Chinese Communist Party officials finally announced the data of the seventh census. Surprisingly, the population in 2020 exceeded 1.4 billion, with the new population increasing by 1.5 times compared to 2019, and the population of 65-year-olds also surged by 60%, making most population experts puzzled. A number of experts, after carefully checking the breakdown of the data, found many gaps and inconsistencies in the official data, and the public widely questioned the authenticity of the data.
On Tuesday, Ning Jizhe, deputy head of the Seventh National Census Leading Group of the State Council of China, attended a press conference at the State Council Information Office to announce the latest census data. According to the official announcement, China’s total population is over 1.4 billion people, although the population aged 15 to 59 accounts for 63 percent of the total population. But compared to the 2010 census, down 6.79 percentage points, the population aged 60 or older accounted for 18% of the total population, up 5.44 percentage points compared to 10 years ago, indicating that China’s aging population is more serious than 10 years ago.
Ning said that in 2020 compared to 2010, China’s total population increased by 72.06 million people, 5.35 percent more than 10 years ago, an average annual growth rate of 0.53 percent, but compared to the census 10 years ago, the average annual growth rate fell by 0.04 percentage points per year, reflecting that China’s population has maintained a low growth rate over the past 10 years.
There are no surprises in the official figures on the surface, but they are completely unreliable for the private and intellectual community. Liu Dong, a Shenyang-based Internet writer, told the station on the same day that the data were most likely a set of figures that had been carefully discussed by the authorities and finally arrived at.
“I do not believe in such figures, and of course we do not have real data. Because the real data from various cities reflect a significant shrinkage in the birth population. It is surprising that the population is still maintaining growth when the population’s willingness to have children is also declining. But to delay the release until now (it was scheduled to be released in mid-April), the figure is questionable.”
The official breakdown does not match the total number of contradictions
Mainland Chinese citizens are skeptical of the official figures, not just because of subjective feelings, but because the official figures are indeed full of holes.
First of all, demographic expert Yi Fuxian pointed out that the Statistics Bureau had published the number of births projected from elementary school enrolment figures, with 238 million births between 1996 and 2020, but the latest published births for the 14-year period were 253 million, an increase of more than 20 million. Based on this figure, the average annual fertility rate is over 1.6, far exceeding that of all developed countries.
Zero mortality from age zero to 14?
Secondly, according to the data released by the Bureau of Statistics, the total number of births per year from 2006 to 2020 adds up to more than 240 million, exactly the same as the cumulative figure just released by the government, which means that the mortality rate from 0 to 14 years old is zero. This would be completely illogical.
Third, the number of births has been going down year by year since 2016, except in 2020, when the epidemic hit, the number of births rose instead of falling, and in 2020 alone, it increased by 26 million people, nearly double the 14 million people in 2019. The birth rate has even broken records since 1991.
Where is the sudden surge in the number of new seniors at age 65 coming from?
What is most puzzling is the sudden increase of 16.41 million people aged 65 or older in 2020, a huge increase of more than 60% over 2019. Looking up the information, last year, all those who turned 65 were born in 1955, and the birth rate that year was not an increase but a plunge from previous years, with only 20 million births.
What’s even more bizarre is that according to the official data on net population growth, the number of deaths in 2020 is 14.61 million, up from 9.45 million in 2019, an increase of nearly 5 million, also a record since the reform and opening up.
Civilians in mainland China are skeptical of this official figure.
Guo Yuhua, a professor at the Department of Sociology at Tsinghua University, who was queried by the station, said she was not sure exactly why.
“How do you verify these numbers, how do you verify them, and there’s no way. In fact, not only on the issue of population data, on all issues, it’s the social trust that’s gone wrong. So (these data) are hard for the average person to believe.”
Officially released census data mocked
Numerous Weibo users questioned the official census data. Netizen “martensite phase change” wrote that it was a bit fake. Others said, “I thought we were back to 1.3 billion people,” and netizen “Bitter Moon” mocked, “Finally, it’s out, just look at it, huh, the statistics bureau is not easy, hard work.
Wu Qiang, an independent political commentator in Beijing and a doctor of political science, said in an interview with the station that from the macro perspective of China’s population, the country’s low population growth has been going on for a decade, and before this census, many government surveys on birth rates have shown negative numbers.
“Separate demographic statistics show that the trend of population decline in several cities is exactly what the international community is worried about in terms of China’s changing demographics, and indeed, as the officials say, China’s population has indeed entered a sustained low growth, a low growth that has great economic, social and political significance. It is a demographic reversal.”
An elderly man and woman in a wheelchair on a street in Beijing, May 11, 2021.
The end of the model of relying on cheap labor to drive economic growth
Wu Qiang explains that China’s model of continuous high economic growth over the past 40 years of reform and opening up has been reversed because of changes in population births. China’s model of relying on cheap labor to drive economic growth has come to an end. He said the population was in a prolonged period of low growth after the financial crisis in 2008, and the previous period of high economic growth had ended.
It means China will have to use more resources to make internal structural reforms in the future,” Wu Qiang said. From economic, social to political, reforms must be made to accommodate such a demographic structure.”
In addition, China announced that there are more than 700 million men and about 680 million women in the country, with a ratio of 105 men for every 100 women, a slight decrease from 10 years ago, reflecting a continued improvement in the population’s gender structure.
In response, Lu Jun, co-founder of the Beijing Yiren Ping Center, a Chinese civil society organization concerned about gender discrimination, told the station that although the official gender ratio has decreased from a decade ago, it is still significantly higher than the world average, indicating that the number of female babies born in China has been artificially reduced.
Lu Jun: “The fundamental reason is that the concept of male superiority over female in Chinese society as a whole has still not been fundamentally reversed. Employment is more difficult for women than for men, and many colleges and universities openly claim that the admission scores for girls are higher than for boys when they enroll. In the cultural sphere, a large number of literary works, films and television productions, advertisements and so on, portray women as consumer animals, in need of protection by men and other roles.”
Lu Jun said the status of women in various fields in China is far lower than that of men, and the preference for men over women has led to a serious imbalance in the gender ratio between men and women.
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