China’s National Bureau of Statistics announced in January this year that, at the end of 2019, the country’s population exceeded 1.4 billion. However, an Indian economist pointed out the data on population was falsified, especially the fictitious male-to-female ratio, in an effort to conceal China’s imminent population crisis.
On September 9, Shailendra Raj Mehta, an Indian economist, published an article called “A Shrinking China” in The India Express, an English language national daily newspaper in India. In addition to the serious falsification of population data in recent years, Mehta claimed that the falsification was to maintain the status of “the world’s most populous country,” and to conceal the severely unbalanced sex ratio and the rapidly declining labor force. He predicted that, within 10 years, China’s population problem would inevitably surface.
The article gave an example from the 2000 China Census data. At that time, there were 90.15 million people in the 5 to 10 age range. 15 years later, the same group reached the ages between 20 and 25 years-of-age. At that time, that is in the year 2015, the group had a population of 100.31 million, according to China’s official statistics. The number did not shrink due to normal deaths, but increased by at least 10 million people.
Mehta follow this reasoning in 2018, which had the latest figures which are available. That number swelled to 113.38 million, meaning that there were 23.23 million extra ghost people. Of these, 9.8 million were men, while 13.35 million were women. He concluded in the article “Hardline Chinese elements today are convinced that it is their destiny to be the dominant power in the world. They are eager to colonize the South China Sea and to show the U.S. and India their place. They wish to invade and occupy Taiwan. This combination of arrogance and obfuscation is volatile and always ends in tragedy.”
Source: 6do.news, September 10, 2020
https://6do.news/article/3172752-60
The Indian Express, September 9, 2020
https://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/china-population-crisis-birthrate-one-child-policy-6588472/