Opinion | 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
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.
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.