The Tibet Autonomous Region covers a land area of 1.2 million square kilometres. In 1953, when the People's Republic of China conducted its first national census, the region registered a population of 1 million.

Today, after the passage of several decades, there are over 2.61 million people in the region. They include roughly 2.41 million of the Tibetan ethnic group (92.2 per cent of the total), 154,360 who are Han (5.9 per cent), and 49,710 of other ethnic groups (1.9 per cent).

According to Baisang Wangdui, director of the Tibet Academy of Social Sciences, Tibetan population growth stood still and even declined before 1959, when Tibetans still lived in many cases as serfs.

"Large numbers of young people gathered in monasteries as monks," he said.

"In the 200 years from the early days of the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911) to the peaceful liberation of Tibet in 1951, the Tibetan population declined."

A. Tom Grunfeld, a Canadian researcher wrote in his book "The Making of Modern Tibet" that the Tibetan population recorded negative growth for hundreds of years, and that this trend continued until the Democratic Reform in 1959.

From 1990 to 2000, the Tibetan population increased by 314,400, a figure that dwarfed the national average growth.

"Since the 1960s, the birth rate of the Tibetan population and the natural growth rate of 14 per one thousand inhabitants has remained higher than the national average of 9.7 per thousand," said Purbo Zholma, director of the Family Planning Committee of the Tibetan Autonomous Region.

(China Daily July 8, 2003)