Great Graphic: Conceptualizing the World's Population

This Great Graphic was posted on The Atlantic website by Matt Schiavenza.  He thinks he is illustrating China's incredible population by identifying four other regions that have similar populations. 

Yet quite clearly India alone has a similar population as China's, especially when joined by Nepal, Bhutan and Bangladesh.  Indeed, if one were to bucket the world's population into five roughly equivalent buckets, this is what it would look like. 

Still the scale of China is daunting.  There are five provinces in China, which if they were separate countries, would each by in the top 20 in terms of population.   Fourteen of China's 34 provinces have populations larger than California's, the most populated state in the US.  The US has nine cities with more than one million people.  China has over 160 such cities.