China's National Bureau of Statistics has released figures showing that the country had a population of 1.30628 billion as of November 1st, 2005.

This means the country has witnessed an annual growth rate of 0.63%, with 8.09 million people added since a 2000 national population census.

Men constitute 51.53 percent of China's total population, while women account for 48.47 percent, showing the gender proportion at 106:100.

Statistics also show kids below the age of 14 total 264.78 million, making up over one fifth of the entire population. This represents a drop of 2.62 percentage points, compared with year 2000 population census figures.

68.7 percent of population is between the ages of 15 and 59, with seniors aged above 60 years making up 11.03 percent.

Also on Thursday, the Ministry of Public Security held a press conference on rarely-used characters for printing computerized "second generation" ID cards. A Ministry official says some rarely-used characters for people's names do not exist in the computer library causing problems when making identification cards.

The official says that over the past three years the country's security organs have been working to compile a list of rare characters used in people's names and residential addresses. They have currently come up with around 4600 rarely used characters.

The official notes the Ministry has created special software containing these 4,600 characters. Once it is installed, those who have failed to get their ID cards in the past can expect to get them issued soon.

In order to avoid that their children have a name similar to others, some parents prefer to use rare characters when naming their children. The Ministry official says a law will be enacted in coming years to regulate naming activities.