Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
. 2022 Mar 7;12(1):3644.
doi: 10.1038/s41598-022-07646-x.

Evaluation and analysis of the projected population of China

Kaixuan Dai  1   2   3 , Shi Shen  4   5   6 , Changxiu Cheng  7   8   9   10
Affiliations

Evaluation and analysis of the projected population of China

Kaixuan Dai et al. Sci Rep. .

Abstract

The population has a significant influence on economic growth, energy consumption, and climate change. Many scholars and organizations have published projections for China's future population due to its substantial population amounts. However, these projections have not been evaluated or analyzed, which may lead confusion to extensional studies based on these datasets. This manuscript compares several China's projection datasets at multiscale and analyzes the impacting factors affecting projection accuracy. The results indicate that the slow of actual population growth rates from 2017 is earlier than most datasets projected. Therefore, the turning point of population decline probably comes rapidly before these datasets expected during 2024 and 2034. Furthermore, the projections do not reveal the population decline from 2010 in the Northeast provinces such as Jilin and Heilongjiang, and underrate the population increase in the southern provinces such as Guangdong and Chongqing. According to the results of regression models, the rate of population changes and the number of migrations people play a significant role in projection accuracy. These findings provide meaningful guidance for scholars to understand the uncertainty of those projection datasets. Moreover, for researchers performing population projections, our discoveries provide insights to increase the projection accuracy.

PubMed Disclaimer

Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare no competing interests.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Workflow of the research.
Figure 2
Figure 2
Comparison between the actual and projection population at the country scale. The vertical axis is the population number (unit: billion), and the horizontal axis represents the years.
Figure 3
Figure 3
Comparison between actual and projection population at the province scale. The subfigures from (1) to (31) represent different provinces. The vertical axis is the population number (unit: million), and the horizontal axis represents the validation years from 2010 to 2020. The red star indicates the actual provincial population, the blue circle represents the NUIST, and the purple circle denotes the THU.
Figure 4
Figure 4
Distribution of the provincial MAPE and MALPE of NUIST and THU. The left panel (a, c) shows the THU results, and the right panel (b, d) shows the NUIST results.
Figure 5
Figure 5
Projection accuracy comparison of THU and NUIST. The purple color indicates that THU has a lower MAPE than NUIST, and the blue color indicates that NUIST has a lower MAPE than THU in a particular province.
Figure 6
Figure 6
Regression coefficients of the SEM for the MAPE and MALPE of NUIST and THU.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

References

    1. Lewis SL, Maslin MA. Defining the anthropocene. Nature. 2015;519:171–180. - PubMed
    1. Steffen W, et al. Trajectories of the earth system in the anthropocene. Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 2018;115:8252–8259. - PMC - PubMed
    1. IPCC. Headline Statements from the Summary for Policymakers. Global Warming of 1.5°C. An IPCC Special Report on the impacts of global warming of 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels and related global greenhouse gas emission pathways, in the context of strengthening the global response to the threat of climate change, 1–2 (2018).
    1. Main Data of the Seventh National Population Census. http://www.stats.gov.cn/english/PressRelease/202105/t20210510_1817185.html.
    1. Liu J, Diamond J. China's environment in a globalizing world. Nature. 2005;435:1179–1186. - PubMed

Publication types