BEIJING - Starting Monday, millions of Chinese census takers will fan out across the country, visiting more than 400 million households to try to get an accurate count of the population over a 10-day period.

The sixth census will use about 6.5 million census takers, each dressed in a uniform and bearing a certificate, asking everyone living and working on the mainland to information about their personal lives.

Anyone born before Monday gets included, and anyone born after Monday gets left out until the next one, in 2020, according to the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS).

About 90 percent of the people will be asked to fill in an 18-item form, covering their name, sex, ethnic group, household registration, and education; the other 10 percent, chosen randomly, will be asked to fill in a longer 45-question form.

Foreigners have it easier: they only have eight questions to answer.

China holds its national census every 10 years. The previous one, in 2000, showed that the world's most populous country had 1.29 billion people.