Apropos of yesterday’s subject, population decline, China’s population collapse was a focus but not the focus. On YouTube, however, many “content creators” are focusing more acutely on China’s version of the problem. The ‘This Thread’ podcast claims, for instance, that China’s situation is much worse than compared to that of the U.S.:
A number of YouTubers are concentrating on a much bolder claim: that the CCP has been lying about its population for years, and that the total population is a tiny fraction of what officials claim. This presenter argues, for instance, that the country’s population is probably less than half a billion:
Look around on YouTube, and you’ll find video after video portraying China’s biggest cities as seemingly empty! Where did they all go? That’s their question. These YouTubers also suggest that Chinese pandemic deaths have been extraordinarily high, persistent, and consistently covered up.
Caution: most outside observers consider this YouTube trend a species of folk fiction, something like the dreaded “conspiracy theory”: false, hyperbolic, crazy — not to put too fine a point on it. But we do know that governments lie; we know that communists lie with more alacrity and out of greater necessity — so maybe there is something to the notion that 1.4 billion people is not just a small statistical fib, but the grandest example of the Big Lie.
One reply on “China’s Hidden Decline”
Much of the evidence presented on the ‘Net about Chinese population size is very weak, though appealing to an audience that wants to estimate the population by literally looking at people and at places.
Moreover, the claims often made about deaths due to COVID impute to the virus a deadliness in China that it simply did not have in the rest of the world. (The theorists would be on better ground were they to focus on containment measures as themselves deadly.)
Still, some of the data on consumption suggests that the population of China is now about 900 million people. Still far larger than that of America, but only about two thirds of the official claim.