China’s census accuracy faces reality check in Covid-19 vaccination and testing

Local governments in China may receive more money from the central government as some subsidies are granted on a per capita basis

But an inability to use all allocated vaccinations for local populations could suggest that population figures were misreported

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In China, not being able to use all allocated coronavirus vaccines in a village, township or city could be a sign that local population figures were inflated. Photo: AFP

Zhou Xin

Zhou Xin is Tech Editor of the Post, following stints as Political Economy Editor and Deputy China Editor.

Published: 6:29pm, 8 Nov 2021Updated: 10:30pm, 8 Nov 2021

China’s coronavirus vaccination programme is having a side effect: casting doubt on the nation’s recently completed once-a-decade census that put the population at 1.4 billion people.

The task of conducting a census in a country as vast as China could only be undertaken by the National Bureau of Statistics, and the result announced by the bureau is official and final. Any suspicion about China’s real population size, therefore, can easily be dismissed by Beijing as groundless.

But the top-down roll-out of Covid-19 vaccinations across the country has opened the door to criticism and questions.

This was illustrated late last month in a small town of Pingtai in Jilin province, which borders North Korea. In China’s census released in May, the town showed it had 1,743 “permanent residents” on November 1, 2020. But township authorities recently pleaded with upper-level government officials to adjust that number to 1,195, or a 31.44 per cent downward revision from the census.

The anecdote lent credence to a long-standing suspicion that local governments tend to over-report their populations in censuses by including people who no longer reside there, because certain government subsidies are allocated based on the number of local people. If a village or town reports a larger number of “permanent residents”, it can receive more subsidies.

But with vaccination rates being so closely monitored, over-reported populations can become unbearable burdens. This is because there are simply not enough people to receive the vaccines that were allocated for areas based on their reported populations

For instance, if a village reported 2,000 permanent residents in the last census, and the minimum vaccination requirement is 80 per cent, it means the village must have 1,600 adults to meet the target. But if the real population of the village is less than 1,600, the village will never be able to meet the target and has little choice but to request that its permanent resident figure be reduced.