WHAT, REALLY, IS CHINA’S POPULATION?

Before we get started with this week's blogs, permit me to wish all of our readers who are celebrating the Western and Orthodox Holy Weeks and Easter and Pascha this week a very wonderful holiday and blessed Pascha.  As a result of this, you may have noted that I did schedule a vidchat for this coming Friday evening (Good Friday), which I hope will be not interfere with those of you attending afternoon services. The blogs this week will be crowded into Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, and there is a strong likelihood that there will be no News and Views on Maundy Thursday, but questions and comments will still be due by 10PM US Central time. There will be no Saturday Honourable mentions this coming Saturday.

Tomorrow will be the beginning of what is effectively a two part blog concerning some recent news events and my usual high octane speculation concerning them. On Thursday, I'll begin another extended series like the "Eschatology of CS Lewis" series. This I do not anticipate will go much longer than two, possibly three, installments over the next couple of weeks. Finally, be aware that they are predicting rain and storms beginning this coming Wednesday, so please remember to keep an eye on the website forum for last minute weather-related schedule changes of the vidchat.

With this said, let us begin this week's blogs with a very strange story shared by S.D., and written by a Chinese woman, that argues that China's real population might be lower than the official statements by some hundreds of millions; the question is, how many?:

Lei's Real Talk: China's Population Is "Somewhere Between 300 and 400 Million"

The essence of Ms. Lei's argument is that China's population has fallen precipitously due to a combination of bad policies:

Lei says the country's population is drastically declining, due to the "Demographic Cliff" caused by an aging population after decades of the CCP's "One Child" policy, plus her estimated 400-500 million COVID deaths since the end of 2019, which she says the CCP is covering-up.

On March 12, Lei said she believed China's actual population was somewhere below 900,000,000, noting four key pieces of evidence:

1. Empty streets and markets
2. A drastic disparity between birth and death rates
3. GROK-3's estimate of the real COVID death toll
4. 5% of people aged 35–44 have died

VIDEO: “Lei’s Real Talk: 400-500 Million “COVID” Deaths in China Since 2019” - Pub. April 10, 2025 by ForbiddenKnowledgeTV.net

 

In the image above, Lei composed an Excel spreadsheet from official Chinese government data, which showed that 5% of the Chinese population aged 35-44 had vanished since 2019. This is the most economically-productive demographic of any population.

If one is having difficulty believing that the covid-and-quackcine planscamdemic could have such a drastic effect, the article cites western insurance actuarial data:

At the time, former Wall Street securities analyst, Edward Dowd reported that these excess deaths occurred in the US during Q3 of 2021 through Q2 of 2022 and was confirmed to him by his personal source at the Society of Actuaries. But this was only the excess deaths among Millennials with good jobs!

Dowd's continued investigations, as of May 2024 revealed that, "About 33 million Americans have been injured, disabled, or died from this vaccine, in our estimate."

• 1.1 million excess deaths
• 4 million people disabled
• 28.6 million vaccine-injured people often missing work, due to chronic illness

Lei ascribes this contemporaneous spike of deaths in China, within the 35-44 demographic – in the prime of their lives – to the "COVID pandemic", however, Edward Dowd correlates the US excess deaths, disability and injuries to the COVID injections, which he calls "The largest global crime against humanity ever seen."

The clincher may be the the Russian estimates of the Chinese population. After all, if any country poses a long-term threat to Russia, it's not so much the out-of-control USSA deep state or the kooky war-hungry nations of Europe, but China. But the Russians come up with very different figures than does the Chinese Communist Party:

Lei states Russian experts determined that it was impossible that China's population ever surged to 1.4 billion, saying:

"Other Russian experts added-up the publicly-available urban population of every Chinese city and county and got only 280 million people and based on the traditional urban-rural population ratio of 1-to-1, they estimated China's actual population being around 560 million."

Perhaps the most interesting argument, however, is from the transcript of Ms. Lei's presentation, where she is relating the on-the-ground experience of Chinese going about their every day business in Shanghai:

Across China people are asking the same question, "Where did everyone go?

(Roll several video posts by young people of what has become a viral trend in China, to describe the obvious abrupt population decline they see around them, saying that the usual influx of people returning to Beijing following the New Year holiday did not occur. Instead, the streets are empty, with a large number of homes up for rent, empty offices and no traffic at typically-congested intersections, with people asking "Where did 8 million Beijingers go?"

Shanghai residents are making similar video posts about the noticeable population decrease there and how the streets, the popular restaurants and malls are all half-empty, saying the city's famous nightlife has become much quieter. One post from a man in an A-line subway train in Shanghai is striking, with him as the sole person in the entire car.

We see similar video posts from residents and people in the real estate market of Guangzhou, the center of the largest megalopolis in the world)

Lei: What we saw is the situation in Beijing, Shanghai Guangzhou, the three Mega Cities of China and many people assume that maybe people in those large cities or Mega Cities had simply left for better opportunities in Second-Tier cities or they might have returned to their hometowns in the countryside.

Now, let's take a look at what's happening in the smaller cities.

(Roll video where young residents of smaller cities, like Zuzhai and Wuhan make similar claims to those above. One man in Suzhou remarks that the streets used to be crowded but now, they're almost deserted. He says he's heard similar reports from Shanghai, Yangzhou, Nantong, Wuxi, Changzhou and how all have fewer workers and laborers.

Others remark that the countryside is empty, too, with schools being shut down and streets and shops vacant. They report that "Society feels gloomy and lifeless" and ask "Where did our 1.4 billion people go?")

If all this is true, then it places the strategic calculation - if there was any, and I believe there was - behind the Trump administration's tough Chinese tariff policy into a very different light. If you've been following the media commentary - both pro and con - on Trump's tariffs, you'll have often heard (again from both sides) that the world markets are undergoing a long-overdue "correction" as they return from fantasy to reality. But if one of the major economic and financial players on the world stage has been deliberately lying about the size of its population, and hence, of its markets, the health and size of its financial institutions, including, above all, its manufacturing and labor potential and purchasing power, then we may, indeed, be in for a series of shocks.

In this respect, you'll note that the end of the article wonders if this practice of over-estimation of population extends to the USA, and my guess is it most probably does.  The influx of immigrants, whether legal or illegal, into Europe and the USA has to be a nightmare for  tracking and accurate actuarial of census estimations.

Perhaps, just perhaps, that is why we'll be seeing more such stories, along with calls for "real IDs" and eventually for everyone to be "chipped".  After all, it's hard if not impossible to run a beast system, if some people are not a part of the beast...

See you on the flip side...

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