The new municipality was created for several reasons. Sichuan province was one of the largest provinces in China in terms of area, and the largest in terms of population, with 120 million residents. Most of the huge reservoir that will be created by the Three Gorges Dam will be within the new municipality of Chongqing.

Chongqing City served as the capital of the Republic of China during World War II. This was before the Pinyin romanization was created, so the city name was spelled "Chungking".

The 1990 PRC Census Reports divide households into those containing only Han (the dominant ethnic group in China), those containing only minority individuals, and those containing both Han and minority individuals.

This map is an important part of my thesis, which explores how individuals with both Han and minority ancestry can change their ethnic identification and distort ethnic data.

The official ethnic minorities numbering more than one million are also shown. The provinces containing more than 10% of each of these minorities are marked. Capital letters indicate a province where the highest percentage, though not necessarily the majority, of that minority are located.

For many years, the government of Taiwan (which is still called the Republic of China) was run by nationalists that had escaped from Mainland China at the end of the civil war in which the Chinese Communist Party came to power. Those nationalists, the Kuomintang (KMT), are still in control of the government, but now they are one party among several that must compete in democratic elections.

The main opposition party, the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), advocates the declaration of Taiwan's independence as a separate country from China. While there are many reasons independence is attractive to Taiwanese, the threats coming from the PRC whenever Taiwan has elections make voters think again. In 1995, democratic presidential elections were held for the first time in Taiwan. The PRC conducted military tests, sending unarmed missiles flying through Taiwan's airspace. The DPP candidate for president was soundly defeated. Who knows how the election would have turned out without interference from the PRC?

In the 2000 election, DPP candidate Chen Shui-bien did win the presidency of Taiwan, in spite of saber-rattling in Mainland China. Many factors contributed to the DPP win, including a split in the KMT vote between the unpopular but party-endorsed Vice-President Lien Chang and the popular independent candidate and former Taiwan Provincial Governor James Soong. So far, Beijing's reaction has been all talk.

TFR is a mathematical approximation of the number of children the typical woman in a population will have in her lifetime, so the number gives you an idea of the average number of children in a family.

In terms of TFR, replacement level is somewhere between 2 and 3. Few countries manage to stay in this range. Most have higher fertility, and a growing number of countries fall below replacement level.

The data for this map come from the 1998 Population Data Sheet, published by the Population Reference Bureau.