Cartograms showing China's population and wealth distribution

Abstract

Population and wealth distributions are two important indicators of socioeconomic activities in a country. Understanding the spatial nature of population distribution is crucial for effective resource allocation and reasonable economic and social policies, factors that influence every aspect of everyday life. Contemporary China is characterized by very rapid economic development and profound social changes, many of them involving population distribution and migration. Here we use a cartogram to represent population distribution at the province level in 2010. The cartogram effectively demonstrates that population is unevenly distributed across the different parts of China. Provinces in the southeast regions are densely populated, while the northwest is only sparsely inhabited. This pattern has been illustrated by the clear contrast between the size of regions above and below the transformed Aihui-Tengchong line in the cartogram, a line long thought to show the extremely uneven distribution of China's population. Furthermore, this line is not only a division line between densely and sparsely populated areas, but also a line of uneven distribution of wealth in China, as shown in the cartogram of gross domestic product (GDP) in 2010. Finally, the cartogram of population change from 2000 to 2010 demonstrates that population growth mostly occurs to the east of the line, with a few exceptions.