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By Micah McCartney
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China has long been over-reporting its population, over 100 million people fewer than officially claimed, a Chinese scientist told Newsweek, a claim met with strong resistance from demography circles.
Yi Fuxian, an obstetrician at University of Wisconsin-Madison who conducts demography research, said the censuses China carries out every 10 years are "seriously overestimated" in an effort to match official estimates. The annual data should be corrected with the census data, he said.
China's population, which Beijing put at 1.41 billion as of 2023, remains the second largest in the world, surpassed last year by India. Questions over the population calculation come as the country grapples with the twin challenges of dropping fertility rates and a growth in the number of senior citizens, a trend many analysts fear will drag on the country's economy.
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China's fertility rate, or births expected per woman during her lifetime, amid the rising cost of living in major cities and shifting cultural attitudes toward having children, is 1.0. This puts the country in the company of neighboring South Korea (0.72), Japan (1.2), and Taiwan (estimated to be 0.85).
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Yi called the implications of inaccurate population reporting "hard to overstate." "It means that China's decades of population control policies are all wrong and that all of China's economic, foreign, and defense policies, as well as those of the U.S. and other countries towards China, are based on faulty demographic data."
The researcher cited the Chinese statistics bureau's earlier reports that there had been about 203 million births between 1991 and 2000 and 79 million deaths, putting its population estimate at 1.27 billion for the turn of the century. The 2000 census came up short, so officials launched a campaign to add tens of millions of "missing" people, bringing the official population close to initial estimates, Yi said.
But a closer look at demographics showed a glaring disparity, Yi said. Around 164.24 million babies were born between 1991 and 2000. After accounting for these births and subtracting deaths and net migration, there were about 40 million fewer Chinese than reported.
Newsweek reached out to the Chinese Foreign Ministry via emailed requests for comment.
'No Evidence'
"Dr. Yi is an early and courageous individual to criticize China's harmful birth control policies," said Feng Wang, sociology professor at the University of California, Irvine.
But Wang disputes Yi's conclusions. "Scholars in China and at the U.N. have analyzed these and other data. Not a single person has 'discovered' such a huge discrepancy."
"China has had at least three censuses since the start of the millennium, and there has been no evidence that more than 100 million people are over-reported in China," Wang said.
Wang argued that Yi's conclusion, that a number of people comparable to the population of Japan do not exist, "is no light business."
'Incentive To Inflate'
China dropped its three-decade one-child policy in 2016, allowing for two and, from 2022, three children per family. Yi believes the country should have ended this policy in 1991, the year he believes China's fertility rate dropped below the replacement level of 2.1 births per woman.
In 2023, China's population was officially reported as 1.41 billion, a decline of approximately 2.08 million from the previous year. Yet Yi maintains the true figure is about 130 million people smaller.
"Economically, China's local governments have a strong incentive to inflate population figures," Yi said. "More residents mean larger fiscal transfers from the central government, including funds for priorities like education, pensions, and poverty alleviation.
"The political cost is so great that the Chinese authorities dare not admit the true population figures," he said.
U.N. Data
China is not alone in over-reporting its population, according to the demographer.
The United Nations on June 11 released its 28th annual report on population estimates and projections, with an estimate of 1.42 billion for China, which is even further off the mark than Beijing's numbers, according to Yi.
"In fact, the U.N.'s population projections for China have always been wildly exaggerated. He pointed out that the global body's 2012 estimate for China was 1.44 billion," which the country has never reached.
Patrick Garland, who heads population estimates and projections section at the U.N., pushed back against Yi's claims.
"We conduct extensive data evaluation and use all the different sources of information available, including reconciling them over time, by age and cohorts," he told Newsweek, stressing the agency does not take China's statistics at face value.
After decades of reining in population growth, China is facing what many analysts view as a demographic crisis.
Wang, the sociology professor, previously told Newsweek that the trend is "long-term, irreversible, and deep," pointing out that by 2050, the median age of Chinese will be over 50, up from 40 at the start of the century.
Update 7/19/24, 3:15 a.m. ET: This article has been updated with additional context and comments.
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