I read wikipedia's article on Anthropogenic Disasters and noticed China is on every list and almost always in the highest places. With so many catastrophic events, what about China or it's people (be it resources, government, etc) that makes it so good at fostering high populations and high population growth?
Culturally China has a number of customs that favoured large families. Sons were emphasized for maintaining the legacy, and China was, for the majority of its history, an agrarian society based on subsistence agriculture. When the Republic of China formed after the end of the Qing Dynasty, China began industrializing, which caused large rural families (Favoured for agricultural subsistence) to migrate to urban areas. In 1960, 84% of the Chinese population was in rural areas, in 2015, it's 44%.
Prior to the One Child Policy, the Communist Party encouraged people to have as many children as they could afford. Starting in 1970, with rising food prices and longer life expectancy, they started telling people to have no more than two kids and marry later in life.
Then in 1978-1980, Song Jian, a top-ranking Chinese official, was influenced by philosophies of the Sierra Club and wanted to curb China's birth rate. So the one child policy was born, but it exempted many ethnic groups, and up until it was lifted in 2015, it only affected around a third of the population. Rural areas were exempt, as well as people whose first child was a daughter because of cultural preferences.
TL;DR: A combination of large rural families moving into urbanized cities, government policy and the ineffectiveness of the One Child Policy means China's population continued to climb into being the most populous nation on Earth.
Sources
http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.RUR.TOTL.ZS?locations=CN
The One Child Family Policy: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1763112/