1982 Chinese census
1982 Chinese census
The 1982 Chinese census, officially the Third National Population Census of the People's Republic of China, was conducted by the People's Republic of China with a zero hour of 1 July 1982. A summary of the results were issued by the State Security Bureau and reported in the People's Daily on October 27, 1982.
Preparations for the census were begun in 1976, with fact-finding missions sent to the United States and Japan to review their methods. Computers were installed in every provincial capital except Tibet; these were linked to a central processing unit at the Beijing office of the State Statistical Bureau. Pretests and trial runs occurred in 1980 and 1981. It was not until after this census had begun that the second census of 1964 was officially acknowledged to have occurred at all. It had been an eighteen-year hiatus, and it wouldn't be until 1987 that China adopted a decennial plan, beginning with the 1990 census.
Approximately five million census takers interviewed a representative of each household in China over the month beginning 1 July 1982. In rural areas, census stations were located at production brigades.
The 1982 census removed the previous census's question about class status, but expanded other areas of inquiry.
“1982 Chinese census” enters the record as 1982 Chinese census. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Chinese and census can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 17, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q7784904. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1982, 1976, 1980 and 1981.
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This entry incorporates text from “1982 Chinese census” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.