BEIJING — Size is not every part — it is what you do with it that counts.

That was Beijing’s indignant response after information that India, its neighbor and fierce rival, will soon overtake China because the world’s most populous nation.

Facing a demographic crisis that might undermine the federal government’s bid to rival the United States, Chinese officers and state media balked at Western protection of recent information projecting India edging forward of mainland China by the center of this yr, if it hasn’t already.

Both can have nearly 1.43 billion folks, in response to the United Nations World Population Dashboard — nicely over a 3rd of the planet’s 8 billion-plus people between them.

They aren’t simply geopolitical rivals; the nuclear-armed neighbors are locked in a dispute that has seen giant troop build-ups alongside their mountainous, 2,000-mile-plus border, and even melee clashes with golf equipment, sticks and stones.

News of the inhabitants rating overtake made headlines all over the world. But distinguished voices in China accused the West of utilizing it as one other excuse to “bad mouth” Beijing as the newest episode in the long-running struggle with the U.S. and its allies.

Chinese officers and state media mentioned America and the West had been focusing solely on inhabitants dimension, quite than schooling, industrial output and economic clout — the latter seeing Beijing dwarf Delhi a number of occasions over.

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin confused that it was necessary “to look at not just the size but also the quality of its population.”

He advised a every day briefing this week, “The population is important, so is talent.”

State broadcaster CCTV said China, which the World Bank credits with lifting almost 800 million people out of poverty in the past 40 years, was being “slandered” regardless of “creating a miracle of sustainable and stable economic development with a huge population.”

“Such hype lacks a basic understanding of the law of population development,” it said.

What issues to China is consumer and investor confidence, “so it’s not arduous to see why Chinese officers are pushing again on the argument {that a} inhabitants decline spells financial decline,” said Dimitar Gueorguiev, an associate professor who teaches Chinese politics at Syracuse University.

To China, being the most populous nation “doesn’t rely for something” in and of itself, Gueorguiev told NBC News in an email. What’s important is “to be seen as a growing, fashionable, and practical nation.”

On the streets of Beijing the mood was similar.

“Population doesn’t equal nationwide energy,” said Zhang Han, 29, a business student from the eastern province of Shandong. “The U.S. and Japan have smaller populations, nevertheless it doesn’t imply they’re not sturdy powers.”

Retired teacher Liu Quan, 57, said he doesn’t care about the population news at all. “We simply need peace” between the quarreling neighbors, he said. “I consider each India and China don’t need battle.”

Despite the vying inhabitants statistics, China is way extra rich than India. After pursuing financial liberalization within the Seventies, its economy has mushroomed to turn out to be the second largest on the earth behind the U.S., with a GDP nearly seven occasions that of fifth-placed India.

Both countries face their own challenges.

Once rising exponentially, China’s growing older inhabitants fell last year for the first time in six decades. This raises serious questions about the ability of this titan — one on which the global economy has come to rely — to maintain let alone enhance its economic status.

China once tried to check its population growth with the now defunct one-child policy. Now it’s desperately trying to arrest a falling birthrate that means that — as in many Western countries — a shrinking young population will struggle to support a growing number of retirees. That’s what partly stagnated the economy of neighboring Japan, despite it already being a high-income country.

India, by contrast, has not achieved the same lightspeed development in manufacturing and infrastructure. Its population is younger but more of them are unemployed or in extreme poverty. Only 2.2% of workers between the ages of 15 and 59 have received formal vocational training, in response to authorities figures. In China, 26% of the workforce are classed as “expert.”

Despite a booming technology sector, the sheer size of the country’s population means it has been struggling to create enough jobs to keep up with demand.

The Times of India newspaper described this as “a ticking social bomb” in a leader column reacting to the population news. “Only by facilitating a lot, a lot better schooling and alternatives for our younger can we notice the hope of an ‘Indian century,'” it said.

A survey conducted by the U.N. in conjunction with this week’s report found that many Indians listed economic issues as their top concern when thinking about population change, followed by worries about the environment, health and human rights.

Those findings suggest that “inhabitants anxieties have seeped into giant parts of most of the people,” even though the numbers should be seen as a sign of development rather than a cause for anxiety, Andrea Wojnar, the United Nations Population Fund’s representative for India, said in a statement.

If China’s concerned about giving up top spot, India doesn’t seem entirely thrilled about claiming it.

Jace Zhang reported from Beijing, and Alex Smith reported from London.