I’ve never been in a city where estimates of population vary so wildly from person to person. Depending on whom I ask, there are anywhere between 10 and 30 million Beijing residents. And then there is the question of whether any official number takes into account the millions of migrant workers toiling day and night on construction sites around the city (probably not).

A China Daily story dated 7 January 2005 has the Beijing Municipal Public Security Bureau putting the city’s population at “15.244 million”. I must say that, with the PSB involved, I find that sort of precision a bit disturbing. Unless I’m entirely mistaken, that number would be written in Chinese as 1524.4万 (wàn, meaning 10,000) which makes the extra 4 look only slightly less unnecessary.

In any case, making the rather large assumption that numbers from different Chinese government sources are at least somewhat consistent, I’ve also found that the population estimate as of an April 2001 Xinhua report was 13.82 million. That’s 1.42(4) million people in four years, or roughly two-and-a-half Cities of Vancouver. And here I was, all along thinking the City of Vancouver had more than a million people*.

My disjointed rambling about population is centred on this tangentially related tidbit: while doing research to fix the largely useless page on Beijing air pollution I made a while back, I discovered that Beijing’s air pollution has not become appreciably worse since records started being kept (publicly) a little over two years ago. My point, then, is that despite my frequent complaints about Beijing’s air pollution, it actually might be getting better when measured against overall population. There may yet be hope for a green Olympics come 2008.

As for the useless air pollution page, I have a lot of data, but have not quite got around to doing anything with it. On the off-off-off chance that someone would like to look through and analyse three years of air pollution data for me, please let me know. Otherwise, Lord willing and the creek don’t rise, I will probably get to it some time in the next few years.

* To be fair to Vancouver, the population of the entire metropolitan area is in fact just over 2 million; the City has only 560,000.

My teacher dismissed us from class today with a warning to avoid getting sick, and a suggestion to stay away from chicken and duck meat. As he said this, I realised that my crazy neighbour’s traditional morning yell wasn’t accompanied by the neighbourhood roosters today. In other news, I seem to have developed a slight cough.