The State Family Planning and Population Commission has reportedly decided to focus its research programmes on seven fields: quantitative trends in the national populace, population quality, aging, gender ratio, mobility and employment, population and environmental sustainability, and population safety and health.

A lengthy list, indeed. Long enough to cover almost all key concerns in contemporary population studies.

But it leaves the impression the commission has come to terms with the real complexities of the population problems this country faces.

In our country of 1.3 billion people, quantity understandably assumes primary consideration in our endeavours to regulate population growth.

The proud portrait of our motherland as a country vast in size and rich in resources is still valid, but many of our quantitative advantages diminish in a per capita perspective.

China feeds 22 per cent of the world's population with 7 per cent of the planet's arable land. Considering the cultivated plots returned to afforestation for ecological considerations in recent years and those scheduled to be returned, as well as farm land increasingly nibbled by urban expansion, the discrepancy only becomes wider.

Such an equation might be too abstract to be appreciated by the average citizen in daily life. But louder voices for either quotas or higher prices for water use, for example, may help us understand the acute water resource problem we will inevitably encounter.

Experts agree that resources available on Chinese territory can support a maximum of 1.6 billion people. We are rapidly closing in on that figure.

That explains why family planning has been one of the few major policies to survive as a national strategy in the wake of significant economic and political changes over the recent decades.

Thanks to the tight reins on population growth over more than three decades, China has become one of the world's low birth-rate nations.

But one of the side-effects of that low birth rate - an aging population - looms large on the Chinese horizon.

While making sure its population grows at the right pace and pattern, the country must ready itself for a rapid aging process.

In a certain sense, population aging does not seem as serious in China as it is in advanced economies. But the aging of the Chinese population is expected to be much faster than in any other countries.

More important, the aging process is outpacing the country's social and economic preparedness.

Our problems are not limited to a low income only.

According to the fifth national census, conducted in 2000, 6.7 per cent of Chinese citizens were illiterate. That translates to 85 million people. By that time, 850 million citizens, or 67 per cent of our population, had only received primary or secondary school education.

While job creation remains one of the most challenging undertakings for any government, an even more daunting task is to guarantee everyone born here the training necessary for both their personal well-being and that of society.

For this reason, we cannot afford to overlook any of the fields the commission has targeted.