China’s Population Declines For The First Time In Decades. Have 400 Million Died? 

China’s Population Declines For The First Time In Decades. Have 400 Million Died? 

Jennifer Zeng
Commentaries 時評, Journalism 我的報導, Vlog 视频

Hello, everyone! Welcome to “Inconvenient Truths”. I am your host Jennifer Zeng. 

Today I will talk about two related issues: China’s first population decline in 6 decades, and an astonishing death toll revealed by a low-key person who almost never talks to the media, but whom the CCP hates most. Mr. Li Hongzhi, the founder of the spiritual discipline Falun Gong, told the Chinese edition of the Epoch Times that 400 million Chinese people have died during the past 3 years. Is that possible? I will discuss this today. 

China Records 1st Recent Population Decline

Today (Jan 17),  the CCP’s National Bureau of Statistics reported that China’s population was 1.41175 billion people at the end of 2022. And this was a decrease of 850 K from the end of the previous year. There were 9.56 million births — a record-low birth rate of 6.77 per thousand — and 10.41 million deaths. 

So this is the first population decline since the Great Leap Forward movement in 1960, when tens of millions starved to death. 

I will talk about the population decline and its relationship with the pandemic in a moment.  

Have 400 Million Died?

Two days ago, on Jan 15, the Chinese edition of the Epoch Times published an astonishing report with an astonishing title: “Founder of Falun Gong: The CCP Covers up the Pandemic, Death Toll in China Hits 400 Million”.

I tweeted this report and a simple translation of several main figures in the report, and have received a lot of comments, retweets, and likes.

I read through the first 200 comments. Almost all of them are negative, saying that they don’t believe the numbers at all.

So today I’d like to talk about why I tweeted this article, and why it is important for us to know that we don’t know.

I don’t want to try to convince anybody, but I do strongly feel a desire to share what’s in my mind and heart, and why I took the risk of being called an idiot, a liar, to tweet about such a shocking report. 


Three Main Informations Channels-All Unreliable, Blocked, or Only Fragmented 


First of all, we must admit that we have no idea what the true numbers are at all. 

The CCP was still saying that there were only 37 deaths in one month on Jan 8. Then, only 6 days later, on Jan 14, the number suddenly jumped to 59,938. From 37 to nearly 60 thousand, no explanation at all why the gap was so huge. 

We usually have 3 channels to get data: the official statistic, media reports, and hearsay, or what you personally experienced, or learned from people around you. 

But with the COVID-related numbers in China, none of the three channels are reliable. The CCP has been lying the entire time, and the media is not allowed to report the truth whatsoever. 

In contrast to the first two channels, it is the third one, the hearsay, that gives us some fragmented facts. From various social media posts and videos, we can learn a little bit of something here and there. 

However, every individual can usually only get access to a few facts or some hearsay here and there, which all have limitations.  

So overall, we must, first of all, admit that we don’t know the numbers. Since we don’t know, we should not easily or readily reject any new numbers we hear. How can we say a number is NOT true when we don’t know the true number to begin with?

The capacity of Cremators in China

Secondly, let’s look at the numbers and capacity of cremators in China. 

According to the CCP’s official numbers, in 2021, the year-end national population is 1.416 billion, with 10.14 million deaths. So the mortality rate is 7.18‰.

On March 18, 2022, the official website of the Ministry of Civil Affairs announced that the total number of cremated bodies in 2021 was 5.963 million, based on this calculation, the cremation rate in 2021 was: 5.963/10.14=58.8%

How many cremators are there in China?  The official website of the Ministry of Civil Affairs announced that by the end of 2021, there were 7,043 cremation furnaces in the country. 

Usually, 45 minutes are needed to cremate a body. Recently, almost all cremators in China are operating 24 hours every day. Sometimes several bodies are cremated together, sometimes bodies are discarded before they are fully cremated. 

Let’s suppose the current wave of outbreaks will last 4 months, and one body is cremated every 30 minutes. Then how many bodies can be cremated in China?

It is 7043*24*2*120=40.57 million

As the cremation rate is 58.8%, so the total death number could be 40.57/58.8%=68.99 million.

So this is a rough number for the current wave of outbreaks over a period of 4 months. If the outbreaks have lasted for three years, then the number can easily surpass hundreds of millions. 

Population Decline

Now let’s look at the population numbers.

We all know that China started to establish the “One Family, One Child” policy as a basic state policy in 1979. It is estimated that during the several decades this policy was in effect, as many as 400 million unborn babies were killed. In those days, having a second child could be regarded as a criminal offense. 

So in those years, to stress the achievement of adopting the “One Child” policy, local officials and the CCP tended to underreport the population. 

Former law professor Yuan Hongbing mentioned in his book “The Taiwan Crisis” that he learned from a senior official of the CCP's Ministry of Civil Affairs that the actual population of China was 1.53 billion in 2005. But the CCP claimed then that China’s population was 1.3 billion. On the one hand, the CCP wanted to boast about its “success" with its “One Child” policy, on the other hand, it didn’t want to alarm the world. In 2006, the world’s population was 6.67 billion. If China had 1.53 billion, that would account for 23% of the earth’s population. The world might be alarmed by this number and raise concerns of a possible food crisis. 

By the way, the book “The Taiwan Crisis” was first published in 2009. 

I don’t know how many people still remember that in 2021, the CCP delayed the release of its 2020 census results on more than one occasion, and was only able to finally release the numbers in May. Usually, this number is released in January.  I did a show to talk about this. Why did it delay the figures again and again? Because it needed to polish the numbers, and it took 5 months to polish the numbers for 2020. Why? 

The CCP later said that its population was 1.41 billion. 

However, as early as Nov. 16, 2020, a well-known demographer and author Yi Fuxian said that he projected the actual population of China in 2020 to be about 1.26 billion, and isn’t likely to exceed 1.28 billion.

In June last year, he insisted that China only had less than 1.28 billion people. 

In July last year, a hacker claimed to have stolen personal information from the Shanghai police on one billion Chinese citizens. This is said to be one of the biggest data breaches in human history.

Yi Fuxian later said, this data theft on 1 billion Chinese citizens confirmed his view that China had less than 1.28 billion people.  His reasoning is, if there were only 1 billion personal records in that database, it indicated that China had only 1 billion people. 

An IT engineer also said that when one used the Elastic Search server to build a big data search system for the Shanghai Public Security Bureau, all the data needs to be sent to ElasticSearch for the system to analyze and sort. And only that way can one do a complete search. So the data was complete. 

As a matter of fact, the database only contained information about 970 million people. That could probably be the true population of China. 

So if China had 1.53 billion people in 2005, but only has 1 billion, or 1.28 billion people now, what happened to 500 million people between then and now?

Mr. Li Hongzhi also said in the Epoch Times report that “over 200 million people in China died during the SARS epidemic between 2002 and 2004. Years later when the CCP noticed the dwindling population, it abandoned its one-child policy and started encouraging couples to have a second or even a third child. ”

This is consistent with China’s family plan policy. The CCP first relaxed its “One Family, One Child” policy in Nov. 2013, and introduced a new policy, which allowed couples, who were both the only child of the family, to have 2 children. 

Two years later, in Oct 2015, the CCP allowed all couples to have 2 children. 

And in Oct last year, it allowed all couples to have 3 children. 

8 days ago, a group of Chinese demographers led by Liang Jianzhang published “China Education and Population Report”. The report says that the excessive education burden is too heavy for families, and is the most important reason for China’s low fertility rate. So the report suggests abolishing the secondary school entrance examination and shortening the school year by 2 years. 

What does this mean? It means cutting the current number of school years from 12 to 10, so that students can graduate from high school at the age of 16 instead of 18. Then they can quickly get married and have children.

The report has so far received a lot of public anger and criticism. It shows how desperate the CCP is to increase its sharply dropped population. 

Death of Celebrities


I shared on Twitter the news of many celebrities’ deaths recently. I said that “celebrities' deaths are more difficult to hide, as their workplaces or families usually publish the news to show respect.”

These are the numbers of celebrities’ deaths announced by Wikipedia.

In the first 10 days of 2022, only 12 Chinese celebrities died. In the same period this year, Wikipedia published 209 Chinese celebrities’ deaths. That’s 17 times the number of last year’s. 

If the annual number of deaths in China is about 10 million during normal years, 10 million times 17 is 170 million. If this number is multiplied by 3, it is 510 million. 

Survivorship Bias

Some people ask, is it possible that 400 million have died in 3 years? That’s over 365 K people per day. How can so many people disappear without being noticed by the outside world?

Well, first of all, dead people don’t talk. They won’t tell you that they have died. 

Secondly, there are 2843 counties in China. So 365 K with 2843 counties, that is 128 persons per day. 128 persons in one county is not that terribly hard to imagine. 

We know that about 14% of people in the former Soviet Union died during WWII.  Did anybody outside of the Soviet Union feel much from the deaths then?

One might say it is nothing strange for people to die in a war. As a matter of fact, in human history, what’s caused the most deaths has been pandemics, not war. 

Thirdly, let’s look at this table.

This is the per capita monthly income and the percentage of China's population in 2019. 

The top row shows that there were 5.46 million people in China who had less than a 0 yuan income in 2019, and that’s 0.39% of the population. 

The second row shows that there were more than 215 million, or 15.42 % of people in China, whose monthly income was between 0-500 yuan, that’s less than $73.81.

And look at the two rows at the bottom in the red circle. These are people whose monthly income is above 5000 yuan, or $738. Only these people are the most likely to have access to the internet and a smartphone, and only these people are likely to have a voice on the internet and in public venues. 

And these people only account for about 5% of the population. These people enjoy the best living standards and best medical conditions in China. And they might not accurately speak for the rest of the 95% of people, or even know what happened to them. 

In the past two days, I tweeted quite a few cases of 3, or even 6 members of one family dying within 5 days or a very short period of time. 

Back in 2020, there was a true case of 4 family members dying out within 15 days. As one of them was a 55-year-old movie director, whose name was Chang Kai, this case made media reports. 

I also reported his story. 

Again, Chang Kai’s story became known because he himself posted on social media about the deaths of his parents and sister before he died himself. If he hadn’t done that, perhaps nobody would know that this family had died out.

In China, there are about 509 million people living in the countryside. Whatever happens to these people, city people might be clueless. So who can make noise for these people? Probably no one.

Mr. Li Hongzhi also said, when the pandemic is over, 500 million people in China will die. I think this 500 million also includes the 400 million who have already died. So another 100 million will die.

Mr. Li didn’t disclose how he knew about the numbers. The reason I am talking about this is, if 500 million really die, how will that impact China, the CCP’s regime, and the Chinese economy?

If China really only has 1 billion people, instead of 1.4 billion now, how can its labor-intensive industries, as well as the real estate market sustain itself? All these will have a profound impact on the world. 

We are really living in a fast-changing world. Maybe we need to prepare ourselves for even more shocking numbers and facts.

Well, that’s all for today. Thank you very much for watching. Please don’t forget to subscribe to my channel if you haven’t. If you are already subscribed, please like and share my content, and double-check that you are still subscribed. 

Also, if you could, please go to my website at jenniferzengblog.com, sign up for a membership, or make a donation to support my truth-telling efforts. 

Thank you. See you next time! 

1/17/2023 *

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