Census takers in east China's Shandong Province are brought together to watch cartoons, not for fun, but as part of their training for the once-a-decade census in China, which begins in November.

The census is to be carried out using door-to-door surveys to obtain accurate information about China's population.

With the skills learned from watching the cartoon, door-to-door workers will become acquainted with households more easily and learn to ask unwelcomed questions more tactfully, said Zhang Jing, one of the census takers in Licang District, Qingdao City.

"What a lovely child, how old are you?" asked a uniformed census taker when an elderly lady with a baby opened the door for her.

"I am a census taker of the sixth national census and I need your cooperation," she smiled.

This is from a cartoon that nearly 60,000 census takers watch to learn communication skills in the city.

The cartoon, lasting for over 32 minutes, consists of the theory and demonstration of census taking, elaborating on communication skills and techniques to properly ask sensitive questions.

"It's interesting and impressive to learn how to communicate through a cartoon," said Zhang.

"Communication is important for us to let residents trust us and tell the truth," she said.

"For example, I learned that 'is there any population change in your family' is more proper to 'did any one die or pass away', which is more irritating," she added.

China will conduct its sixth national population census on November 1, though census takers found it difficult to enter some people's homes in urban areas during the pilot period in Licang District.

"People go to work during the daytime and won't answer the doorbell or let us in at night because of security reasons," said Zhang Tao, a police officer of Laoshan Mountain District of Qindao, who went to the households with his colleagues in July to check whether the household registration documents, or Hukou, could match those members living in households.

"It was really hard to get into some people's home. Some thought we were fake police," said Zhang.

The difficulty of census takers' being invited into households has highlighted people's stronger awareness of privacy rights, as well as their distrust towards each other in modern time, said Li Wei, a researcher with the Qingdao Academy of Social Sciences.

"We tried to promote the census takers' communication skills so they could make it easier," said Sun Lanxue, director of the sixth census bureau of Qingdao.

However, as census takers are from all walks of life with different educational backgrounds, it's difficult for everyone to grasp the skills through training courses, Sun said.

The country will mobilize about 6,000,000 census takers for the sixth national census. Census takers are only required to have graduated from middle school and are interested in public service.

Besides some governmental officials, the census takers are also from neighborhood committees' staff, college students, laid-off workers and those who are retired.

Each of them is required to visit 80 to 100 households, recording the registration information of 250 to 300 residents.

"After the pilot, we had some case studies, and wrote different scenarios introducing how to communicate and ask questions in the census as guiding materials for the census takers," said Gao Minghui, vice director of the sixth census bureau in Qingdao.

"The cartoon might be a more popular and receptive way," Gao said.

The cartoon will be broadcast during the training course of every county, district and town of the city.

In addition to Qingdao, China has organized training courses for census takers at national, provincial, municipal and township levels to make sure that door-to-door workers take the training before the census begins.

"The training courses or the cartoon can't teach what to say or what to do, exactly, in real circumstances. Census takers need to think and use these skills to do their jobs, Sun said.