Of all the statistics we read about China, most of them fall in to one of two groups: statistics about how big China is, and statistics about how fast China is developing. Many of the most impressive statistics cover both of these, for example; between 1981 and 2004 an estimated 500 million Chinese citizens climbed out of poverty. That’s more than the population of Brazil and Indonesia, the world’s fourth and fifth most populous countries, combined.

Officially, China’s population is split between 31 regions, from the dense urban areas around Shanghai, Beijing and Tianjin, to the vast plains of Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia . The largest of these in terms of population is the southern region of Guangdong, home to almost 110 million people. If Guangdong were a country in its own right, it would be the world’s 14th most populous, between Mexico and The Philippines. In fact, all but three of China’s 31 regions have over 10 million people, placing each of them in the 100 most populated countries. 20 of them would be in the world’s top 50 and 13 are larger than the largest US state, California. Figure 1 compares each region of China to a country with a similar population.