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China to Use New Input System for Fifth Census
China will use the high-speed Optical Character Recognition (OCR) system to conduct its fifth census which will begin on November 1.
The new system, provided by the Ziguang Group affiliated with Qinghua University, consists of 421 scanners and software. It will take the system about six months to complete the entire country's 410 million survey forms with an margin error below 0. 056 percent.
Speaking at an agreement-signing ceremony on using the new system, Lu Chunheng, deputy director of the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), said the OCR system will greatly reduce the workload, increase efficiency, minimize the margin of error, and ensure accuracy in conducting the census.
"This will be the first time China has used its own world-class technology to conduct the largest census in the world," Lu said. According to Lu, China's previous four population censuses mainly used a manual input system which was time-consuming and had a wider margin of error.
For instance, the fourth census conducted in 1990 took 10 months during which over 9,000 workers had to type figures into computers.
The fifth national census this November is expected to record changes that have taken place in China's population size, structure, distribution, quality, environment, and other demographic information about the past ten years. China has conducted national censuses in 1953, 1964, 1982 and 1990 since the founding of the People's Republic in 1949. China had a population of 1.236 billion at the end of 1997, according to the NBS, and its population is growing by 13 to 15 million a year. The country aims to maintain its population below 1.3 billion.
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