County in Sichuan Lost 22% of People. Two Personal Stories: Why Are Things So Different in China?

County in Sichuan Lost 22% of People. Two Personal Stories: Why Are Things So Different in China?

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. 

I know the number of 400 million deaths in China has shocked many people.  I myself was greatly shocked too. I must admit that I can’t prove this number is true. But, what many people haven’t realized is, we cannot prove that it is untrue as well. Only one thing is true: We don’t know the true numbers. So today I will present several other facts and estimations, and most importantly, I’d like to explain why it’s hard to use what someone knows about and has experienced in other countries to imagine, or make judgments about things in China. If you don’t know anyone from China it might be challenging to get an accurate idea of the unique differences. I’d like to share some of these differences with you.  So make sure you stick around till the end.

Sharp Population Decline in 3 Counties in Sichuan Province


We talked about how it took the CCP 5 months to polish its 2020 population numbers in 2021. Why did it take so long in such an advanced big-data age? Because it is difficult to fake a whole set of everything without leaving some loopholes. 

However, with some local governments, they don’t have to consider how to balance the overall figures. So when they release their population numbers, they might not have that big of a need to create fake ones.

So let’s check the population numbers of 3 counties in Sichuan Province. The data came from the local government’s own website. Some of the census bulletins have been taken down, but are still available via stored records on the internet, such as Baidu's web snapshot. 

So this is the 2020 resident population number of five counties in Bazhong (巴中市) City in Sichuan Province.  See the highlighted number in yellow. 521,875, that’s the population of Tongjiang County in 2020.

This is the table for Tongjiang County in 2019. At the end of 2019, there were 723,126 people on the household registration, but only 670.6 K permanent residents. So we will take this number for comparison purposes. 

These are the numbers for three counties in Sichuan Province: Tongjiang County (通江县) , Nanjiang County (南江县), and Pingchang County (平昌县).

You can see for Tongjiang County, the population dropped from 670.6 K in 2019 to 521.9K in 2020. That’s a 22% drop.

In Nanjiang County (南江县), the population dropped from 670.2 K in 2018 to 467.6K in 2020, that’s a 30% drop.

In Pingchang County (平昌县), the population dropped from 790.4 K in 2018 to 658.6K in 2020. That’s a 17% drop. 

Take Tongjiang County for example, the 670.6 K was the number at the end of 2019. The 521.9K was the number by Nov 1, 2020.  This is to say, in only 10 months, this county lost 148.7 K people. 

You might say that some people might have left their hometowns to work in other cities. But remember, COVID broke out at the end of 2019, and at that time, because of the Chinese New Year and the lockdowns, many migrant workers chose to go back to their hometowns, and didn’t leave after they spent the New Year with their families. 

See this screenshot from a Baidu search. The two reports in the red circle at the bottom were all from TongJiang government’s website, both published in Mar 2020, and both say that many peasants came back to Sichuan to farm, instead of going to Guangzhou to work. 

The strange, and not too strange thing is, when I clicked on the two reports, what I got was the same thing, the report was not available. Why?

Anyway, this confirms the fact that farmers in Tongjiang County were going back to Tongjiang from other cities in 2020. 

The title of the second report says this, “Tongjiang County has helped 46 K migrant workers to resume employment.” The report says that one villager called Pu Jiahe initially planned to go to Guangzhou to work, and was convinced by a village leader to stay, and would grow green peppers at home instead, etc. 

So from these, we can reasonably say that the loss of 148.7 K, or 22% of people in 10 months in this county was mainly caused by the pandemic. 

If one county could lose 22% of its population in 10 months, is it that hard to imagine that the entire country could have possibly lost 30% of its population in 3 years?

Cremators, Employees, Enterprises, and a Possible Death Number

Now, let’s check the numbers of cremators, employees in the funeral service industry, and funeral service-related enterprises in China.

These are the number from this official website. I have copied the website address and put it in purple color at the top, so you can check the numbers yourself. (Archived here: https://web.archive.org/web/20230122212818/https://www.ceicdata.com/zh-hans/china/funeral-service-overview)

These are the numbers of cremators in China, from 2010 to 2021. You can see that the number for 2021 is 7043.

These are the numbers of employees in the funeral service industry in the past 10 years. You can see the number peaked in 2015, and went down till it reached a new low in 2019. Then it jumped sharply to a new record high in 2021.

These are the numbers of registered funeral service-related enterprises in China from 2015 to 2022. It shows steady growth until 2021. 

So if the number of cremators, employees, and enterprises all started to grow in 2019, it means that the funeral industry has been operating at its full capacity, right? Otherwise, you don’t need to buy new cremators and hire new employees.

So let’s do a most conservative calculation. Suppose each cremator only works for 8 hours per day. And each body needs 45 minutes to cremate. 

So 7043 cremators can handle 27.42 million bodies a year.

Given the cremation rate is 58.8%, so the total death number is 46.63 million a year.

And in 3 years, this number is nearly 140 million.

But we all know that since Dec last year, all the crematoriums have been overwhelmed. They have been operating 24 hours a day, and sometimes several bodies were cremated together. So the actual cremation number could be doubled, or even tripled.

Well, that’s a little bit of calculation based on the cremator number.

Instinctive Reaction and Rational Thinking

When people heard the number 400 million, the first reaction could be it is too hard to believe, or this is just impossible. For many people, this might be either an instant and instinctive reaction, or a judgment based on their current knowledge and experience. 
I think the main reasons why many people find this number hard to believe are: 1. It is impossible to hide such a large number of deaths. 2. It is impossible for society to maintain normal operation with so many people dying. 

Well, for the first reason, I discussed in my last show how the three main channels to gain information are blocked. So it might not be that hard for the CCP to hide things from the world. Don’t think it is impossible. 

I remember in the days when the Internet first thrived in the world, people were hopeful that the internet would bring free information and thus freedom and democracy to Chinese people, as the foundation of the internet is that everything is inter-connected, and there is no way to block information on the internet. 

Well, after only some 20-30 years, the CCP proved to these people that they were wrong. The CCP can cut Chinese people off from the internet outside of China, and create a closed environment with the Internet for Chinese people. 

So don’t assume that the CCP is not able to cover up the deaths of 1/3 of the population. 
The second basis of disbelief is: Society won’t be able to operate with so many people dying. 

Well, we all know that it was widely reported that as many as 75% of Twitter employees planned or threatened to leave the company after Elon Musk purchased it. 

This report says 1200 employees left Twitter. 

My point here is, if the media has not talked about this, and you don’t know any Twitter employees or their friends or relatives, although you are using Twitter every day, will you feel or know that so many people have left Twitter?

No, you won’t. Twitter is still operating well after losing so many people. 

A popular Chinese language YouTuber, professor Zhang Tianliang at Fei Tian College, also shared his personal experience in his show. He said he once worked for the IT department at a hospital in China. There were about 20-plus people in his department when he first started to work there. But after a while, many people left. At one point, only 5 or 6 people remained. So they became extremely busy. But they managed to maintain normal operations, and people outside his department knew nothing or very little about the fact that they had lost so many people. 

So, the two main reasons for us to not believe the number may not be that reliable or solid. 

On the contrary, if you think rationally, you may find that you have no way to disprove the number. 

So the rational thinking is, we don’t know the true number, so we’d better not dismiss any numbers unless we can disprove them. 

Two Logics, Two Worlds

Next, I’d like to talk about 2 personal stories to demonstrate why one can’t use what he or she knows from the western world to judge or imagine things in China.

The first one is very recent.

The other day when I tweeted this video showing many people lining up outside a crematorium with coffins,  someone left a comment, saying “If they have coffins why are they lining up to be cremated?”

I simply replied, "They have a coffin, but they don't have grave land. Grave land can be very expensive. Most people can't afford that. Watch this.”

Then I posted a video showing people in Shenyang City digging holes in the ground and selling them for 20-30 K each.


Perhaps many people don’t know the living conditions and environment in China. 

Many years ago, in 1997, I was still living in an apartment in Beijing. 

We threw away the trash through such a hole that went all the way down to the ground level, to the trash bin there. There was no requirement that we separate recyclable items. 

But there were people like him who traveled through apartment buildings and collected paper boxes, books, and other recyclable items. Actually, we sold those things to them, and they would then sell them to factories at a higher price. So these people made a living out of this.
Anyway, I had a large amount of not-too-good books, which I wanted to get rid of. I didn’t want to sell them, as I didn’t want other people to read them. So I decided to destroy them. 

I first tried to soak them in water. But I didn’t have big enough containers to hold all the books. I later tried to burn them in the hallway next to the garbage outlet and then throw them down the hole. However, that almost caused a fire inside the garbage bin on the ground floor, and somebody protested loudly against it.

What could I do? Later I had to put all these books inside my car, drove dozens of miles away from the city, and finally found a place where I could burn these books without causing any trouble. 

If I didn’t have a car, and had to take a bus to travel away from the city, that would be more of a hassle. 

Anyway, my point here is, even trying to burn a bunch of books was a big challenge in a city in China, so how can you easily deal with dead bodies?  City people don’t have one inch of land on which they can bury anything. 

Another story happened many years ago. 

You know, I escaped from China to Australia in 2001 after being nearly tortured to death in a Beijing Female Labor Camp for practicing Falun Gong. I later gained refugee status from the Austrian government. 

In 2004, I finished writing my memoir about what happened to me in China and especially in the labor camp.  And the title of the book is “Witnessing History: One woman's fight for freedom and Falun Gong” in case you’d like to take a look. 

Before the book was published, my publisher had an editor edit the manuscript I submitted. There was such a sentence in my book, “In 1981, I moved from Hanwang Town to Mianyang City with my father. ”

Without consulting me, my Australian editor crossed out the “father” and changed it to “parents”. So the sentence became “I moved from Hanwang Town to Mianyang City with my parents. ”

In her opinion, if I moved from one city to another, I should have moved with my parents instead of with my father. The whole family should move together. So she thought I might have confused “parents” with “father” because my English was not good enough.

I said to her, no, please change parents back to father. She did not know, in China, at that time, anyone who worked for a state-owned workplace needed the government’s permission to move. My mother didn’t have permission. So she couldn’t move with my father. 

I have two sisters. So my younger sister stayed with my mother in Hanwang, while my elder sister and I moved to Mianyang with my father. Until I left Mianyang for Beijing for my university education in 1984, my mother was still in Hanwang. It took her 4 years to get permission to join my father in Mianyang.

So that’s the reality in China. So it’s not that my editor could correctly edit my book only based on her English skills. She could get something wrong simply because she wasn’t familiar enough with Chinese society, and make judgments based on her own life experiences in Australia.

I know many experts say that millions could die in China during this wave of the pandemic. All of their models were based on figures from other countries. So their bases could be all off, to begin with.

People sometimes say, there are two types of logic in the world. One is logic, another is CCP logic.

I totally agree with this saying. So to expand it a little bit, we can also say there are two kinds of worlds on the earth, one is the CCP’s world, one is the non-CCP’s world. 

Do you agree?

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! 

1/19/2023 *

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