Yesterday, the Conservative Woman website published an article entitled "Cities stand empty as the Chinese population goes into reverse" by Niall McCrae. A lot of the article discusses the declining birthrates in China, including that the number of births has, per official statistics, been less than deaths for the past few years. Nothing new there. But I found the following interesting. After noting that "[r]esearchers at the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences predict that China’s population will halve by the end of the century, falling to 525million," the author adds:
Controversially, some analysts believe that China never surpassed a billion, and that the communist state has persistently exaggerated the number of people. How so?
In the 1990s China was establishing itself as the workshop of the world, and millions of people were drawn to eastern cities from the rural hinterlands. Many villages were abandoned, and as farming discontinues, desertification is changing the landscape. Mega cities have been built, with citizens living in high-rise apartment blocks, near the factories that export all kinds of goods to the West, from electronics to MAGA baseball caps.
A major fault in the official population figure is duplicate registration. Hundreds of millions may have been counted twice, due to their rural identity remaining after they moved to an urban area. Financial incentives and social security qualification encourage people to retain a particular status such as student. Deaths are not always recorded. For various reasons, researchers such as Li Fuxian of Wisconsin-Madison University and author of Big Country with an Empty Nest, speculate that the real population of China is hundreds of millions lower than the official figure.
Later, the author mentions:
Some major new cities are deserted, with swathes of empty housing projects built on speculation. Precincts and dual carriageways have an apocalyptic atmosphere. Indicators such as domestic salt consumption suggest a rapidly declining population. The change is dramatic, and recent. Where have all the people gone? Perhaps the Chinese coronavirus vaccine is a factor.
Underlying all of this is that China's official statistics can't be trusted and even the proxies that have been traditionally used to estimate such things as population, unemployment, etc., no longer are reported.
Probably good long term for China, having a stable, smaller population allows easier self-sufficiency in food.
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