Yi Fuxian

Opinion | How Chinese officials inflated the nation’s birth rate and population size for 2019

The unexplained discrepancies in official data from different sources only underline how the government manipulates the figures to justify its population control policies and allow past mistakes to go unpunished

Reading Time:4 minutes

Why you can trust SCMP

China’s fertility rate has decreased over the years, along with a decline in infant mortality, a rise in contraception and divorce rates, a delay in the marriage age, and a decrease in people’s willingness to raise children. Photo: Xinhua

Yi Fuxian

Published: 11:00am, 28 Jan 2020Updated: 2:10pm, 17 Feb 2020

China’s official demographic data in 2019 has seriously overestimated the country’s actual birth rate and population size, a grave mistake that will lead to disastrous policymaking if leaders blindly take these numbers as fact．

My estimates show that China’s actual population size should be 1.279 billion at the end of 2019, or 121 million fewer than the officially stated 1.4 billion. The actual number of births in China last year should be about 10 million instead of 14.65 million, as reported by the National Bureau of Statistics.

It doesn’t require rocket science to see the absurdity of China’s official demographic data. For instance, the statistics bureau said China had 15.23 million births in 2018, but the Health Statistics Yearbook compiled by China’s health care authority, which cover new births in all hospitals, showed that there were only 13.62 million.

The hospital delivery rate is 99.9 per cent in China, which may account for some of the discrepancy of 1.61 million births. But this still doesn’t account for the bulk of the 1.61 million “births”.

Nurses take care of a newborn baby at a hospital in Qinhuangdao in Hebei province on January 24. The statistics bureau said China had 15.23 million births in 2018, but the Health Statistics Yearbook recorded only 13.62 million. Photo: Xinhua

In fact, the number of births released in the Health Statistics Yearbook is overestimated. For example, the yearbook announced that there were 14.54 million births in 2015, but the micro-census showed that only 11 million people were actually born.