Population Distribution and Urban Growth in East Asia

China's population is famously uneven in its distribution, a pattern captured by the geographer Hu Huanyong in 1935 with what is now called the Hu Line, or Heihe-Tengchong Line, running diagonally from Heihe in the northeast to Tengchong in the southwest. Hu observed that roughly 96 percent of China's population lived in the southeastern portion of this line, covering only about 43 percent of the country's land area, while the sparsely populated northwestern portion, including Tibet, Xinjiang, and Inner Mongolia, contained the remaining land but a small fraction of the population — a division that, despite nearly a century of internal migration and development policy, remains strikingly close to accurate today. China's National Bureau of Statistics reported that the country's total population began to decline in 2022, its first sustained fall since the famine years around 1960, reaching roughly 1.409 billion by the end of 2023.