The data of the national census of mainland China, which is conducted every ten years, was finally released the day before yesterday after a delay of more than a month. According to this data, the population of mainland China exceeds 1.4 billion, which is considered to continue to grow at a low rate, and is still the first in the world, and remains more than India. However, experts point out that the data is full of holes. Some experts even believe that the real population of China is actually between 1.25 billion and 1.28 billion. Today we also talk about the population of mainland China and why population figures are so important to the authorities.
This is the seventh census since the establishment of the Chinese Communist Party, and the results were scheduled to be announced in early April, but the Communist Party delayed the announcement until May 11. Official figures say that China’s population will total 1.411.78 billion in 2020, a 5.38 percent increase over the census figures from 10 years ago. With about 18 percent of the global population, China remains the world’s most populous country.
The average age of China’s population is 38.8 years, with 51.24% of the population being male; 48.76% being female, with 35 million more men than women.
In addition, the population aged 0 to 14 years rose by 1.35 percentage points and the population aged 60 years or older rose by 5.44 percentage points; the working population (i.e., those aged 15 to 59 years) accounted for about 63 percent of the total population, down by 6.79 percentage points.
Not only are experts unconvinced by the data released by Beijing, but many ordinary people have also found fault with it.
The WeChat public number “Ding Jiangang Real Estate” quoted the census results as saying that the number of births in 2020 was 12 million, while the total population from the census results showed a natural increase of 11.73 million in 2020, which means that only 270,000 people died in that year, while the rest of the years were above 10 million. is clearly a data falsification.
Speaking to Radio Free Asia, Yi Fu-hsien, a senior researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and author of “The Empty Nest of the Great Nation,” who was originally an obstetrics and gynecology specialist and later became an expert in demographics, said the 1.4 billion population census results are questionable, with the biggest doubt being that the lower age group does not match the previously announced birth rate. He argued that “the lower age group (population) is grossly overestimated, and the water is mainly above the lower age group.”
Yi Fuxian questioned that this year’s population of 0-14-year-olds is higher than the total number of births announced in the previous 15 years, which does not make sense.
Official annual birth figures show that 238 million people were born between 2006 and 2020, so the census should also show 238 million people aged 0-14, but this time the official figure is more than 250 million, an overstatement of 12 million people.
For more than a decade, Fu-Hsien Yi has specialized in China’s population issues and has become an expert on China’s population in the United States. For many years, he has also called for mainland China to quickly open up its fertility restrictions, and is the author of the book “The Empty Nest of the Great Nation”. This book used to be banned on the mainland, but the authorities found that the population problem was serious and agreed to publish his book, but the family planning department strongly opposed it.
After the data of this Communist Party census came out, Yi Fuxian became the main target of interviews by various media. He argued that the births in the mainland have been going down year by year since 2016, but only in 2020, when the epidemic hit, the births rose instead of falling, with the official claim of 27 million newborns in 2020, nearly double the 14 million or so in 2019, and a birth rate that broke the record since 1991. Outsiders believe this is impossible and defies common sense.
Yi Fu-hsien pointed out that the number of marriages fell by 44.7 percent in the first quarter of 2020 due to the work stoppage and city closures of the epidemic, and was expected to rebound in the second quarter, but only increased by 7.3 percent year-on-year. The number of marriages for the year could fall below 8 million, and the total fertility rate in 2021 could fall below 0.8, with the actual number of births falling below 7 million and negative population growth of 4 million.
Also, what screams out is the sudden increase of 16.41 million people over 65 years old in 2020, a huge increase of over 60% from 2019. If you look up the data, all the people over 65 in 2020 were born before 1955, when China was in turmoil and unrest, the birth rate was very low, for example, in 1955 the birth rate did not increase but plummeted compared to previous years, with only 20.04 million births.
The WeChat public website “Data Collection Office” forwarded another article, citing the census results that the population over 65 years old will increase by 16.41 million and die by 14.27 million in 2020, implying that more than 30 million elderly people must supplement the population over 65 years old in order to logically achieve the census results. The article notes that this cannot be done.
According to official Communist Party figures for net population growth, the number of deaths in 2020 is 14.61 million, up nearly 5 million from 9.45 million in 2019, the latest record in 40 years. Some suspect that this may be related to deaths caused by the new coronavirus, although Chinese officials say only a few tens of thousands will die.
Demographer Dr. Fuxian Yi took to his social media platform to directly position the census as “the worst census ever. He explained that the quality of China’s census is getting worse every time, especially the 2020 census, for the following reasons.
- The executors are mostly the original staff of the Bureau of Statistics, the former Family Planning Commission and the Population Institute, who instinctively keep the population data continuous or face being held accountable.
- The census is officially called “verification of household registration ID cards”, which means verification, but only household registration is looked at, not photos. The problem is that China’s household registration population is more watery than what the National Bureau of Statistics has published. Since there are more than twenty individual rights linked to the hukou, people have a strong incentive to obtain more than one hukou, and it is often the case that one person has more than ten hukou.
- The income of census takers is linked to the number of census takers, and census takers do not have to enter households to conduct surveys, so many census takers are greedy for more and faster, or falsely report the number of people.
- Local governments expect more people. China’s fiscal system makes many local governments highly dependent on financial transfers from higher levels of government. Increasing population can lead to more financial transfers, more funding for education and health care, money for poverty alleviation, etc., and more leverage in fighting for railroad and highway projects, etc.
Yi Fuxian stressed that “due to interests, the population data from various departments (education, health, household registration, statistics bureau) in China are all watery, and these data seem to “corroborate” each other, but in fact they contaminate each other. Even the 2000 and 2010 censuses were falsified. The central government has no access to real population data at all, resulting in decisions based on faulty population data.”
Based on a comparative study of various officially released data, Dr. Fuxian Yi published a long article in Social Science Forum, “A Simulation Study of the 2020 Census,” before the official census in November 2020, arguing that there is a systematic system of population falsification in China.
According to the article, “the National Bureau of Statistics since 1990 has estimated births not based on census and sample survey fertility rates, but by reference to elementary school enrollment; the published births and total population contain huge amounts of water due to widespread misrepresentation of the number of students by educational institutions to obtain funding for compulsory education.”
Because Chinese regulations stipulate that funding for compulsory education for children between the ages of 6 and 15 is shared between the central government and localities in proportion to each other, 8 to 2 in the western region and 6 to 4 in the central region, educational institutions and local governments have a strong incentive to misrepresent the number of students.
“The 2020 and 2010 censuses also made significant changes to the original data in order to maintain continuity with the published population data, leading to distorted data and misleading various decisions.”
This is an issue that Yi Fu-hsien has been shouting about for many years, so if you are interested, you can search for his previous articles online.
After the official results were announced, Yi Fu Xian emphasized in a tweet that “the actual population in 2020 will be less than 1.28 billion, which is already negative growth; the fertility rate is less than 1.1, with less than 10 million births and about 10.6 million deaths. This announcement that the population is still growing is due to ‘false growth’ caused by inflated births and underreporting of deaths.”
Yi Fu-hsien pointed out that China’s fertility rate has been falling, yet data falsification has been done to catch up with other countries, for example, the 2000 Chinese census showed a fertility rate of only 1.2 (13 million people), but it was changed to 1.8 (17.71 million people) by the Chinese statistics bureau with a broad stroke of the pen, but in 2010 the official count of the population of 10-year-olds was 14 million, and in 2015 the number of 15-year-olds The total number of children was 13 million, and these latter figures prove that only 13 million people were born in China in 2000, but the NBS inflated the number by 4.71 million.
He stressed that “many years have similar problems, but all of them also take years to prove the revised data wrong, as described above.”
The article reassesses China’s fertility and birth numbers based on various social indicators such as healthcare, education and marriage, and concludes that the actual population in 2020 is ‘likely’ to be only 1.26 billion and unlikely to exceed 1.28 billion, and that China faces an unprecedented aging crisis.
Yi also pointed out that in ancient China and other countries, population data is sacred, such as the Shang Dynasty, which imposed a penalty of “beheading” or “punishment with the surrender of the enemy” on those who falsified population data. He believes that population data cannot be concealed for a long time and will be exposed one day.
One of the reasons for the collapse of the Soviet Union was the negative growth of the labor force due to the low fertility rate, which could not support the domestic and foreign affairs that had been spread to a large extent,” said Yifu Yin. Professor Anatoly Vishnevsky of the Russian Academy of Sciences said that the fertility rate was already below replacement level as early as the 1960s, but the problem was covered up by a complex ‘game’. The disintegration could have been avoided if the relevant authorities had not covered up the demographic truth and the government had engaged in a strategic contraction.”
Wang Jian, a self-publisher who has worked in financial journalism for 30 years in China and Hong Kong, analyzed the truth about China’s seventh census on YouTube. He agrees with Yi Fuxian and argues that 2018 is not only an inflection point for China’s population, which has turned from growth to decline, but also an inflection point for China’s economy, which has gone from high growth with a GDP growth rate of more than 8% to a real growth rate of only 3% in 2020.
According to Wang Jian, because of the falsification of population data, some people advocate that China can surpass the United States is not valid, and many Westerners are deceived by the false population size and consumption level of the Chinese Communist Party.
In May 2020, Chinese Premier Li Keqiang said at a press conference after the National People’s Congress that “600 million of us earn about 1,000 yuan a month” and three days later, the Communist Party magazine Quyi published an article by Communist Party General Secretary Xi Jinping on June 1, “On the shortcomings of a well-off society According to the article, “China has basically achieved the goal of building a moderately prosperous society, and the results are better than what was expected.
The Communist Party claims that China has 1.4 billion people, but only 400 million have reached the middle-income level, so he said that people should see from the census that China’s aging problem brings about a weight loss in the social security fund and widespread low-income poverty, while Western investors should see that the Chinese market is not really that big.
Why did the Chinese Communist Party take a population of over 1.2 billion and, after more than a month of revising the data, finally publish it as nearly 1.42 billion? Of course, the main reason is to compete for the title of the world’s most populous country, because if India becomes the world’s most populous country, a lot of international capital will flow to the more populous and younger India, and China will be stripped of its “world factory” faster.
In fact, the falsification of population data is a rather large systemic project, which is not easy to do, because it has to be matched with data from the past years, including the number, age, gender and regional distribution, and so on. If you use supercomputers to do the calculation and audit, it is easy to see many, many problems. The falsification we mentioned above may be just the tip of the iceberg, just a small part, and soon the problem of falsification will be exposed.
If even the falsified data is falsified, how much credit is left in this country? What other data, including China’s economic data, the value of China’s currency, etc., can be trusted? I think people around the world with a little common sense will ask the question: How long can such a regime run?
The answer, I’m afraid, is extremely unpromising.
Recent Comments