Chinese Language → A Sea of People
Language:
China is History; China is Land; China is People.
This is how a 1944 American propaganda movie titled “Why We Fight: Battle of China” summarized China. China is people, 450 million at the time, 1,4 billion today. China’s massive population has a long history. Back in the dynastic times, China was already the most populous country in the world, which led to some nefarious consequences. While China’s overpopulation provided the country with endless manpower — up until Mao’s Cultural Revolution, there had been very few machines in use in China—without the need of machinery, there was no possible improvement over earlier technologies, which is one of the reasons why China was so backward when the first British envoy, McCartney, arrived in China in 1793.
The Chinese character for “crowd” is composed of “three people”: 
As many other Chinese characters, when an element is tripled, it usually means “alot of”, for example: “triple trees”= forest. 
But this character for “crowd” is a simplified character. The traditional variant is this one: 
which I wouldn’t be able to analyse. On top of the character, there is a “net”（罒）, but underneath, I don’t understand…
I do not know to which extent the simplified version was in use before the simplification of the characters, or if instead, the character was created after the simplification policies of the 1950s… But it seems to me that the simplified version of the character represents better its meaning than its traditional version… unless, of course, it has a meaning that I don’t understand.
