China Decoded is Newsweek’s in-depth newsletter about China’s growing influence on the world. It goes beyond the headlines to examine how Beijing thinks, how its policies travel beyond China’s borders, and what they mean for the United States and its allies. Readers can sign up for China Decoded here to receive each edition directly in their inbox.
The newsletter is written by journalists with deep experience covering China. Didi Kirsten Tatlow, Senior Correspondent for International Affairs and Investigations, has reported extensively on Chinese politics, influence and security. John Feng, China Editor, is based in Taiwan and covers China’s domestic politics, foreign policy and the strategic competition between Beijing and Washington.
Below, for Newsweek Members, we are reproducing the latest edition of China Decoded in full:
Emptying Nest
Could there really be just 320 million Chinese by 2100?
It seems impossible. After all, aren’t there 1.4 billion Chinese today? That’s what the government says.
But no one in China believes government figures, and people outside China should not either. Not even the former Premier Li Keqiang, who earlier in his career as party secretary of Liaoning province, said that the government’s GDP number was “man-made” and that he studied practical things like electricity consumption to gauge real growth.
So, 320 million Chinese people in 74 years time?
That’s what Fuxian Yi, an independent Chinese demographer, is projecting in a new monograph in an independent Chinese journal, Contemporary China Review.
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A brief word on this journal: it’s a rare voice emerging from a massively censored environment.
For sure, it’s not based in China. That would be impossible. But its 14-person editorial board is all-Chinese and the journal carries voices from inside China. It says it has “the support of independent Chinese intellectuals, scholars, and readers worldwide,” and “has remained committed to liberal values and to the defense of freedom of speech and expression in the Chinese-speaking world.” It’s edited and published in New York by Bouden House, a Chinese-language literary press that was established in 2018.
Back to Yi, who was recently appointed the journal’s deputy editor-in-chief. He’s a senior scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and an obstetrics and gynecology specialist who trained as a medical doctor in Hunan province before leaving for the U.S. many years ago.
I’ve known Yi for years, first interviewing him nearly a decade and a half ago in China, where he would visit from time to time to spread the word about his groundbreaking book, Big Country with an Empty Nest. The title said it all. Yi never bought the official population figures.
The whole situation was crazy anyway. China’s one child policy had been drawn up by a missile expert called Song Jian. You read that right: missiles.
Song used an engineering control-systems model to analyze a population boom in the late 1960s and 70s that was freaking out Communist Party leaders as they wondered how everyone could be fed and how they could hold on to power.
In 1980 he came up with a mechanistic projection that the population would exceed 4.2 billion by 2080, whereupon the government truly panicked and the one child policy was implemented.
It sounds so tame. Three words. But the policy was crudely controlling and the reality often bloody.
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In the journal’s foreword, the policy is described as “a classic case of applying engineering logic to a complex social system. It continues: "The policy resulted in hundreds of millions of foregone births, while coercive practices during its implementation, including forced abortions and sterilizations, caused profound human suffering and contributed to China’s persistent low fertility and population aging.”
Those last two parts—low fertility and population aging—are the subject of Yi’s new monograph, China's Population Data Manipulation.
In a dictatorship, where truth-telling must be punished for power to be preserved, officials have an incentive to falsify figures.
Yi dug obsessively. He cross-validated official numbers against datasets such as school enrollment and graduation statistics, vaccinations, household registrations, and live birth and mortality data. He compared provincial demographic data with national data and disaggregated census records.
Yi argues that the official population is overstated by about 130 million, and, based on that and on current fertility trends—the population control policy was nixed a decade ago but fertility has not recovered—it could fall to about 320 million in 2100. It sounds absurdly low, but when you think that a person only lives for about 80 years, meaning that shrinkage can occur fast, it begins perhaps to make sense. Of course, I can’t say if Yi’s prediction will come true.
The United Nations agrees that China’s population will fall dramatically by 2100, though Yi says it too has gotten the figures wrong.
The U.N.’s World Population Prospects, a standard reference for policy and business analysis, has been obliged to adjust its estimates for China downwards over the years, from 1.06 billion (projected in 2019) to 633 million (projected in 2024.)
This image from the WPP shows the trend though Yi believes it is still too optimistic:
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All of this is hugely important for the world. Did the overprojections fuel China’s overconfidence, and the rest of the world’s cringe, in the face of what was presented as “inevitable”—China’s triumphant rise to global dominance off of a bigger, more balanced population?
Certainly, a bigger population doesn’t automatically mean a more powerful country. But a seriously skewed one poses challenges.
“This means that China’s economic, social, defense, and foreign policies, as well as international investment decisions and foreign governments’ policies toward China, have all rested on flawed demographic data,” Yi writes.
“The consequences are profound. Inflated figures led Chinese economists to project that China’s economy would far surpass America’s, feeding Beijing’s ‘East rising, West declining’ strategic miscalculation. The same distortions shaped global assessments of China’s trajectory, fueling 'Thucydides Trap' narratives and strategic anxiety among U.S. policymakers and China analysts,” he writes.
The journal is full of other interesting things too, for example, the purges in the People’s Liberation Army that felled a top general, Zhang Youxia, and what they say about Xi Jinping’s power; a debate about where the economy is really at.
It’s a hard-to-find, authentic voice amid the miasma of propaganda and censorship, the truths and half-truths, that is China under the Communist Party “dynasty” (my colleague John has more on the dynasties below), where only one thing is for sure—that the “absence of knowledge” is deliberate. And that affects us, too.
The Data Story
Speaking of what’s real…. If you were on the Chinese internet this summer, you may have come across a wild conspiracy involving the Tang dynasty. If you missed it, fear not. Let’s recap.
China claims an uninterrupted civilization going back some 5,000 years. History is rarely that simple, but that’s what Chinese leader Xi Jinping told President Donald Trump in 2017 during the latter’s first state visit to the country.
Trump said during a stroll through Beijing’s Forbidden City that Egyptian civilization was 8,000 years old. Aha, Xi responded, but Chinese culture has never been broken. That may be up for debate, and we’ll see why later.
What’s not up for debate, not usually anyway, is the Tang era of 618-907. Most historians agree that it was the golden age of Chinese civilization, the peak of arts and culture at a time when various peoples and religions mixed. Those fine traditions were passed down to subsequent dynasties, and the poems of that period are still taught in school today, including in Taiwan.
But this summer, a fringe corner of the Chinese internet upset that long-established norm by claiming the Tang dynasty never existed, like ever. Their argument centered on the belief that later scholars fabricated hundreds of years of Tang history. Why? They didn’t say. How bizarre.
The theory was advanced by a vlogger on the video-sharing app Bilibili. The user’s account was eventually banned and related content scrubbed, but not before it could go viral for a few weeks.
The conspiracy caught on for a number of reasons (sometimes good fiction just holds your attention), but one of them was Han nationalism. Han Chinese are the overwhelming ethnic majority in China today—they’re over 90 percent of the population—but a select group of ultranationalists, especially on the internet (where else?) like to look for reasons to discredit parts of Chinese history that don’t conform with their values.
The Tang dynasty became a victim of Han nationalism because, although its rulers claimed Han lineage, historians believe they were of mixed ancestry. How can impure former rulers have been responsible for the golden era of Chinese civilization? It’s easier if they never existed in the first place.
The Communist Party’s media machine intervened, of course. Stata-run outlets published myriad rebuttals and in August the flagship People’s Daily newspaper criticized the phenomenon of “pseudohistory chaos.”
Around that time, the former U.S. diplomat David Cowhig, whose blog we’ve cited before, translated a front-page editorial in Chinese Social Sciences Today, which is published by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. One paragraph in particular tells us why Beijing was worried.
“Pseudohistory encourages the pernicious trend of historical nihilism and endangers ideological security. Pseudohistory is a new variant of historical nihilism…. Even worse, some engage in historical nihilism by reassessing the achievements of historical figures, repudiating major historical personalities, ridiculing historical figures, smearing revolutionary heroes, glorifying aggression, and denying revolution,” the newspaper said.
There it is—historical nihilism. We looked at it in a previous issue. It’s a serious topic, because in China today it’s a serious crime with serious legal consequences, for scholars, for artists and for ordinary citizens on the internet. The wrong interpretation of ancient history could lead to the wrong interpretation of modern history—that’s a risk for the Communist Party.
“This poses a threat by denying the guiding principles of Marxism, the historical inevitability of China’s path toward socialism, and the leadership of the Communist Party of China,” the CASS outlet said. “The disorder caused by pseudohistory distorts historical facts, spreads erroneous historical perspectives, and misleads social thought, posing a grave threat to national ideological security.”
As I argue in an essay for Newsweek Members this weekend, China’s long history was full of fiefdoms, kingdoms and dynasties that were ruled by people who Han nationalists would consider outsiders and colonists.
This would include the Manchus who led China’s final imperial dynasty, the Qing (1644-1912), which overthrew the Ming (1368-1644) and its Han rulers, who overthrew the Yuan (1271-1368) and its Mongol rulers, who had supplanted the Song dynasty (960-1279) and interrupted 1,500 years of claimed Han lineage since the Qin dynasty (221-206 B.C.).
China’s post-Qing leaders found a way to reconcile the country’s multiethnic past long ago, by claiming the Manchus, Mongols and everyone else as ethnic minorities under one China. The Han majority leads China, but it can’t afford to allow ethnic divisions to destabilize society, so it’s much easier to call everyone Chinese instead.