China's population finally hit the 1.3 million mark Thursday, but the occasion was cause not for rejoicing as for questions about the ominous screwed demographics of the most numerous nation in human history.

The good news for the Beijing government was that the historic mark was only reached four years behind schedule. Since successive Chinese governments have been implementing a draconian birth control policy for the past quarter of a century to slow down and eventually reverse population growth that was rightly seen as an achievement. The bad news, however was that it still happened at all.

For China's population is still increasing in absolute numbers on a scale that is unprecedented by any other country in the world except for India. Every year, 16 million more Chinese are born, equivalent to half the population of Canada or the addition of a state with the population of New Jersey to the United States.

That means that pressure to provide enough food, energy and jobs to feed this huge accumulation of people will continue to grow remorselessly over the next few years.

In the long run, in fact, all the trends indicate that the birth control policy that has tried to limit Chinese families to only one child each is working. Indeed, if current demographic trends continue for the next half century, China will have the same problem with a shrinking, aging population that already afflicts Europe and Japan.

Nor is China the fastest growing nation in population terms by any means. On current trends India, which currently has 1.06 billion people, will have a larger population than the China by 2035.

But long before any of these projected trends come about, it is quite possible that the draconian Chinese birth control policies will have produced social and ultimately international and strategic side effects of far more dramatic and immediate impact.

For one-child policy has led to the largest scale application of abortion and even infanticide ever documented in any nation in peacetime in the modern era. In particular, scores of millions of unborn or infant girls are believed to have been aborted or killed so that families could have a boy instead of a girl.

China's official population statistics documented the remarkable demographic imbalance that has resulted.

The strict rules on family size have also created a gender imbalance, with about 117 boys for every 100 girls, as cultural preference for sons prompts couples, usually in rural areas, to abort girls, the British newspaper The Scotsman reported Wednesday.

This means that over the next 20 or 30 years, China is going to see scores of millions of young men grow to manhood without the girls available for them to date and later marry. The lessons of world and Chinese history both suggest this could be a dangerous recipe for foreign expansion and wars of aggression.

Historically, aggressive nations that have sought to expand violently and rapidly and create huge empires in short periods of time have done when they had rapid population growth and, especially, when they developed a surplus of aggressive young men who had not been socialized by society or the responsibilities and fulfillment of marriage and family.

The American social analyst and futurist George Gilder warned in his influential book Men and Marriage that societies without a stable moral and family structure were especially vulnerable to both internal upheavals and turning to external aggression.

The Spanish conquest and colonization of the Americas in the 16th century and the expansion of the British Empire to conquer a quarter of the land service of the earth in the 18th and 19th centuries were both ultimately generated by a combination of surplus population aggressively seeking new opportunities around the world with an advanced technology that gave the military supremacy to do so. The long slow expansion of the Russian people eastwards across the Eurasian steppe to the Pacific Ocean up to the outbreak of World War I was also ultimately driven by high birthrates and rapid population growth.

But the Britain that expanded to colonize, conquer, rule and transform a quarter of the land surface of the earth during the Industrial Revolution came from a home island that in 1800 only had a population of little more than 12 million. China today has a population of 1.3 billion.

And in modern times, China has been subject to longer and more repeated cycles of domestic upheaval than any other nation or society in the world during that time except for neighboring Russia.

Since 1840, every 20 to 40 years, huge peasant uprisings or mass movements have swept China, all of them powered by the manic enthusiasm of tens of millions of unemployed or under-employed young men swept by religious or political ideologies and nationalist passions.

Most recently, Chairman Mao Zedong, the founding father of the People's Republic of China, regained his waning domestic power by unleashing the passion of tens of millions of young Red Guards during the Great Cultural Revolution of 1965-67. At least a million people died and tens of millions of others were tortured, exiled, jailed or impoverished.

Earlier upheavals were even worse. Between 1850 and 1865, at least 30 million people were killed in the religious uprising of the T'ai P'ing that swept southern China. The death toll was 50 times higher than that of the U.S. Civil War that occurred at the same time.

However, phenomena like the Ta'i P'ing uprising, the 1900 Boxer rising, the victory of Mao's communists in China's Civil War from 1945 to 48 and the Cultural Revolution could only turn China upside down. The nation in those eras was still so weak militarily and divided internally that it could not export its aggressive energies overseas and create a vast global empire the way the British, the Russians and the Spanish had. Nor did they have the military technology and power with which Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan exploded upon the world in the 1930s.

However, a 21st century China with a vast surplus of young males over females would be a very different prospect for the rest of the world from the enfeebled China of the Ta'i P'ing or even the Red Guards. China has rapidly developed the largest concentration of industrial capability in the world and its Gross Domestic Product continues to rise rapidly. Its combination of a huge, increasingly educated and industrious population, and rapidly accumulating industrial and economic power strikingly resembles the United States a century ago.

That is why the combination of China's enormous and still growing population with the gender imbalance caused by the efforts to control it raise such problematic and potentially alarming questions about the future direction of the world's largest nation. It was, therefore, fittingly symbolic that the 1.3 billion Chinese citizen to be born Thursday was a boy.