In the early 1930s, a famine swept across the Ukrainian region of the former Soviet Union, starving millions to death. The devastation, triggered by Stalin's forced collectivization of farming, was thoroughly covered up and the dead were buried in secret. The problem was the shrinking population. Propaganda about the system's success and prosperity required a growing population, but the 1937 census — the first in 11 years — put the Soviet population at 162 million, far below official projections. Stalin's solution was simple: he scrapped the statistics he disliked and purged the officials who compiled them. In 1939, the Soviet Union announced a population of 170.46 million.
"There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics." The famous aphorism, attributed to Benjamin Disraeli, who served as British prime minister in the late 19th century, warns that figures meant to be objective can always become a means of concealing or distorting reality. Population data, the foundation of national statistics, is no exception. In China, suspicions persist that local governments inflate population counts to secure subsidies. Yi Fuxian, a demographer at the University of Wisconsin, has published research arguing that China's population, officially tallied at about 1.4 billion, is in fact closer to 1.27 billion.
The city of Toyama, in Japan's Toyama Prefecture, was recently found to have padded its population by roughly 2,000 in the national census conducted every five years. The Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications put the city's estimated population at 402,133 in May; after the discrepancy was raised, the confirmed figure released in September was 399,197. The local government most likely overreached to preserve its standing as a city of 400,000 and to secure more funding from the central government. Steep population decline and the threat of regional extinction can push local governments into such lapses. In South Korea, too, several local governments drew criticism in the past for artificially boosting their numbers through fraudulent address registrations. Once trust in population data collapses, the foundation of fiscal, pension, housing and medical policy is shaken, and efforts to address a demographic crisis that will determine the nation's fate inevitably falter. This is no time to let our guard down.