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.
