Population
The 2009 National Sample Survey on Population Change adopted a stratified multi-stage systematic PPS cluster sampling scheme, taking the whole nation as the population and each province, autonomous region or municipality as sub-populations. A total of 1.16 million people were selected from 11,748 survey districts in 5872 neighborhoods in 3,460 townships (towns and street committees) in 1,882 counties (cities and districts) of the 31 provinces, autonomous regions and municipalities. The size of the sample was thus 0.873 per thousand of the national population. The weighted estimation procedure suggested that the birth rate was 12.13 per thousand, the death rate was 7.08 per thousand and the natural growth rate was 5.05 per thousand for China in 2009. Based on these rates, it was further estimated that China had a total population of 1,334.74 million at the end of 2009, with 16.15 million births, 9.43 million deaths and a net increase of 6.72 million people during the year.