Most people live in or near India and China

These maps illustrate an important fact that I find hard to get my mind around – the immensity of the populations of China and India.   They aren’t just individual countries in the way the USA, the UK and Russia are countries.    They equal or exceed the populations of individual non-Asian countries.   There are provinces of China and India that are more populous than important European countries

Double click to enlarge.

The top map shows that the combined populations of China, India, Japan and a couple of neighboring countries exceed the populations of the whole rest of the world.

The bottom map shows the world divided into equal segments of 1 billion persons each.  They show that the populations of (1) part of China plus Japan and Korea and (2) part of India plus Bangladesh and Burma are equal to the populations of  (3) all of North and South America plus Australia and New Zealand, (4) all of Europe plus western Asia, (5) all of Africa, (6) Southeast Asia including south China and (7) the rest of Asia including western China and northern India.

Double click to enlarge.

Here are links to the sources of the maps.

http://waitbutwhy.com/2013/08/what-if-all-71-billion-people-moved-to.html

http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2012/10/because-its-friday-7-billion-person-continents.html

Here’s some background on world population.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/human-population-reaches-seven-billion/

Correction 9/19/2018.  I misread the map when I made the original post.  I thought the world’s population consisted of six segments of 1.2 billion each, conflating Southeast Asia and the rest of Asia.

Tags: China, Geography, India, Population Geography, World population, World Population Maps