Something very strange is happening in China. There is fevered speculation and rumour on what many say is the catastrophic state of the country; China’s economy is collapsing and, even more dramatically, its people are disappearing.
The National Bureau of Statistics data says China's population was 1.48 billion at the end of 2024, a decrease of 1.39 million from the end of 2023. But many think that it is less, far less, by hundreds of millions, and believe that Xi Jinping’s government is harbouring a very dark secret.
There is a growing uneasiness among the Chinese, and since the Lunar New Year it has become almost an obsession. The Lunar New Year passed off with unusual quietness. Even major cities like Beijing and Shanghai were empty of life and multiple videos were posted showing just how quiet my hometown, Beijing, was during the holiday night. One blogger, living just outside Beijing's Second Ring Road (it has six) reported that the entire city was eerily quiet, with no fireworks, no festive sounds and the usual celebratory atmosphere completely absent.
A blogger in Shanghai who spent the Lunar New Year there for the first time was shocked by how empty and flat it felt. The streets were, and remain, really quiet. Roads usually packed with traffic are empty. It's surreal, like it is the end of everything.
And it is the same all over China, in big cities, small towns, the countryside and villages. The more I learn the scarier it feels.
A friend who goes to a usually packed and boisterous tea house to play mahjong says that half the rooms are empty, with hardly any customers. The staff say that people now play at a much lower level, with bets as low as two yuan, reflecting a significant downgrade in spending.
Another friend told me that convenience stores are struggling, and even high margin businesses like foot spas and beauty salons are affected. Clearly, the economy has been hit hard over the past few years and living conditions have visibly worsened. A friend of a friend’s shop income has fallen from 40,000 Yuan to ¥15,000. Everything feels gloomy. Everyone's pockets are empty and the whole nation is in a crisis. Everyone feels insecure and afraid.
Many think that it is related to the covid crisis. The Chinese hoped that after the pandemic there would be a rebound, but the opposite has happened, with further economic decline. And this leads to the worrying speculation, now rife, that China’s covid-related death toll is much higher than officially reported, with hundreds of millions dead. Some say that over 500 million have died. But with the CCP’s excessive secrecy, it’s hard to tell. But everyone knows that something is very wrong.
Almost half of China seems to be in hospital. I’m told that if you go to one it will be bursting with activity. The Ministry of Civil Affairs has stopped releasing funeral statistics, raising suspicions of a cover up. In an unprecedented move the CCP’s 7th census results were delayed for several months, and there are long queues for cremation. Cremation fees have risen significantly as the crematoriums can't keep up with demand. Funeral homes and crematoriums are strictly prohibited from publishing data and must keep the number of cremations confidential.
Many think that this is because the CCP is trying to explain away the reduced population by claiming that people have migrated abroad. Of course, some have left, but the entry of hundreds of millions of Chinese into other countries without anybody noticing it is clearly absurd.
Similarly, if the number of newborns decreases and kindergartens close down, the government attributes it to younger people not wanting to have children, thus preventing the public from discovering the real situation.
Of course, many young people are choosing not to have children; the cost of raising a child is shocking, and many feel that the situation in China is so hopeless it would be cruel to bring children into the world. During lockdown a viral video showed a young couple in Shanghai being threatened with punishment for three generations of their family if they didn't comply with quarantine laws. The couple responded that they didn’t care, they were the last generation.
And some young people in China are not having children as a form of resistance against the government, which is now pushing a three-child policy.
China now has a shortage of skilled labour, forcing manufacturers to move to cheaper nations, like Vietnam. The military can’t recruit. The sense of despair is all-pervasive. In China office space and shopping mall rental markets are key indicators of economic health. At the end of 2024 the vacancy rate for Office Buildings in Beijing and Shanghai surpassed 20%. This is not just due to high unemployment or the collapsing property market, but also due to a significant population decline, with deaths from covid-related factors being a major part of it.
Naturally, the authorities have done everything they can to ‘de-bunk’ these rumours, and though they are not yet arresting people for tweets, they are blocking phones and social media accounts.
The excess covid death theory is necessarily, therefore, based on indirect evidence, such as salt consumption and reduced demand for food. And, where it is available, funeral data.
A Chinese citizen using Elon Musk’s AI model Grock 3 found that from 2020 to 2023 China lost up to 200 million people, mostly based on consumption records.
Japanese salt exports to China are now only half pre-covid levels, and Japanese research data suggests that, based on China's salt consumption, the population is likely to be about 800 million, six hundred million less than the number claimed by the CCP. A Chinese blogger claimed that according to data from China's Ministry of Public Security there are only 776 million people in China with official ID cards, which if true should be reliable.
Anecdotally, many deaths have been of those of childbearing age.
And some think that even a population of 800 million or so is overstated and that it might be as low as 400 million, but that seems too extreme. I certainly hope so, as a death toll of around a billion people is unthinkably horrible.
One seemingly knowledgeable source has calculated 430 million covid related deaths. He got this by using pre-pandemic Ministry of Civil Affairs data that, on average, 10 million Chinese die every year with the winter months seeing the highest fatalities at about 1 million per month. According to people who work in the Chinese funeral industry their workload grew eight to ten-fold during since covid. Considering all facts and excluding people who died in the countryside and were buried by their family, he calculated an average death rate of seven million per month for the first three years, from early 2020 to the end of 2022. That’s 252 million people as opposed to the normal 30 million.
And after lockdown ended China experienced an upsurge in covid- related fatalities, and from the end of 2022 to early months of 2023 he estimated another 120 million Chinese died, based on internal data from Beijing's police department. He then extrapolated average losses to get a total of 450 million deaths.
But people are still dying, so the total number of casualties may now be around 500, a figure that the Falun Gong religious cult founder agrees with.
Among all this death, one death shocked the nation and has come to symbolise all the rest, many of them young. That death was Qian Qian’s, China’s "millennium baby", born on the stroke of midnight Jan. 1, 2000.
She was a beautiful, healthy young woman, but died of sudden cardiac arrest on 24 March, causing great worry and sorrow across China – another unexplained sudden death of a healthy young person.
Reportedly, China’s tumour hospitals are also being overrun, with many saying it is related to a delayed or long-term side effect of Chinese covid vaccine. On social media there's much heated discussion of alleged vaccine side effects, including leukaemia, diabetes and cancer as well as cardiovascular disease.
It is, frankly, overwhelming. Can it be true that four hundred million have died and the government is covering it up? Many think so. My family in China is alright. None has died, but they are all worried. Could it be that because of the poor economy people are just staying at home and not spending. I suppose that is a factor, but I can’t shake off the horrible feeling that there is a lot of truth in these estimates, and that China’s population is now between 700 and 800 million, meaning that if the CCP’s claim that China had a population of over 1.4 billion, over 500 million people might have died because of covid and the government’s response to it. That’s slightly more than the entire population of all the EU countries.