Subtract a billion................

There are a lot of people in China.  This fact can seem like a bit of local color, a background association like France and cheese or Thailand and beaches.  For people who live there, though, and especially for people who work here, population is a force like gravity, affecting almost everything else....The idea of a billion and a third citizens of any one place is such an abstract number it's hard to grasp - to get to the population of the U. S., take China's and subtract a billion.

-Clay Shirky,  Little Rice:  Smartphones, Xiaomi, and the Chinese Dream