On World Diabetes Day, a group of people assembled in a Beijing park, trying to stay warm in the chilly, windy November dusk. They were gearing up for a "walk campaign," launched simultaneously around the globe Sunday in an effort to fight the deadly disease.

Diabetics from 45 Beijing communities attended the walk -- more than organizers had expected.

China now has more than 50 million diabetics and their number is rising by an average of 1.5 million to two million a year, making the country with the largest number of diabetes patients in the world, according to a forum on prevention and treatment of diabetes held last Sunday in Chongqing municipality, southwest China.

"The soaring economy has raised people's quality of life in China since the early 1990s, with more high-calorie food on people's dining tables," said Wang He, deputy head of the Guangdong Second Provincial Traditional Chinese Medicine Hospital and a diabetes specialist, "which has triggered a rapid growth of diabetes cases."

The Ministry of Public Health has said that about 200 million Chinese are overweight, more than 160 million have high blood pressure and some 20 million suffer from diabetes. Those rates and other obesity-related illnesses are rising.

The number of obese people in China doubled to 60 million in a decade between 1992 and 2002 with diseases related to an unhealthy diet and lifestyle also on the rise, government sources noted.

China's first comprehensive national survey on diet, nutrition and disease found that less physical activity -- fewer Chinese do manual labor for a living, and many now drive cars instead of cycling or walking -- has also contributed to problems of obesity, diabetes and abnormal blood lipid levels.

"Compared with the nutrition survey results of 1992, the prevalence of being overweight has risen by 39 percent and the prevalence of obesity increased 97 percent," Wang Longde, Chinese vice minister of health said, warning that the problem will get worse.

Compared with the information collected in a 1996 survey, the prevalence of diabetes among adults over age 20 in big cities has increased from 4.6 percent to 6.4 percent.

The Chinese government will work hard with global health organizations to improve nutritional intake and reduce the rate of chronic non-infectious diseases, Wang said.