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Comment by jldugger | Hacker News Reader

> It's pure statistics

I'm not so sure about that: https://www.populationpyramid.net/china/2026/ suggests peak high school in china was years ago.

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Of ≈17 million Chinese students who graduated junior high school after grade 9 in 2024, ≈10 million were admitted to a high school, ≈4 million to a vocational school and the remaining ≈3 million disappear from education statistics, presumably directly entering the workforce. http://www.moe.gov.cn/jyb_sjzl/sjzl_fztjgb/202506/t20250611_...

So at least in theory there's still lots of room to increase high school enrollment, though I doubt this would lead to noticeably more geniuses. The testing system is pretty good at sorting the best students into good schools, I think.

Unfortunately it's hard to take China's population / enrollment demographics at face value. There's many incentives in the system to overstate growth, and cross checks between different reports that _should_ be correlated suggest they're quite overstated.

It's bad enough they passed some legislation a few years ago[1], but the damage has in many senses already been done. And it's unclear how effective the changes will be. So it's entirely possible those 3 million missing high schoolers never existed.

[1]: https://www.reuters.com/world/china/chinas-top-legislative-b...

At this point i’ve witnessed over 30years of “stats about China aren’t real” type posts while they continue to demonstrate impressive economic and social results that i’m far more inclined to believe the potentially flawed Chinese data than posts that basically claim all data out of China is fake.

Isolated demands for rigor, really. China does have a lot of incentives to publish misleading statistics. Also, so does everyone else. In most places we bake skepticism of official lines from government and industry alike into our epistemic weights and move on, but when China does it we're supposed to treat it as a big deal. Propaganda at its finest

The figures for students graduating primary school (18.57 million) and entering junior high school (18.49 million) match up quite well, though. Do you think primary schools and junior high schools manage to coordinate massive student number inflation to the tune of 3 million non-existent students, but then at the transition to senior high schools that suddenly breaks down? If anything, I'd expect it to break down when those non-existent students are supposed to take the Zhongkao exam in order to graduate, not at the senior high school admissions stage.

Some statistics reported in China are unreliable because the person doing the reporting also has their performance evaluated by the numbers they report and there are few external checks on validity, but I don't think that's the case for student numbers in particular.

Also, it seems like you're the same 'jldugger who cited Chinese population statistics upthread, but when somebody else does it, they're suddenly unreliable???

> If anything, I'd expect it to break down when those non-existent students are supposed to take the Zhongkao exam in order to graduate, not at the senior high school admissions stage.

Reasonable. If I were more conspiratorial, I might suggest that it's precisely because people are watching college exam numbers that 9th grade -> high school is where the break is. Or could just be the result of compounding growth from two competing officials making different exaggerated claims decades ago.

But really, the high school enrollment gap is not super germane to my main point: we may have seen peak China population, stemming largely from a smaller incoming cohort. The sidebar about offsetting that decline with increased enrollment percentages is interesting, I'm just default skeptical.

> cited Chinese population statistics upthread, but when somebody else does it, they're suddenly unreliable???

My cite appears to use UN data, not the PRC's official stats (at least not directly). But I'm pretty sure the official stats are also showing the same trend, just at a slower rate of decline. I mean, it's the entire reason for loosening the one-child policy to two, then to three.

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