The 2000 Chinese census, officially the Fifth National Population Census of the People's Republic of China (Chinese: 中华人民共和国第五次全国人口普查), was conducted by the government of the People's Republic of China with 1 November 2000 as its zero hour.

[note 2] The census did not include the special administrative regions of Hong Kong and Macau.

Based on the results of the Fifth National Population Census, Henan was the most populous province-level division, Shandong was ranked second, Guangdong and Sichuan were third and fourth, and Jiangsu, Hebei, Hunan, Hubei, Anhui, and Zhejiang were ranked fifth through tenth.

Hainan, Ningxia, Qinghai, and Tibet were the four least populous, with fewer than 10 million people each.

There were four province-level divisions with an ethnic minority population of more than 10 million: in decreasing order, Guangxi, Yunnan, Guizhou, and Xinjiang.

In Qinghai, Guangxi, Guizhou, Ningxia, and Yunnan the ethnic minority population was greater than 30%.

Seven other ethnic groups, including the Moinba, Oroqen, and Drung, had a population of less than 10,000 each; among them, the Tatars, Hezhe, indigenous Taiwanese, and Lhoba had less than 50,000 each.

There were 734,438 people belonging to unrecognized ethnic groups, including 710,486 in Guizhou (96.74% of the total), 7,404 in Yunnan (1.01%), and more than 1,000 in each of Tibet, Zhejiang, Guangdong, Guangxi, and Jiangsu.