This is a reddit post which summarised the situation as far as it can be:
The only source for China’s population being 1.4-1.5 billion is China
itself. No other source has ever verified this claim. Literally no one
knows what China's real population is except for China's leaders who may
well be overstating the population for countless reasons such as to look stronger than they are. Data that comes out of China has always been
considered unreliable because democracy, transparency, and freedom of
the press do not exist in China. Demographers such as Yi Fuxian stated
that China's population was closer to 1.2 billion than the official 1.4 billion. China has had a 1 child policy for almost 40 years from
1979-2015. A fertility rate of 2.1 is needed just to keep the population
the same - so how could China gain 300 million from 1990-2020 when its
overall fertility rate was only about 1.5? And that figure is based off official statistics - the real fertility rate could be as low as 1.0 as
noted by experts like Yi Fuxian.
Western countries kept gaining population despite low fertility rates
because of immigration - China does not get any immigrants - so how
could its population rise from 1.1 billion in 1990 to 1.4 billion in
2020? How could China have gained 300 million with a low fertility rate
and no massive scale immigration? Some will say that China's population
growth still had momentum but other countries like India had 860 million
in 1990 and had 1.4 billion by 2020 despite a far higher fertility rate
of 3.0 and more momentum. How is it possible that China's population
grew similarly to India despite a far lower fertility rate and less
momentum? Even taking into account life expectancy does not explain
things as the life expectancy in China only rose by 10 years from
1990-2020 while it rose higher in India by 12 years in the same time
period. The death rate in China is also a lot higher than in India due
to high corruption, pollution, and suicides. China also lost at least
millions if not tens of millions if not hundreds of millions to the
coronavirus and suffered more from Covid than other countries.
I will present some videos that you do not have to or even need to watch
- but I recommend the videos by Lei’s Real Talk as she presents
substantial evidence and reasoning for her claims.
This video titled "How I used AI to calculate China’s real population" (
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ftcLM3502_8&t=31s) by Lei's Real Talk
states that when the official fertility rate of 1.7 from 1990-2020 was
used for ChatGPT's population calculator - China's population should
have dropped from 1.14 billion in 1990 to 890 million in 2020 instead of increasing to 1.41 billion like in the official statistics. The same
method was applied to India and it found that the population should have increased from 870 million to 1.43 billion which was almost the same as
India's official population of 1.38 billion. So it seems like India's population statistics are more accurate. It is suspicious that China
still has a larger population than India in 2020 despite a way lower
fertility rate, greater emigration to other countries, and higher death
rate.
That same video decided to use the likely lower than officially reported fertility rate for China between 2000-2010 of 1.1 and the population
calculator calculated that China's real population for 2020 was only 695 million as opposed to the official 1.41 billion. All of that is not
taking into account Covid deaths.
This video -
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rankZJu3K1g - estimates
that China lost between 200-600 million to Covid. China had experienced
the disappearance of more than 21 million cell phone accounts all the
way back in early 2020 when Covid started to spread which might indicate
a high death toll from Covid and this was only the start of Covid about
5 years ago - since then, hundreds of millions of weak and vulnerable
old people could have died due to Covid.
It is believed that China's economy might only be 40% of the official statistics due to the fact that economic growth is correlated with
increased electricity consumption and yet - the amount of night lights
from China seen by satellites does not correlate with economic growth,
this video -
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A5A5Eu0ra3I - goes into
detail. If China's population is only 40% of the official figures - that
would explain why China's economy is only 40% the size of the official
economic data.
The Russians even conducted their own study in which they added up all
the officially stated population of cities in China and got 280 million inhabitants and assuming that the ratio of urban-rural inhabitants in
China is about 1-1 - they concluded that China's real population is
between 500-800 million. This video by Lei's Real Talk explains it -
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n3zhCCCYVeA&t=76s - the Japanese also
came to the same conclusion as the Russians after realizing that salt consumption in China halved which could indicate a significant decline
in the population due to demographic crisis and Covid deaths.
This other video by Lei’s Real Talk titled "China’s vanishing population and the lie of 1.4 billion people" (
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gsIg-_5Yl_8) states that 200-500
million died from Covid and shows video evidence of depopulated cities
and sparsely populated rural areas.
This video by Rei's Real Talk titled "The Vanishing Billion: Exposing
China’s Population Myth" (
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFbMWq-xvXU) summarizes the previous videos she made about China's population and
states that China might only have 300 million people remaining.
So, if the fertility rate of 1.7 between 1990-2020 is used - than
China's real population is not 1.5 billion but 900 million. If the
fertility rate is further adjusted to be 1.1 between 2000-2010 than the population is 700 million. If the 200-500 million death toll from Covid
is taken into account - than the population is only 200-500 million -
one can take the median number of that range which is 350 million. All
of this means that the United States could have more people than China.
What are the counter-arguments in favor of trusting the official
population statistics? So far, I heard none. Some say that the official statistics must be correct but these same people present no logical
reason as to why. Of course, the fertility rate could have been higher
than reported. Not everyone abided by the one child policy and that
policy only applied to crowded urban areas and not rural areas or to
ethnic minorities. And a fertility rate of 2.1 is not necessary as the population can still rise if the number of births exceeds the number of
deaths - but could China's real population still be a few hundred
million less than 1.4 billion - like 1-1.2 billion? Most likely.
So how likely is the idea that China has less than 400 million people?
It is possible but unlikely. Know that China was not being transparent
with its Covid death toll. In 2020, they claimed that only 3,000 died
from Covid in all of China when many crematoriums reported that they
alone - were each burning 2,000 bodies each day. China has been setting
up more crematoriums while the average city and village reported far
more deaths than births despite China claiming that the overall
population rose past 1.4 billion.
You could argue that it is IMPOSSIBLE to fake a country's population on
such a scale for so long without anyone noticing - but remember - only
China counts its own population, literally no one else is allowed to. I personally believe that China's population is between 1-1.2 billion.
What do you think? Please present facts and logical reasoning if you
want to strengthen your argument.
--
"An intellectual is a person knowledgeable in one field who speaks out
only in others...”
Tom Wolfe
--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
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