We’ve previously covered that China’s demographics are in severe decline and that China’s GDP may be overstated by 60%. Now a researcher says that China’s population could be overstated by 37-50%.
(Before we dig in, two caveats: First, the channel is Lei’s Real Talk, from someone who came over from communist China and was a stu7dnet in the U.S. when the Tiananmen Square, but she doesn’t use her full name, which she says is to protect her family back in China. Second, she’s using AI to answer some of her questions. Still, the math-based questions don’t seem conducive to the “AI hallucinations” we see elsewhere, but some caveat lictor seems in order.)
“We know China is facing a series of economic challenges. Weak consumer, confidence falling real estate prices, high debt, industrial overcapacity, sluggish exports, and so on and so forth. But the underlying issue of the faltering economy, in my opinion, is a severe population crisis.”
“China’s actual population is far below than the official figure of 1.4 billion.”
“I want to compare China and India’s population between the 30-year period from 1990 to 2020. Let’s also compare their average fertility rate between the two countries and their medium age.” If you run those very basic numbers, things don’t add up.
“In 1990, China’s population is over India is by about 270 million [1.14 billion vs. 870 million], and 30 years later China’s population is still over India by 30 million [1.41 billion vs. 1.38 billion].”
“However, if you look at the fertility rate, India’s average fertility rate [2.97%] during the 30 years years is so much higher than China’s [1.70].” All these are the official published rates.
“With that kind of fertility rate in India consistently over 30 years, India’s population should be larger than China’s. Mathematically it’s impossible that China’s population is still greater than India’s.”
I’m skipping over a detailed breakdown of the two country’s respective fertility rates by decades.
“I asked GPT to apply the fertility rates for each country and give me the total population in 2020 for India and China respectively, and this is the results it generate. In 2020 population, India’s population was 1.38 billion, China’s was only 890 million.” India’s number is off the official figure by 4%. China’s number is off by 37%, or 520 million people. And this is at a time when life expectancy for China has been increasing.
Analysis of various other population factor considerations snipped.
“I asked AI to recalculate everything by replacing the official fertility of 1.7 and 1.5 from the year to 2000 to 2010 replaced them with Dr. Yi Fuxian [University of Wisconsin Madison demographic researcher whose work we previously mentioned here] fertility assessment of 1.1. It came up with a shocking total population of 695 million, and that’s less than half of the announced population of 1.4 billion.”
We didn’t see a huge drop in economic output because China’s economy is investment driven.
“Population loss took place over 30 years, and particularly started since 2000, and this reduction in population didn’t show up as reduction in consumer spending until this generation reached the age of 18, or even older, when they started to spend money. So now we start to see the impact on consumer spending because there’s a time lag.
Plus Flu Manchu deaths.
“China suddenly saw a wave of kindergarten closures, so in some cases private kindergartens have been shrunk by 20% in some regions.”
“So for all these factors combined, I think China’s real population may be between 600 million and to 800 million.”
Given the GDP overstatement estimates, this enormous overstatement of China’s population seems plausible. It also makes all those wild claims of “China will soon overtake the US economically” look even more ridiculous.
China’s “one child per couple” policy will be seen by future generations as one of the greatest self-inflicted catastrophes in history.
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15 Responses to “China’s Population Only 600 to 800 million?”
Wikipedia gives the populations of 182 cities in 2020.. Totaling those up gives 495M. Statista.com gives the urbanization of China as 61.43%. This gives a total population of 806M.
If we work backwards: assume the initial population of 1.4B and the same urbanization fraction, we get an urban population of 860M. assuming an average “town” size of 50K, this means there would have to be ANOTHER 7,300 towns, with 539M people not living in any of those 7300 towns.
doing the same comparison w/the US gives
US cities : 98M (given) -> 82.66% -> 118.5M
US Pop: 274M <- 82.66% <- 331M (given)
whjch gives 3520 "towns" w/an average of 50K.and 57M not living in even those towns.
I'm not sure if this bolsters or undercuts her figures. But it's another look at the populations independent of her methodology.
Small correction should be 540M for Chinese not living in the towns
Numbers for China in same format as the US
Chinese cities: 495M (given) -> 61.43% -> 806M
Chines Pop: 860M <- 61.43% <- 1.4B (given)
which gives 7300 "towns" w/an average of 50K and 540M not living his those towns
The Chinese decided to continue the one-child practice even after the government abandoned it. Once they got a taste of the good life, they didn’t want to lose it by being burdened with additional kids.
Also, this analysis doesn’t mention the “bare branches” problem of millions of excess men as a result of the murder of millions of their baby sisters during the one-child policy period and Chinese traditional cultural preference for male children. When you kill off baby girls, who’s going to produce babies twenty years later?
The restrictions and oppressiveness of China’s “social credit” and surveillance society have their impact as well. If you make people’s lives miserable enough, they won’t want to bring children into that world. China’s current aggressiveness and posturing is due to their cratering population of military-age men. If they don’t make their moves soon, they won’t have the bodies to make threats in the future.
China the highest abortion rate per 1,000 women ages 15 to 49 of any country in the world. You will know that the CCP Politburo Standing Committee is finally serious about arresting their population decline when they ban abortion.
If China’s population is 500,000,000 overstated then it should come as no surprise that the country is awash in ghost cities.
Moreover, occupancy rates for the vacant properties cannot significantly increase unless loan terms become so favorable that each and every Chinese citizen becomes the owner of his own apartment.
Given that no such conditions prevail in even the wealthiest countries, China’s real estate build-out has been exposed as a monstrous malinvestment.
The Central Planners made a complete hash of the real estate market. Given that real estate assets comprise the majority of Chinese equity holdings, the shock of writing down these inflated holdings will devastate the banking industry.
It is unclear how long the day of reckoning may be forestalled but Chinese disinvestment ought to be a priority for every money manager’s portfolio.
Back in the 1970s, Robert and Virginia Heinlein visited the (then) Soviet Union. In an essay (anthologized in Expanded Universe) entitled “Pravda Means Truth,” he shared his observations.
One of them was an estimate of Moscow’s population, then officially around (IIRC) 2.5 million. Based on his analysis–which is laid out in detail in the essay–he and Ginny estimated Moscow’s actual population at less than a third of the official figure…around 750-800,000. He also discusses some later conversations with others which seemed to vindicate his estimate.
It’s not exactly a state secret that authoritarian and especially totalitarian regimes tend to gundeck their “official” statistics. What’s interesting is that Heinlein’s estimate for Moscow seems to track to the figures for China. One can only conclude that Soviet demographics hadn’t changed in nearly fifty years since Stalin had the demographers who published the 1940(?) census which conclusively demonstrated the results of the Holodomor. And apparently the PRC has taken that page from the USSR’s playbook.
P.S. While I would imagine that the one-child policy exacerbated the problem, I’ve seen an argument that China’s birthrate began its decline several years before the one-child policy was implemented.
the ghost cities are explained by provincial governments selling land for the building of over 3 billion individual habitations, more than double the official population.
I don’t get using AI to compute these numbers. It shouldn’t be that hard to do these calculations for someone with even a little bit of mathematical knowledge. Why trust software that is known for making things up, even in a regime where it seems more likely to be accurate?
Years ago I was bored listening to incoming Chinese province GDP, or something growth. I forget. Anyways, every single report was the same number. From coastal manufacturing to western desert. Couldn’t be, yet officially reported .
We can put some of these factors together: because of their economic growth being investment based instead of consumption based, the central party cannot allow the demographics to be revised downward, as that would immediately impact property values, if there are not enough Chinese of means to acquire them. Moreover, we may infer mass deceit from the bottom up as well, and their longevity numbers are then drawn into question; because it turns out that all of the places with the oldest people are ones with elder welfare, common poverty, official corruption, and incompetent administration of vital statistics, where it is both possible and incentived to lie about great-granddad still being alive (to collect his money).
“But the underlying issue of the faltering economy, in my opinion, is a severe population crisis.”
In this case, “population crisis” is not being used in the Malthusian sense of “too many poor people reproducing”. It signifies too few people to handle the economic challenges posed by labor scarcity.
Labor scarcity is a perennial problem. Marx preached that the proletariat was being inexorably reduced to subsistence wages and the prospect of continuous unemployment because capital was displacing labor. There were too many poor people facing starvation and extinction. Marx and Malthus are joined at the hip on this one point.
Conversely, Mises and Rothbard argued strenuously that labor is the scarcest of all the factors of production because mining and agriculture require labor to “bring in the harvest” and capital cannot be formed unless labor is added to “land” (used in the economic sense of natural resources).
So the fewer laborers (capitalists and their employees), the lower the economic output. So yeah, a 500 million population deficit is ruinous to China’s financial future.
Professor Yi Fuxian who get mentioned above (I believe he’s actually a professor in the UWisconsin medical school – demography is his hobby), believes there are 1.28b Chinese, as opposed to the official figure of 1.42b. That’s 140m missing Chinese.
He focuses on birthrates. He studies all sorts of other indicators of birthrates such as sales of baby carriages, marriage rates, and numbers of doses of vaccines administered to peer behind the official figures. And he often says you should never believe official Chinese government figures.
The figures from any authoritarian state are tough to use for such assessments. Both the State and the people have strong incentives for deception…local officials would likely “fail to notice” some extra children in order to make the compliance rates with the One Child mandate look better, for example. Having a larger population also gives local officials a call for greater resources from the central government (which they can skim to their own benefit). Since there is so much lying going on, you end up with large margins of error in your key metrics (population and fertility rate or growth rate).
Since grown is exponential, it doesn’t even require large errors in the initial conditions (population at time T and fertility rate R) to end up with a badly skewed result.
Wikipedia gives the populations of 182 cities in 2020.. Totaling those up gives 495M. Statista.com gives the urbanization of China as 61.43%. This gives a total population of 806M.
If we work backwards: assume the initial population of 1.4B and the same urbanization fraction, we get an urban population of 860M. assuming an average “town” size of 50K, this means there would have to be ANOTHER 7,300 towns, with 539M people not living in any of those 7300 towns.
doing the same comparison w/the US gives
US cities : 98M (given) -> 82.66% -> 118.5M
US Pop: 274M <- 82.66% <- 331M (given)
whjch gives 3520 "towns" w/an average of 50K.and 57M not living in even those towns.
I'm not sure if this bolsters or undercuts her figures. But it's another look at the populations independent of her methodology.
Small correction should be 540M for Chinese not living in the towns
Numbers for China in same format as the US
Chinese cities: 495M (given) -> 61.43% -> 806M
Chines Pop: 860M <- 61.43% <- 1.4B (given)
which gives 7300 "towns" w/an average of 50K and 540M not living his those towns
The Chinese decided to continue the one-child practice even after the government abandoned it. Once they got a taste of the good life, they didn’t want to lose it by being burdened with additional kids.
Also, this analysis doesn’t mention the “bare branches” problem of millions of excess men as a result of the murder of millions of their baby sisters during the one-child policy period and Chinese traditional cultural preference for male children. When you kill off baby girls, who’s going to produce babies twenty years later?
The restrictions and oppressiveness of China’s “social credit” and surveillance society have their impact as well. If you make people’s lives miserable enough, they won’t want to bring children into that world. China’s current aggressiveness and posturing is due to their cratering population of military-age men. If they don’t make their moves soon, they won’t have the bodies to make threats in the future.
China the highest abortion rate per 1,000 women ages 15 to 49 of any country in the world. You will know that the CCP Politburo Standing Committee is finally serious about arresting their population decline when they ban abortion.
If China’s population is 500,000,000 overstated then it should come as no surprise that the country is awash in ghost cities.
Moreover, occupancy rates for the vacant properties cannot significantly increase unless loan terms become so favorable that each and every Chinese citizen becomes the owner of his own apartment.
Given that no such conditions prevail in even the wealthiest countries, China’s real estate build-out has been exposed as a monstrous malinvestment.
The Central Planners made a complete hash of the real estate market. Given that real estate assets comprise the majority of Chinese equity holdings, the shock of writing down these inflated holdings will devastate the banking industry.
It is unclear how long the day of reckoning may be forestalled but Chinese disinvestment ought to be a priority for every money manager’s portfolio.
[…] COMMIES LIE ABOUT EVERYTHING BUT THOSE NUMBERS SEEM A LITTLE EXTREME: China’s Population Only 600 to 800 million? […]
The wisdom of the Central Planners.
” Too clever by half “.
In this case literally.
Back in the 1970s, Robert and Virginia Heinlein visited the (then) Soviet Union. In an essay (anthologized in Expanded Universe) entitled “Pravda Means Truth,” he shared his observations.
One of them was an estimate of Moscow’s population, then officially around (IIRC) 2.5 million. Based on his analysis–which is laid out in detail in the essay–he and Ginny estimated Moscow’s actual population at less than a third of the official figure…around 750-800,000. He also discusses some later conversations with others which seemed to vindicate his estimate.
It’s not exactly a state secret that authoritarian and especially totalitarian regimes tend to gundeck their “official” statistics. What’s interesting is that Heinlein’s estimate for Moscow seems to track to the figures for China. One can only conclude that Soviet demographics hadn’t changed in nearly fifty years since Stalin had the demographers who published the 1940(?) census which conclusively demonstrated the results of the Holodomor. And apparently the PRC has taken that page from the USSR’s playbook.
P.S. While I would imagine that the one-child policy exacerbated the problem, I’ve seen an argument that China’s birthrate began its decline several years before the one-child policy was implemented.
the ghost cities are explained by provincial governments selling land for the building of over 3 billion individual habitations, more than double the official population.
I don’t get using AI to compute these numbers. It shouldn’t be that hard to do these calculations for someone with even a little bit of mathematical knowledge. Why trust software that is known for making things up, even in a regime where it seems more likely to be accurate?
Years ago I was bored listening to incoming Chinese province GDP, or something growth. I forget. Anyways, every single report was the same number. From coastal manufacturing to western desert. Couldn’t be, yet officially reported .
We can put some of these factors together: because of their economic growth being investment based instead of consumption based, the central party cannot allow the demographics to be revised downward, as that would immediately impact property values, if there are not enough Chinese of means to acquire them. Moreover, we may infer mass deceit from the bottom up as well, and their longevity numbers are then drawn into question; because it turns out that all of the places with the oldest people are ones with elder welfare, common poverty, official corruption, and incompetent administration of vital statistics, where it is both possible and incentived to lie about great-granddad still being alive (to collect his money).
“But the underlying issue of the faltering economy, in my opinion, is a severe population crisis.”
In this case, “population crisis” is not being used in the Malthusian sense of “too many poor people reproducing”. It signifies too few people to handle the economic challenges posed by labor scarcity.
Labor scarcity is a perennial problem. Marx preached that the proletariat was being inexorably reduced to subsistence wages and the prospect of continuous unemployment because capital was displacing labor. There were too many poor people facing starvation and extinction. Marx and Malthus are joined at the hip on this one point.
Conversely, Mises and Rothbard argued strenuously that labor is the scarcest of all the factors of production because mining and agriculture require labor to “bring in the harvest” and capital cannot be formed unless labor is added to “land” (used in the economic sense of natural resources).
So the fewer laborers (capitalists and their employees), the lower the economic output. So yeah, a 500 million population deficit is ruinous to China’s financial future.
Professor Yi Fuxian who get mentioned above (I believe he’s actually a professor in the UWisconsin medical school – demography is his hobby), believes there are 1.28b Chinese, as opposed to the official figure of 1.42b. That’s 140m missing Chinese.
He focuses on birthrates. He studies all sorts of other indicators of birthrates such as sales of baby carriages, marriage rates, and numbers of doses of vaccines administered to peer behind the official figures. And he often says you should never believe official Chinese government figures.
The figures from any authoritarian state are tough to use for such assessments. Both the State and the people have strong incentives for deception…local officials would likely “fail to notice” some extra children in order to make the compliance rates with the One Child mandate look better, for example. Having a larger population also gives local officials a call for greater resources from the central government (which they can skim to their own benefit). Since there is so much lying going on, you end up with large margins of error in your key metrics (population and fertility rate or growth rate).
Since grown is exponential, it doesn’t even require large errors in the initial conditions (population at time T and fertility rate R) to end up with a badly skewed result.