China Seems to Have "Misplaced" 120 Million People

China is currently having sort of a panic, and they're a little bit anxious about their population to vastly understate things.

In truth, the Chinese population is dropping dramatically, and the Chinese government is absolutely terrified about what that means.

it can be hard to know the true scale of the problem.

But a starting point, best-case scenario for China, can be found in the official estimates coming from the UN's world population prospects, which are built off the data the Chinese government is willing to provide.

This provided data always paints China in the best possible light.

And even this data says that by the year 2100, China's population will decrease from the current official figure of 1.4 billion people to just around 630 million.

That will give China well under half the population of India, which is expected to be about 1.5 billion by the same year.

On the other hand, it will put China in a population category far more similar to the United States and Europe than the world is used to seeing, with the US expected to reach approximately 420 million and Europe around 592 million around the same time period.

And these trends will almost certainly dramatically alter the way the entire world perceives China as a global power.

And this is just what China is willing to admit to, because it's undeniable.

But in reality, things are far worse than China has been publicly letting on.

The truth is, there are huge discrepancies in the data that China has provided.

As just one example, there are massive differences in the data between China's published birth rates and the amount of children who actually enroll in Chinese schools, say, five years later, which tells us that China has been publishing false birth rate numbers.

I'll let you decide whether that's been intentional or not.

And there are also many other errors of the same kind.

Discrepancies like these lead us to strongly suspect that China's population today is already much smaller than they officially project, and that their rate of population decline is also worse than has been modeled.

That means China is starting from a lower number and decreasing faster than expected, which could lead to a dramatically different outcome than the 630 million number they're already so terrified of.

It's impossible to know the true numbers here, but the fact that China has such strong discrepancies in their data in the first place pretty strongly indicates that it's not exactly going better than they thought.

The raw population number is only half the story, though.

What's equally interesting is who those people in China actually are, or in this case, how old they are.

Because China's population is expected to shrink at a time when life expectancy is actually expected to increase, dramatically.

China's population then will shrink not so much because everyone is dying off, but more so because there is simply nobody being born to replace them.

In other words, China's population isn't just going to get smaller.

it's going to get a whole lot older too.

Today, China's median age is 41.7 years old.