton Rouge, Louisiana Chapter 2. Measuring Distance and Travel Time and Analyzing Distance Decay Behavior Case Study 2A: Estimating Drive Time and Transit Time in Baton Rouge, Louisiana Case Study 2B: Analyzing Distance Decay Behavior for Hospitalization in Florida Chapter 3. Spatial Smoothing and Spatial Interpolation Case Study 3A: Mapping Place Names in Guangxi, China Case Study 3B: Area-Based Interpolations of Population in Baton Rouge, Louisiana Case Study 3C: Detecting Spatiotemporal Crime Hotspots in Baton Rouge, Louisiana Chapter 4. Delineating Functional Regions and Applications in Health Geography Case Study 4A: Defining Service Areas of Acute Hospitals in Baton Rouge, Louisiana Case Study 4B: Automated Delineation of Hospital Service Areas in Florida Chapter 5. GIS-Based Measures of Spatial Accessibility and Application in Examining Healthcare Disparity Case Study 5: Measuring Accessibility of Primary Care Physicians in Baton Rouge Chapter 6. Function Fittings by Regressions and Application in Analyzing Urban Density Patterns Case Study 6: Analyzing Population Density Patterns in Chicago Urban Area >Chapter 7. Principal Components, Factor and Cluster Analyses and Application in Social Area Analysis Case Study 7: Social Area Analysis in Beijing Chapter 8. Spatial Statistics and Applications in Cultural and Crime Geography Case Study 8A: Spatial Distribution and Clusters of Place Names in Yunnan, China Case Study 8B: Detecting Colocation Between Crime Incidents and Facilities Case Study 8C: Spatial Cluster and Regression Analyses of Homicide Patterns in Chicago Chapter 9. Regionalization Methods and Application in Analysis of Cancer Data Case Study 9: Constructing Geographical Areas for Mapping Cancer Rates in Louisiana Chapter 10. System of Linear Equations and Application of Garin-Lowry in Simulating Urban Population and Employment Patterns Case Study 10: Simulating Population and Service Employment Distributions in a Hypothetical City Chapter 11. Linear and Quadratic Programming and Applications in Examining Wasteful Commuting and Allocating Healthcare Providers Case Study 11A: Measuring Wasteful Commuting in Columbus, Ohio Case Study 11B: Location-Allocation Analysis of Hospitals in Rural China Chapter 12. Monte Carlo Method and Applications in Urban Population and Traffic Simulations Case Study 12A. Examining Zonal Effect on Urban Population Density Functions in Chicago by Monte Carlo Simulation Case Study 12B: Monte Carlo-Based Traffic Simulation in Baton Rouge, Louisiana Chapter 13. Agent-Based Model and Application in Crime Simulation Case Study 13: Agent-Based Crime Simulation in Baton Rouge, Louisiana Chapter 14. Spatiotemporal Big Data Analytics and Application in Urban Studies Case Study 14A: Exploring Taxi Trajectory in ArcGIS Case Study 14B: Identifying High Traffic Corridors and Destinations in Shanghai Dataset File Structure 1 BatonRouge Census.gdb BR.gdb 2A BatonRouge BR_Road.gdb Hosp_Address.csv TransitNetworkTemplate.xml BR_GTFS Google API Pro.tbx 2B Florida FL_HSA.gdb R_ArcGIS_Tools.tbx (RegressionR) 3A China_GX GX.gdb 3B BatonRouge BR.gdb 3C BatonRouge BRcrime R_ArcGIS_Tools.tbx (STKDE) 4A BatonRouge BRRoad.gdb 4B Florida FL_HSA.gdb HSA Delineation Pro.tbx Huff Model Pro.tbx FLplgnAdjAppend.csv 5 BRMSA BRMSA.gdb Accessibility Pro.tbx 6 Chicago ChiUrArea.gdb R_ArcGIS_Tools.tbx (RegressionR) 7 Beijing BJSA.gdb bjattr.csv R_ArcGIS_Tools.tbx (PCAandFA, BasicClustering) 8A Yunnan YN.gdb R_ArcGIS_Tools.tbx (SaTScanR) 8B Jiangsu JS.gdb 8C Chicago ChiCity.gdb cityattr.csv ...

As of 2023, the bulk of the Chinese population was aged between 25 and 59 years, amounting to around half of the population. A breakdown of the population by broad age groups reveals that around 61.3 percent of the total population was in working age between 16 and 59 years in 2023. Age cohorts below 25 years were considerably smaller, although there was a slight growth trend in recent years. Population development in China Population development in China over the past decades has been strongly influenced by political and economic factors. After a time of high fertility rates during the Maoist regime, China introduced birth-control measures in the 1970s, including the so-called one-child policy. The fertility rate dropped accordingly from around six children per woman in the 1960s to below two at the end of the 20th century. At the same time, life expectancy increased consistently. In the face of a rapidly aging society, the government gradually lifted the one-child policy after 2012, finally arriving at a three-child policy in 2021. However, like in most other developed countries nowadays, people in China are reluctant to have more than one or two children due to high costs of living and education, as well as changed social norms and private values. China’s top-heavy age pyramid The above-mentioned developments are clearly reflected in the Chinese age pyramid. The age cohorts between 30 and 39 years are the last two larger age cohorts. The cohorts between 15 and 24, which now enter childbearing age, are decisively smaller, which will have a negative effect on the number of births in the coming decade. When looking at a gender distribution of the population pyramid, a considerable gender gap among the younger age cohorts becomes visible, leaving even less room for growth in birth figures.

Metropolitan area from resources and environment science and social economic data, including data center, the Beijing municipal emergency administration, China's seismic data set download: 2015 beijing-tianjin-hebei, Yangtze river delta urban agglomeration (flow) of the floating population and large bay area characteristic research data sets, the density of population data (2000-2005-2010-2015-2020), human settlements, 1978-2017 (30 m by 30 m), the seventh in 2020 census data with vector (form), GDP raster data (2019), the data of the construction land expansion in 1978, 1985-2017 (30 m by 30 m), the population birth rate (1 km x 1 km) in 2015, the population spatial distribution of the 2000-2005-2010-2015-2020 (100 m by 100 m), and other social and economic data, statistical yearbook, three large scale urban agglomeration districts and counties, villages and towns social economic statistics and metropolis POI data (20 cities).

In 2023, approximately 127.1 million people lived in Guangdong province in China. That same year, only about 3.65 million people lived in the sparsely populated highlands of Tibet. Regional differences in China China is the world’s most populous country, with an exceptional economic growth momentum. The country can be roughly divided into three regions: Western, Eastern, and Central China. Western China covers the most remote regions from the sea. It also has the highest proportion of minority population and the lowest levels of economic output. Eastern China, on the other hand, enjoys a high level of economic development and international corporations. Central China lags behind in comparison to the booming coastal regions. In order to accelerate the economic development of Western and Central Chinese regions, the PRC government has ramped up several incentive plans such as ‘Rise of Central China’ and ‘China Western Development’. Economic power of different provinces When observed individually, some provinces could stand an international comparison. Jiangxi province, for example, a medium-sized Chinese province, had a population size comparable to Argentina or Spain in 2023. That year, the GDP of Zhejiang, an eastern coastal province, even exceeded the economic output of the Netherlands. In terms of per capita annual income, the municipality of Shanghai reached a level close to that of the Czech Republik. Nevertheless, as shown by the Gini Index, China’s economic spur leaves millions of people in dust. Among the various kinds of economic inequality in China, regional or the so-called coast-inland disparity is one of the most significant. Posing as evidence for the rather large income gap in China, the poorest province Heilongjiang had a per capita income similar to that of Sri Lanka that year.

In 2024, about 943.5 million people lived in urban regions in China and 464.8 million in rural. That year, the country had a total population of approximately 1.41 billion people. As of 2024, China was the second most populous country in the world. Urbanization in China Urbanization refers to the process by which people move from rural to urban areas and how a society adapts to the population shift. It is usually seen as a driving force in economic growth, accompanied by industrialization, modernization and the spread of education. Urbanization levels tend to be higher in industrial countries, whereas the degree of urbanization in developing countries remains relatively low. According to World Bank, a mere 19.4 percent of the Chinese population had been living in urban areas in 1980. Since then, China’s urban population has skyrocketed. By 2024, about 67 percent of the Chinese population lived in urban areas. Regional urbanization rates In the last decades, urbanization has progressed greatly in every region of China. Even in most of the more remote Chinese provinces, the urbanization rate surpassed 50 percent in recent years. However, the most urbanized areas are still to be found in the coastal eastern and southern regions of China. The population of Shanghai, the largest city in China and the world’s seventh largest city ranged at around 24 million people in 2023. China’s urban areas are characterized by a developing middle class. Per capita disposable income of Chinese urban households has more than doubled between 2010 and 2020. The emerging middle class is expected to become a significant driver for the continuing growth of the Chinese economy.

This statistic shows the hospital bed density in China from 2013 to 2023. In 2023, China's hospital bed density amounted to 7.23 beds per thousand inhabitants.

As urbanization speeds up, the concept of healthy cities is receiving more focus. This article compares Chongzuo and Nanning in Guangxi with Beijing to assess the development gaps in cities in Guangxi. An indicator system for healthy cities was designed from six dimensions—healthy economy, healthy population, healthy healthcare, healthy environment, healthy facilities, and healthy transportation—and 26 secondary indicators, which were selected from 2005 to 2022, and an improved factor analysis was used to synthesize a healthy city index (HCI). The number of factors was determined by combining characteristic roots and the variance contribution rate, and the HCI was weighted using the entropy-weighted Topsis method. A comprehensive evaluation of the urban health status of these cities was conducted. The results showed that extracting six common factors had the greatest effect, with a cumulative variance contribution rate of 93.83%. Chongzuo city scored higher in the field of healthcare. The healthy environment score of Nanning was relatively high, which may be related to continuous increases in green measures. In terms of the healthy economy dimension, Beijing was far ahead. However, in recent years, the healthy economy level in Chongzuo has increased, and the GDP growth rate has ranked among the highest in Guangxi. In addition, the growth rate of healthy facilities in Nanning was relatively fast and has been greater than that in Chongzuo in recent years, which indicates that the Nanning Municipal Government believes urban construction and municipal supporting facilities are highly important. In terms of healthy transportation, Chongzuo and Nanning scored higher than Beijing. This may be because the transportation in these two cities is convenient and the traffic density is more balanced than that in Beijing, thereby reducing traffic congestion. Chongzuo had the highest score for a healthy population, and a steadily growing population provides the city with stable human resources, which helps promote urban economic and social development. Finally, relevant policy recommendations were put forwards to enhance the health level of the cities.

In 2023, China's highway network density had reached approximately 56.63 kilometers per 100 square kilometers, representing an increase of 0.85 kilometers per 100 square kilometers from the previous year. Road density is the ratio of the length of the country's total road network to the national land area.

As of 2023, about 19.6 percent of the population of Shanghai municipality in China were 65 years and older. This share is expected to grow rapidly in the coming decades. Shanghai is one of the four first tier cities in China, the other three being Beijing, Shenzhen, and Guangzhou.