The Chinese New Year period is the peak travel time for Chinese people. During this period, people working in different cities (including migrant workers) return to their hometown and then afterwards come back to the cities where they work. Also many people travel for tourism.
According to China’s Ministry of Transportation, in the 40-day Chinese New Year period (15 days before the New Year and 25 days after), there were 4.7 billion person-times (if a person rode the train 3 times, it would be counted as 3 person-times) travelling in China in 2023. That number was .57 billion in 2019 (the last year before COVID spread). Travel went down by 924 million person-times.
This could indicate a huge population loss (t could be in the hundreds of millions) in China due to COVID, but the Chinese Communist Party just hid the information.
There are other sources indirectly supporting the suspicion. In June 2022, hacker “ChinaDan” obtained data from the Shanghai Public Security Bureau’s database of individual information. The database had information (name, birth date, address, picture, phone number, etc.) of only 970 million people.
In 2021, overseas media reported that internal data from the Ministry of Public Security showed that China had only 780 million ID cards at that time (an ID card is mandatory for every Chinese citizen who is over 16 years of age). According to China’s Seventh Census in 2020, 81 percent of the people in China were 16 or above. Assuming all the 780 million ID cards are for these people, then the total population would be 960 million.
Source: Epoch Times, March 11, 2023
https://www.epochtimes.com/gb/23/3/10/n13947106.htmoii