CCP Conducts Surveys on Population Change, Triggering Speculation About Real Numbers

People with protective masks walk at Nanjing road in Shanghai on Dec. 11, 2022. Hu Chengwei/Getty Images

Commentary

China’s National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) has been conducting a sample survey on population changes, triggering more speculation on China’s true population data after COVID-19.

The NBS announced on Oct. 10 that to accurately monitor and reflect changes in China’s demographic development, and to formulate plans for national economic and social development, it has decided to introduce the “2023 Population Changes Sampling Survey” nationwide.

The scope of the survey includes sampled urban and rural areas. The fieldwork is being conducted from Oct. 10 to Nov. 30. In addition to basic information such as name, gender, age, ethnicity, education level, and identity number, the survey also includes information on mobility, work, marriage, childbirth, death, and housing.

The announcement also said that the Census and Statistics Department will send enumerators to households for registration, or the target respondents can fill in the form via the internet.

Before the survey, the NBS appointed a considerable number of officials, including 33 departmental and bureau-level officials, including chief engineers and chief economists.

The personnel changes involve the senior management of the investigation teams in 16 province-level divisions: Shanxi, Inner Mongolia, Liaoning, Heilongjiang, Zhejiang, Jiangxi, Shandong, Sichuan, Tibet, Shaanxi, Qinghai, Ningxia, Xinjiang, Shanghai, Guangdong, and Beijing.

In December 2022, regime authorities abandoned the three-year “zero-COVID” policy. Some on Wall Street predicted at the time that China’s economy would rebound steadily and become the biggest driver of global growth.

Police keep some protesters behind a cordon during a protest against the Chinese regime's strict zero-COVID measures in Beijing on Nov. 27, 2022. Kevin Frayer/Getty Images

However, the expected economic recovery hasn’t materialized after more than half a year. To the contrary, China’s exports have declined continuously, its stock market is in the doldrums, the unemployment rate of young people has hit record highs, and real estate companies have collapsed one after another, which may even bring down China’s entire economy in terms of the associated financial risks.

China’s population has entered full-scale negative growth, and all the policies of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) are constructed on false demographic data, which has caused the entire economy to face a serious crisis, according to the analysis of Li Yuanhua, a former associate professor at Capital Normal University who currently lives in Australia.

“China’s population is aging seriously,“ Mr. Li told The Epoch Times on Oct. 15. ”There is a shortage of young workers, and the birth rate of newborns is extremely low, so the economic model of relying on the demographic dividend in the past has completely collapsed.”

Population data are extremely important to national governance, which involves social, economic, political, defense, and diplomatic aspects. However, China’s population data have been falsified at various levels, and the exact size of China’s population is a mystery to the world, Mr. Li said.

Expert: At Least 3 Levels of Manipulation

In the 2020 census, the CCP’s official data claimed that China’s population was 1.41 billion. Since the data were released a half-year later than expected, it was widely believed that the numbers were heavily manipulated.

According to an analysis at the end of 2020 by “Financial Cold Eye,” a U.S.-based financial expert and YouTuber with 430,000 followers, the data had been manipulated at least three times: Birth control interest groups falsified data for partnership interests; population data were restated after rural migrant workers moved to cities so that their children could go to cities for preferential education and retain their land interests in the countryside; and the Family Planning Commission “manually corrects” data according to its preference, which is actually fabricating data.

“I can tell you responsibly that the real population of China is now 1.27 billion, and it will continue to decrease,” he said, citing his own calculations.

COVID Sharply Decreased Population

China’s population has further plummeted since the three-year pandemic.

At the end of January, the NBS acknowledged that by the end of 2022, China’s national population was lower than that of the previous year. It said that there were 9.56 million births in the year, with a birth rate of 6.77 per 1,000 people, which was the lowest since the founding of the communist regime in 1949.

From 1979 to 2015, the CCP implemented a “one-child policy"; the CCP later changed it to a “two-child policy” and after May 2021, changed it to a “three-child policy.” However, the number of births during each year in the three decades of the “one-child policy” far exceeds the number of births in 2022 under the “three-child policy.”

Between 1959 and 1961, China suffered through the Great Famine. At least 36 million people were starved to death, and the number of births dropped to 16.35 million, 14.02 million, and 9.49 million births, respectively, in that period.

Employees of the Shin Chiao Hotel in Beijing build a small and rudimentary steel furnace in the hotel courtyard in October 1958 during the "Great Leap Forward," a period intended to help China catch up to the UK's economy within 15 years. Jacquet Francillon/AFP via Getty Images

The number of births in 2022 was 9.56 million, lower than the average level during the Great Famine and close to the lowest level in 1961, when China’s population base was only 660 million.

In addition to other reasons why people are reluctant to have children now, how many people died in China during the three-year pandemic, in addition to those who died directly from COVID-19?

The CCP’s extreme “zero-COVID” policy led to a shutdown of society, with many starving to death in their homes, some critically ill people dying because of the lack of treatment, residents committing suicide by jumping out of buildings, and pregnant women miscarrying after being denied medical care.

Analysis of China’s Current Population

In July 2022, an anonymous hacker posted online about the sale of a massive amount of data, up to 23 terabytes (23,000 gigabytes) that was obtained from the Shanghai Public Security Department. The data were stolen in June 2022 from Alibaba Cloud, a subsidiary of Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba.

Various researchers have confirmed that the database contains information on 970 million Chinese citizens.

To verify the authenticity of the data, the Vendor provided a sample dataset containing 750,000 data entries. The leaked data were verified to be accurate by various parties.

A nurse cares for a newborn at the Women and Children's Hospital in Fuyang City, Anhui Province, China, on Aug. 8, 2022. Cfoto/Future Publishing via Getty Images

The database uploaded by the Shanghai Public Security Bureau to the Alibaba cloud was unlikely to be partial data and was highly probable to be complete, Li Zhengkuan, a current affairs commentator, said. This would mean that the total population of China in 2022 was 970 million.

If the estimate of “Financial Cold Eye” is accurate, that means China’s population dropped by about 300 million in two years.

It’s worth noting that in December 2022, when the CCP completely dropped all pandemic-control measures, China once again entered a wave of deaths from COVID-19. Therefore, the current population is expected to be much lower than that of 2022.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.