China population census delay may be due to coronavirus impact on migrant workers, demographer says

Coronavirus travel restrictions caused many migrant workers to remain in their rural hometowns, making them more difficult to count, demographer says

This distortion may require more time to sort through and check

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During the pandemic, many of China’s migrant workers were forced to stay in their hometowns because of travel restrictions. Photo: AFP

Published: 5:00pm, 7 May 2021Updated: 5:16pm, 3 Jun 2021

The coronavirus pandemic’s impact on the travel patterns of migrant workers – making it more difficult to count them – may have played a key role in Beijing’s decision to delay the release of its once-a-decade population census, according to a veteran demographer who has closely studied China’s previous census practises.

The postponement of China’s 2020 census data release – first from early April to late April, and then to an indefinite date in the future – has raised suspicions in some quarters that the government was intervening to cover up problems with the data, though there has been no evidence to support this speculation.

Every day since the first delay, netizens have posted a myriad of satirical comments on the official social media account of the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), calling for it to release the data.

“I come here every day to check in on the census. I’ve never even been this diligent when it comes to running or taking medicine,” said one popular comment on Weibo, China’s version of Twitter.

Cai Yong, who has studied China’s demographics for years, said that while a lot of attention is being paid to China’s falling fertility rate, it is unlikely to be the biggest reason behind the delay.

“My personal feeling is the delay has more to do with migration than fertility,” said Cai, an associate professor of sociology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. “While there has been a great deal of attention on fertility in China, the fact is that we all know the birth number will be low.

“The NBS has a set of well-developed procedures to make necessary fertility/birth adjustments, as it has been doing for the past few decades. However, Covid and related travel restrictions likely disrupted the usual labour-migration patterns.”