The growth of China's population and die veracity of the figures that purport to measure it are both puzzles. Critical in die solutions to both puzzles are die records of an alien dynasty that ruled China from 1644 to 1911. All reconstructions of the growth of the population in recent centuries trace to one or the other of die two Ch'ing series—die local reports ordered by the emperor Ch'ien-lung in 1741, or the survey that began in 1909 and ended with the revolution in 1911. The results of the registration of 1953–1954 are consistent with the first Ch'ing activity. The statistics of the Republic of China had lineal descent from both series, but at a level of total population consistent with the limited results of the 1909–1911 survey.

Today there is a plethora of pessimistic literature on the population problems of densely settled agricultural areas. It is matched, if not exceeded, in quantity by the optimistic writings of those who see economic development as a panacea for demographic ills. There is research, too, but the definitions of problems, the analytical approaches, and the conclusions reflect the cleavages of academic specializations. Demographers deprecate the realistic possibilities for economic development and so project present populations into future situations that must be catastrophic if the cynicism concerning economic expansion is justified. Economists analyze the potentialities for development and assume some mystical force in human reactions that automatically reduces rates of population increase as the material basis of living becomes more abundant. Analysis of the relations between population increase and economic development is notably deficient. The difficulty lies deeper than the naïveté of social scientists. That quantitative research for which they are prepared requires statistical materials, but those materials exist primarily for the advanced industrializing economies of Western origin. These are precisely the economies in which the relations between people and economy have been or are in process of being rationalized through controlled human reproduction. The techniques of the historian and the anthropologist must be combined with those of the economist and the demographer for the analysis of social, demographic, and economic relations within prestatistical cultures.

Decades of propaganda have made students in the Western world so familiar with the Japanese interpretation of the population problem of Japan that even international commissions considered population pressure as an extenuating factor in the successive acts of military aggression by which Japan acquired hegemony over Formosa, Korea, and Manchuria. Few realized that the population pressure within Japan was minimal in comparison with that which already existed in the conquered areas; that, furthermore, Japanese imperial policy tended toward an increasing imbalance between population increase and employment opportunities. The deepening poverty of the Korean masses was often reported, only to be challenged by the citation of production statistics, but the provincialism of the West was such that discussion remained in the realm of charge and countercharge. Few students dared the linguistic hurdles barring factual analysis of the impact of Japanese political, economic, and educational domination on the traditional Korean patterns of fertility, mortality and migration. Whatever the explanation for this myopia of the social scientists of the interwar decades, its conquences were serious. No backlog of technically competent and conceptually mature research on the demography of Korea exists to guide either the analysis of the present or the assessment of the future.