There are 1,198,500,000 people alive now in China.
To get a feel for what that means, simply take yourself - in all your singularity, importance, complexity, and love - and multiply by 1,198,500,000.
See? Nothing to it.

I think the Chinese are a people of survival. We are all wonderful survivors. We have risen in population during the last century, a century in which wars and famines have happened all the time. We have survived natural and political disasters almost every other year during the last sixty years. Without optimism I don’t think my people could live until today. I have gone to poor rural areas in China and seen destitute people joke and jest and laugh. I can imagine Chinese at the bottom of society, surviving like them over thousands of years. They must have a good sense of humor to go through hardship, and they must have learned how to steal whatever small pleasure they can to hold on to their dear life. I can’t imagine that any people could survive so many centuries of sorrow if to live only means to suffer. They have learned to steal joy, however little, out of the overall suffering.

Only desperation can account for what the Chinese do in the name of 'medicine.' That's something you might remind your New Age friends who've gone gaga over 'holistic medicine' and 'alternative Chinese cures.

Today the average life expectancy for a male is 79, while the average female will live to 81. For a married couple, at least one spouse has a 25% chance of reaching age 97.

The Chinese dream for me is still about getting the 600 million people who have not reached middle income by international standards... (a monthly income of... $300)... to become middle income, and getting China's average $10,000 GDP per capita to $30,000 or $50,000... That's first and foremost a priority for everyone. We still have a huge swath of the population that can't meet the needs of... dignified life and... secure a good future for their children. ...[T]he China dream ...is that you ...can be in a country with economic opportunities. When you educate, you have better opportunities, when you invest you have a good return, and people live happy and secure lives in a relatively healthy and safe environment. ...China also evolves along with its economy.

In China, women who are single past the age of twenty-seven are stigmatized as sheng nu, or “leftover women.” They face severe pressure from their families to marry, stemming from the widespread belief that regardless of education and professional achievement, a woman is “absolutely nothing until she is married.” One thirty-six-year-old economics professor was rejected by fifteen men because she had an advanced degree; her father then forbade her younger sister from going to graduate school.

Nothing and no one can destroy the Chinese people. They are relentless survivors. They are the oldest civilized people on earth. Their civilization passes through phases but its basic characteristics remain the same. They yield, they bend to the wind, but they never break.

China has an uninterrupted civilization of more than 5,000 years, and the Chinese nation has both gone through sufferings and made splendid achievements. When the West embarked upon industrialization and embraced the oceans, China fell behind because its emperors chose to shut China's door to the world, and this made China a victim of foreign aggression. Since modern times began, China was beset by crises at home and abroad, and ravaged by wars and chaos, which inflicted untold sufferings to its people. However, in a century of darkness, the Chinese people, rising one upon another in an unyielding spirit, never stopped searching for a way towards national renewal and prosperity.

The life expectancy in Hong Kong is among the highest in the world … you can come to only one conclusion: we have the most environmentally friendly place for people, for executives, for Hong Kong people to live

Men’s life expectancy was one year less than women’s in 1920; today, it is seven years less, yet the federal government has only an Office of Research on Women’s Health.

Even if you hope to live for seventy or eighty years, in the end you are destined to die. You should regard your pleasures and sorrows, relationships, and attachments in worldly affairs as your enemy. To do so is the way to a fuller life. You should keep in mind the buddha way alone and work for the bliss of nirvana. Especially those of you who are elderly or who are middle-aged, how many years do you have left? How can you be lax in your practice of the way?

In fact, the chief end of a woman in China is not to live for herself, or for society; not to be a reformer or to be president of the woman's natural feet Society; not to live even as a saint or to do good to the world; the chief end of a woman in China is to live as a good daughter a good wife and a good mother.

Don’t smoke, don’t drink, don’t do drugs, and get enough sleep. A healthy lifestyle will increase your lifespan considerably.

These are strange times, when we are healthier than ever but more anxious about our health. According to all the standard benchmarks, we've never had it so healthy. Longevity in the West continues to rise -- a typical British woman can now expect to live to seventy-nine, eight years more than just half a century ago, and over double the life expectation when Queen Victoria came to the throne in 1837. Break the figures down a bit and you find other encouraging signs even in the recent past; in 1950, the UK experienced 26,000 infant deaths; within half a century that had fallen by 80 per cent. Deaths in the UK from infectious diseases nearly halved between 1970 and 1992; between 1971 and 1991 stroke deaths dropped by 40 per cent and coronary heart disease fatalities by 19 per cent -- and those are diseases widely perceived to be worsening.