Density

One of the variables in the 1990 census data as you have it is area, but there are some noteworthy difficulties with using it in its unreconstructed form. If a county is on the seacost and has islands, each of the individual bits of land is a separate row in the .dbf file... but each county has only ONE value for each census variable. So it's necessary to 'clean' the data to make them usable for calculations like persons-per-unit-area. I spent most of an afternoon going through that, using Excel, to produce a .dbf file in /easia/ called areapop3.dbf. It's not without problems, including some missing values (though I may find ways to repair some of them) and an uncertainty about just what the units are (km square? acres? hectares? or some utterly arbitrary value?) that I hope to be able to sort out.

But it's possible to make some interesting maps, even with the limitations: Northeastern China, the Southeast, and the West. Since I'm particularly interested in the southeast coast, here's a view of that. The colors express the variation for all of China, and of course you'll see different things by looking just at a province --by JOINing areapop3.dbf to existing shapefiles, as we've already done in ArcView4. So here's what I get for Guangdong and Guangxi:

Cities stand out quite clearly, since they're densely populated and generally small landscape units. And mountainous areas are, it shouldn't surprise, relatively sparsely populated.

I want you to use the areapop3.dbf data to make density maps of your provinces, and add them to the Province pages as PhotoShop-created .jpgs . That shouldn't take long, and shouldn't require any new skills --so it's a chance to consolidate your skills.