On 28 April 2011, China's state statistics bureau released its first report on the country's 2010 population census. The report states that the total population of mainland China reached 1.3397 billion in 2010, with an annual average population growth rate of 0.57% during the previous 10 years. The share of the total population aged 0 to 14 declined from 22.9% in 2000 to 16.6% in 2010, whereas the proportion aged 65 and above grew from 7.0% to 8.9% during the same period. This indicates that China's population is aging rapidly. The report also shows that China is urbanizing, with nearly half of the population--665.57 million people, or 49.7%--living in urban areas, an increase of 13 percentage points over the 2000 figure. Moreover, about 260 million Chinese people are living away from where they are formally registered, and the overwhelming majority of them (about 220 million) are rural migrants living and working in urban areas but without formal urban household registration status. China is at a demographic turning point: It is changing from an agricultural society into an urban one, from a young society to an old one, and from a society attached to the land to one that is very much on the move.

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JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.Population Council is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Population and Development Review. In November 1957, at a meeting of representatives of Communist and Workers' Parties in Moscow, the late Chairman Mao Zedong proposed the goal for China of overtaking Great Britain in industrial production within 15 years. The Chinese Communist Party convened several important conferences in the early months of 1958.' A transformation of society was projected in which the masses were to be the driving force. The general line of the Party that guided the Great Leap Forward was "Going all out, aiming high and achieving greater, faster, better, and more economical results in building socialism. "2 Labor-intensive development was viewed as a solution to the problem of capital shortage; partial imbalances were to be taken in stride. Development processes were explained in political terms, and the impact of ideology on economic development was emphasized.Launched in the spring of 1958, the Great Leap Forward was China's alternative to Soviet-style development, an attempt to leap ahead in production by reorganizing the peasantry into large-scale communes and mobilizing society to bring about technological revolution in agriculture.As the Great Leap progressed, production targets were revised upward several times, reaching unrealistic levels. Heavy industry, especially steel production, was accorded high priority at the expense of agriculture and light industry. Residents in both urban and rural areas, young and old, were mobilized to increase iron and steel production. Millions of peasant laborers moved into cities to work in factories. In the countryside the formation of people's communes was praised as a "golden bridge" toward communist society.Unfortunately, nothing worked as expected. The practice of claiming nonexistent achievements became a "wind of exaggeration" that blew through the country. The "communist wind," which referred to impracticable attempts to establish a "communist society" by means of equal distribution, emerged POPULATION AND DEVELOPMENT REVIEW 13, NO. 4 (DECEMBER 1987) 639 640 Consequences of the Great Leap as a striking feature of the Leap.3 Much of the iron and steel that was made by backyard blast furnaces was useless. Foodgrain production declined considerably in three successive years, 1959-61, and industrial output fell subsequently. The standard of living also deteriorated sharply. The years 1959-61 are remembered as three bitter years in modern Chinese history. Faced with the collapse of the commune system, the leaders made extensive organizational changes, and in 1962 they decentralized the unit of labor management and income sh...

The hepatitis B virus (HBV) is a DNA virus that can cause chronic hepatitis B (CHB) in humans. Current therapies for CHB infection are limited in efficacy and do not target the pre-existing viral genomic DNA, which are present in the nucleus as a covalently closed circular DNA (cccDNA) form. The transcription activator-like (TAL) effector nucleases (TALENs) are newly developed enzymes that can cleave sequence-specific DNA targets. Here, TALENs targeting the conserved regions of the viral genomic DNA among different HBV genotypes were constructed. The expression of TALENs in Huh7 cells transfected with monomeric linear full-length HBV DNA significantly reduced the viral production of HBeAg, HBsAg, HBcAg, and pgRNA, resulted in a decreased cccDNA level and misrepaired cccDNAs without apparent cytotoxic effects. The anti-HBV effect of TALENs was further demonstrated in a hydrodynamic injection-based mouse model. In addition, an enhanced antiviral effect with combinations of TALENs and interferon-α (IFN-α) treatment was observed and expression of TALENs restored HBV suppressed IFN-stimulated response element-directed transcription. Taken together, these data indicate that TALENs can specifically target and successfully inactivate the HBV genome and are potently synergistic with IFN-α, thus providing a potential therapeutic strategy for treating CHB infection.