I've been reading this guy's arguments for a long time, can't deny and can't confirm. However, I am skeptical about it. Some data he includes are interesting, like people enrolling in schools.
If there really were 1.28 billion Chinese and not the 1.41B the consequences for CPC, and China would be devastating.
I don't know what his motivation is but his claim is ridiculous.
If the current population was indeed 1.28 billion as he claims, that'd be 10% less than the offcial number. Given how population surveys are carried out, the survey data would have to be manipulated completely from the village and street level all the way up. That's simply impossible.
National population surveys take place every 10 years. Each requires tens of thousands surveyors to visit every village and street, in addition to the numerous statisticians crunching data at the different levels of the government. Before and after the local survey data are added together and rolled up, they are randomly checked to ensure confidence in the result. The published result is not just as simple as someone declaring "China has a population of 1.41 billion as of 2021. Period." The result actually consists of data to the county level at least. It covers not only the head counts but also ages, genders, ethnicities, employments, educations, family relationships, family wealth, etc. The workload would have been enormous to fake all these data perfectly.
If his claim was true, there would have been 130 million fake head count added to the survey. That'd be more than the population of the most populous provinces in China, such as like Henan, Shandong and Guangdong. Where could the politburo have hidden this much fake head counts in the survey result? Even if the politburo could spread the forgery all over the place down to the villages and streets, a 10% difference between the published result and the reality would still be very noticeable to the tens of thousands surveyors and the savvy locals.
In between the national surveys, the surveyors and statisticians do not just spend days drinking tea in their offices. There are rotating surveys at smaller scales all the time to keep the data up to date. To cover the manipulation in national surveys, these smaller surveys would have to be faked systematically and thoroughly, too.
Accurate population data is critical for almost all economical and social activities. It is cross-referenced every day by all government branches to derive the statistics that are per capita, such as unemployment rate, crime rate, birth rate, rate of primary school enrollment, migration trends, just to name a few. A 10% off in the population data would make all these derived stats off by 10%, too.
Not only the government cares about population data, institutions, private and public, also need the accurate data to run their business. Can you imagine China Telecom, Alibaba and Ctrip planning their business with population data that's 10% off and not realizing the discrepancy over this many years?
