Why Are China And India So Populated

This area contains 36% of the world's population, a total of 2.6 billion people, but these are only two countries and only make up 8.2% of the land on earth. Two out of every five people alive today are living in one of these countries. How did China and India end up with so many people? First we'll take a look at their geographic location. For a society to maintain large populations they need access to water, good soil, and comfortable climate. If you take a look at the world's major rivers you can see that 10 are in a freezing environment, 5 are in a rainforest environment which is not great for agriculture, and 4 are isolated from humanity, leaving 7 rivers that would allow for major civilizations to develop. 4 of these are in India and China. It is around these 7 rivers that the first civilizations start to spring up. India has the Gangetic Plain, a 255 million hectare area that is one of the most fertile places on earth. The Indus Valley is also an excellent agricultural zone that acted as a cradle for one of the world's first major civilizations. China has the Sichuan Basin, fed by the Yangtze River, the third largest on earth, and the North China Plains, fed by the Yellow River, the sixth largest on earth. Both of these areas were able to produce abundant amounts of food for the Chinese. Today they have some of the world's highest population density. These plains provided both civilizations water and silt for agriculture, as well as rivers and trade for commerce. China alone has 50,000 rivers that are usable for agriculture. Compared to other early civilizations, China and India have a massive advantage. Egypt, outside of the Nile, was too dry and hot. The civilizations in Iraq suffered the same. Iran, being another ancient state, did not have access to a major river and so couldn't grow at the same rate. And unlike Egypt, China and India can rely on more than one river. The Mississippi River civilization was unfortunately isolated from most of humanity and arrived at a much later date than both the Chinese and the Indians. The whole genocide thing didn't help the Native American numbers either. Most of the world is not suited for dense settlement. Africa, Arabia, the Amazons, Mosaicanda, Alaska, Central Africa, Siberia, and the Sahara Desert are all harsh to human life. While Mexico, Central Asia, and Australia do not have enough inland water to support large-scale agriculture. China and India are also located between the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn which when you look at a map seems to be the best area for human settlement. 20% of the world's arable land is within the borders of China and India. They are in the top 4 countries with arable land available. The US has a huge amount of land but unfortunately disease and conquest destroyed its native population. It is still the 3rd most populous nation in spite of that. And most of Russia's land is too cold to support agriculture, leaving China and India as the countries with the best agricultural lands. India is 50% arable land compared to countries like Australia, Brazil, and Russia which are all below 10%. Because of this India and China produce 50% of the world's rice and 30% of the world's wheat. Both of these regions were gifted with rice as a staple crop. If you want to sustain massive population growth, rice is the crop you would choose to do it. It provides more calories than any other crop field of the same size. Even today it accounts for 1 fifth of the world's calories. Rice is also labour intensive and requires large families to harvest which encourages people to have more and more children. Areas of the world that produce rice have some of the highest population density. Europe by contrast did not have a staple crop as good as rice until the potato arrived from the Americas in the 1500s. China and India also have excellent natural defences that help them defend from outside invasions and reduced warfare in the region. The Himalayas protect India from the North, the Tar Desert, the Indus River in the West, and the jungles to the East. Any enemy coming in from the South would have to do so by ship. China has Siberia to the North, the Gobi Desert to the West, the Tibetan Plateau to the South, and the Pacific Garden to the East. These natural borders may not have stopped all invasions from outsiders but they did make it difficult. Finally, they have access to the Middle East and Europe. This has led for trade like the Silk Road to bring in wealth and the exchange of ideas that civilisations in Oceania, Americas, and Sub-Saharan Africa would have missed out on. China and India were both some of the first agricultural societies, they had a massive head start. They began to farm around 8-9000 BC and populations grew fast due to favourable conditions. The Indus Valley civilisation in India grew rich off trade with Mesopotamia and the population boomed due to abundant resources. China was constructing massive irrigation projects and canals to increase crop yields while most of the world still relied on rainwater to hydrate their crops. Both China and India are prone to flooding and to combat this large scale hydraulic projects were necessary. The organisation needed to pull off these massive projects to strengthen the cultural ties within the countries. Both of these nations united under a single ruler early on, India by Ashoka in 250 BC and China later on in 200 BC by the Qin Dynasty. This unity helped form the massive countries they are today rather than the many smaller states that we would see in Europe. Populations of India and China continued to grow while Europe was set back by plagues. The plague of Justinian killed 50% of the population in the 6th century AD and again in the 14th century the Black Death killed up to 50 million of Europe's suspected 80 million population. The Mongols as well wiped out 90% of the Iranian population and ravaged the rest of the Middle East and Asia. Both affected China but it managed to recover faster while India escaped the wrath of the Khans. Unfortunately for the Native Americans, European conquest and disease would wipe out 90% of them. By the 17th century the population of China was 150 million and India 100 million. For most of history both of these nations have made up 60% of the world's population. India was the largest economy in the world in the ancient and medieval periods containing up to a third of the world's wealth. The industrial revolution took hold in Europe first and their population soared. Between 1700 and 1900 Europe's population grew from 100 million to 400 million. Medicine increased life span and decreased child deaths. The population of Britain increased from 10 million to 40 million in the 19th century. The United States saw its population grow from around 5.3 million in 1800 to 106 million in 1920. After modernisation birth rates fell and their population stabilised. The populations in Asia continued to grow as they industrialised later. When they finally did begin to industrialise the populations in the already fertile regions began to skyrocket. China's population rose from approximately 430 million in 1850 to 580 million in 1953 and now stands at over 1.3 billion. The population of the Indian subcontinent which was around 125 million in 1750 increased to 389 million in 1941. Today India, Pakistan and Bangladesh are home to 1.6 billion people. During the 20th century the Chinese leader Mao encouraged his people to have as many children as possible. This led to massive population growth up until 1978 when after Mao had died the Chinese implemented the one child policy. Indian culture has always included large families and this tradition continued into the modern day. After a forced sterilisation campaign in the 1970s some Indians are suspicious of family planning incentives. Some parts of the nation do have birth rates on par with European nations now. Today both China and India have populations higher than every other continent bar the one they are in. So that's it, the strategic locations of China and India as well as their unique historical situations set them up to be the most populated nations on earth. I hope you enjoyed the video.