A dataset of district/county-level population distribution of China’s six national censuses

Spatialized population data are of great importance for supporting the studies on transportation, geography, socio-economy, sustainable development etc. In this paper, we collected the district/county-level population data of China’s six population censuses starting from 1949. With the administrative division in 2015 (the year of the Sixth Population Census) as the benchmark of the geographical region of the districts and counties, we calibrated and spatialized the population data to obtain a dataset of district/county-level population distribution of China’s six national censuses.