Population disputation
What’s the most populous nation in the world? For years, the answer to that question was simple and rarely disputed: China. But this week an academic has sparked widespread discussion around the world by making a bold claim — that China’s official population estimates were wrong and in fact India was now the world’s largest country.
According to the South China Morning Post, Yi Fuxian, a researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, suggested that China had only 377.6 million new births from 1991 to 2016, far less than the official figure of 464.8 million. This meant that China’s official population estimate, currently at 1.38 billion, was wrong, Yi said. Instead it should have been 90 million lower, a gap roughly the same as Germany and Belgium’s population combined.
That would make it 1.29 billion, and lower than India’s estimated 1.32 billion population, according to Yi.
Multiple media outlets in China, India and beyond quickly picked up the news. Not only would it mean that India had already overtaken China as the world’s largest nation — something the United Nations had estimated to happen in 2022 — but that China’s population growth slowdown was worse than many thought and is being hidden from the public.
Reached via email, Yi said the controversy was “no surprise” to him, but added that he had already noted his belief that China’s official estimates were wrong in the 2013 edition of his book, Big Country
with an Empty Nest, which took a critical look at China’s family-planning policies, including its “one-child” rule.
Yi’s status as a passionate activist against China’s family planning policies is well-known and has led some to question his estimates of China’s population.
“His numbers should not be taken at face value,” Wang Feng, a demographer from the University of California, Irvine, told the Guardian.
But according to the South China Morning Post, a number of other academics at an event at Peking University this week where Yi reasserted his population estimates, seemed to concur that the government figures were off.