China's official People's Daily has an article on China's attempts to reach zero population growth. It has some interesting but also some disturbing elements, breaking the problems down into five key issues:

• The country will take 30 years to reach the zero population growth level, taking the total population up to the 1.5 billion "security" line.

• "The population quality needs to be raised" - we'll be coming back to this one.

• The imblanace of the gender ratio, now at 117 boys to 100 girls, well above the normal range of 103 to 107 boys to girls. I've talked about this recently.

• Urbanisation: 40.5% of China's population live in cities and this is estimated to rise to 65% by 2020. In numbers that's 360 million extra people living in cities, making a total of 900 million city dwellers. This pressures land and water resources.

• Impact on the "traditional system" and changed allocation of labour resources. In other words, the economic gap between rich cities and poor rural areas will get worse. In the priceless words of the article: Besides, the pattern in which rural dwellers move to cities and developed regions has widened urban-rural gap, forcing the state to put more funds and material resources into poor and backward areas where young and middle-aged labors ran off. You bad people for following the economic incentives presented to you.

Let's return to that second point. From the article:

the population quality needs to be raised. China now has some 60 million disabled persons, nearly 20 percent of them are born with disability. The occurrence rate of born defects stays high. On the other hand, common people are facing challenges of both infectious diseases and chronic, non-infectious diseases. Besides, the cultural standard of the population is rather low and the overall schooling lags far behind developed countries

NOTE: If you've arrived here via a search engine looking for China's population, it hit 1.3 billion people in early 2005.