Poor and populous Henan will become China’s first province with more than 100 million people later this month, state media said yesterday, giving it a population size similar to the Philippines.
Largely rural Henan, in central China, is the source of many of the migrant workers who have helped transform the nation into the world’s third-largest economy.
Henan’s population jumped from 40 million in the 1950s to about 90 million in the 1990s, and while it would soon hit 100 million, the rise had slowed notably over the past two decades, the China News Service said.
Henan could have been even more crowded without the central government’s one-child policy, introduced three decades ago to curb population growth, the report said. Without the policy, Henan’s population would have an estimated additional 33 million people, it said.
China’s urban population will overtake its rural population for the first time by 2015, with the number of people living in towns and cities set to top 700 million, state media said earlier this month. The country is projected to have 1.39 billion citizens by 2015, up from 1.32 billion at the end of 2008.
The world’s most populous sub-national entity is India’s Uttar Pradesh state, with 166 million people.
Packed crowds in India celebrating their cricket team’s victory ended in a deadly stampede on Wednesday, with 11 mainly young fans crushed to death, the local state’s chief minister said. Joyous cricket fans had come out to celebrate and welcome home their heroes, Royal Challengers Bengaluru, after they beat Punjab Kings in a roller-coaster Indian Premier League (IPL) cricket final on Tuesday night. However, the euphoria of the vast crowds in the southern tech city of Bengaluru ended in disaster, with Indian Prime Minister Narendra calling it “absolutely heartrending.” Karnataka Chief Minister Siddaramaiah said most of the deceased are young, with 11 dead
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LOST CONTACT: The mission carried payloads from Japan, the US and Taiwan’s National Central University, including a deep space radiation probe, ispace said Japanese company ispace said its uncrewed moon lander likely crashed onto the moon’s surface during its lunar touchdown attempt yesterday, marking another failure two years after its unsuccessful inaugural mission. Tokyo-based ispace had hoped to join US firms Intuitive Machines and Firefly Aerospace as companies that have accomplished commercial landings amid a global race for the moon, which includes state-run missions from China and India. A successful mission would have made ispace the first company outside the US to achieve a moon landing. Resilience, ispace’s second lunar lander, could not decelerate fast enough as it approached the moon, and the company has
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