Many of the more than 200 million migrant labourers who work far from home without proper residence permits in their adopted cities are expected to shun census-takers, fearing punishment, census official Feng Nailin said.

The same goes for citizens who fear fines for having more children than are allowed under family-planning rules that generally limit people to one child, he told reporters at a briefing outlining the census starting November 1.

"The biggest difficulty will be to register the migrant population, which is rapidly growing due to fast-paced urbanisation," said Feng, director of the population and employment department of the National Bureau of Statistics.

"Another problem is many people are refusing to cooperate compared to earlier censuses, maybe because the pace of life is faster now and the awareness of privacy is increasing.

"The under-reporting of new births is another difficulty" that the up to six million census-takers will face in the once-a-decade tally, he added.

Some of these hurdles were already encountered in trial census-taking efforts ahead of the main count, he said.

China's population was estimated to be 1.3347 billion people at the end of 2009, Feng said.

That is up from 594 million people counted in the nation's first census in 1953 and 1.26 billion people in a 2000 census, he said.

To encourage people to report all their children, Beijing has called on local officials nationwide who will do the actual counting to reduce fines to couples who report "one child policy" infractions during the census, he said.

"Families with financial difficulties will also be allowed to pay their fines in installments," he said.

Feng also said Chinese rules ban the use of census information to levy punishments for the failure to register domiciles.

China maintains a strict household registration system that effectively prevents citizens having access to a range of social services such as unemployment and health insurance and free schooling when they relocate.

First put in place in the 1950s to curb large population movements, it has come under fire as hundreds of millions of migrant workers leave rural areas to move to the nation's fast growing cities.

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