- AMERICAN THINKER - J.R. Dunn - MAY 1, 2023 -
Recently, the Chinese government admitted that it had "overcounted" the Chinese population by about a hundred million. Actually, nothing of the sort happened. Chinese announcements concerning anything are generally soaked in various mixtures of bogosity, and this one is no exception.
A hundred million is not a rounding error. There was, in fact, no error at all. The Chinese simply lied about their population at some unknown point in the past and continued lying until it became inconvenient or impossible to sustain.
Communist states lie about everything. This is one of the few certainties — other than the certainty of their eventual failure — that can be entertained about a People's Republic. To borrow from Mary McCarthy, everything they say is a lie, including "and" and "the." In cases like this, it usually involves national security. Communist China was blowing itself up, like a puffer fish, to look more scary and formidable.
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I have long had doubts about China's population claims. The Chinese had a horrible 20th century, far worse than that suffered by anyone else. The record of the runner-up, that being Russia, is a positive picnic compared to what the Chinese went through. Let's look at the stats:
Boxer Rebellion (1900) – 100,000
Xinhai revolution (1911–1912) – 175,000
Sino-Japanese war (1937-1945) – 20 million
Nationalist Chinese deaths – 10,214,000
Communist-Kuomintang civil war (1945–1949) – 7 million
Anti-Landlord campaign (1949–1952) – up to 4 million
Korean War battle deaths (1950–1953) – 180,000 to 650,000
Counterrevolutionary campaign – 2 million
Great Leap Forward (1958–1962) – 40–65 million
Great Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) – Up to 20 million
One-child campaign – 336 million abortions
Now, the population of China in 1900 was 395,800,000. China's current population, according to various sources, is either 1,425,671,352 or 1,461,313,515 (I like the absolute certainty suggested by those last three digits.) Whether that hundred million has been subtracted from those figures is unclear.
So, comrade, you're telling me that China started the 20th century with just under 400,000,000, suffered something on the order of 463,139,000 excess deaths (remember, we're not counting ordinary, everyday mortality here) across the ensuing 80 years, and still wound up with 1.4+ billion people?
I call 废话. I say it is mathematically and physically impossible. That it could not have happened that way. There was an old simile used in classrooms and textbooks before the P.C. era called the "marching Chinese" that asserted that if you started the population of China marching over the edge of a cliff at a regular walking pace, you'd never run out because they'd be reproducing faster than they'd be going over the cliff. (The standard reply was, "How could they? They'd be marching!") What's left out of account here is the Manchus, the Kuomintang, the communists, and the Imperial Japanese Army slaughtering them by the millions and tens of millions continuously for the better part of a century.