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Comment by kitschshrine | Hacker News Reader

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kitschshrine·

it's a lie, much like the government's made up 7% gdp growth.

"China's liaoning province admitted that it inflated GDP figures from 2011 to 2014"

https://qz.com/887709/chinas-liaoning-province-admitted-that...

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Now, this I have been wondering for a long time. Chinese authorities, especially on a local level, aren't exactly known for their honesty and high moral standards. At the same time, they have a lot of incentives to over-report one particular metric: population.

So, when people are talking about 1,5 billion Chinese - have these figures have been independently confirmed, or just taken straight from the government?

Genuinely curious, what are the incentives to over report population?

Subsidies?

Doesn't it determine budget distribution from the central authorities?

If anything, the population is underreported. The 2010 census claims it to be around 1.3 billion. But it is widely accepted as a fact that a lot of people in the countryside weren't included in the census because they are "illegal" additional children born in defiance of the one-child policy, and were simply hidden in the basement during the census, as they are hidden whenever any government check is happening.

Those children have no rights, and according to the state, don't exist. They can't go to school, get an official job, etc. They are born to do physical work on the fields and support their parents into their old age.

And the US government saying there's no inflation, and the recovery is real - just a little slow. ;-)

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