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Why and how were false birth reported in China

China has many limitations, a vast territory and limited infrastructure outside the largest cities.  Therefore, sometimes fundamental statistical errors creep up in the system.   Errors crop out all over the place, I don't want to imply that global warming is not a thing, I believe the contrary, but, when you see a North American glacier that has been shrinking since the early 19th century as proof of global warming, you have a data problem.

The Chinese have a similar problem, instead of counting the number of children born, they rely on two data points, reported live births by doctors, midwives and hospitals as a first data point, and the number of BCG vaccines administered -- this vaccine is given to every single child born in China within 3 days of birth.   That way, the statistical office has confirmed data points.

What the statisticians didn't expect was that there are substantial incentives to corrupt that data, what doctors have done over the past 20 years is split the BCG doses between 3 or 4 children and report the number of births as if they had been delivered.  Increasing their revenues two ways through higher pay, and also selling off the excess doses of vaccine for hard currency abroad.

This is why since 2017 the new data shows a 60% collapse in the birth rate across China.   In 2017, the Chinese government changed the way BCG vaccines were administered, increasing the control, doctors were no longer able to inflate birthrates.   This forced statisticians to revise all their old data and focus on new indirect data, such as the number of children in preschool.   The first revision occurred about two years ago when the Government recognized that its population was 100 million smaller than it had assumed.   The 2020 census was even more daming where another 100 million suddenly vanished.   The latest data seem to suggest that even there the census numbers were inflated by local government to boost central government allocations.   It has been suggested that another 100 million were never born.   

Why is this becoming such an issue, simply because it is no longer possible to hide it the number of children in schools and universities is falling because there are fewer of them.  




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