China's True Population? Take 1.2 Billion People -- Then Add Brazil
By Mark Hertsgaard

Here's a pop quiz: "How many people live in China today?"

Mark Hertsgaard is a leading environmental journalist who has frequently written about China. His article in the Atlantic Monthly, "Our Real China Problem" , published in November 1997, remains one of the best overviews of the subject, although much has changed in China since then, some for the better, some for the worse. In his most recent book, "Earth Odyssey" , Hertsgaard writes about China's environmental problems in the context of global issues such as overpopulation, air and water pollution, soil loss, and global warming.

Even if you're just a casual follower of news about China, you can probably supply the usual answer: 1.2 billion. After all, that's the figure most media sources use. The New York Times, for example, repeatedly cited it in a long September 19 article that compared the population policies of China and India -- much to China's favor, not coincidentally.

Or check out the websites of the U.S. State Department and Central Intelligence Agency. The State Department lists a 1997 estimate of 1.22 billion. The CIA says 1.246 billion (as of July 1999). Completing the circle, both of these estimates round off to the 1.2 billion number that cropped up in so much of last week's media coverage of the 50th anniversary of the People's Republic.

The problem is, that number is certainly wrong, and not by a small amount. The true figure is probably closer to 1.4 billion, and perhaps even higher. The implications -- for China and the outside world -- are immense.

The discrepancy between 1.2 and 1.4 billion amounts to two hundred million people. That is more than the population of Brazil, itself the fifth most populous country in the world. Thus China's government has to feed, house, educate and employ not only its 1.2 billion "official" citizens but also a Brazil's worth of extra people. That is an enormous economic burden, and makes it all the harder for China to maintain the 7 and 8 percent growth rates of recent years. A faltering economy in turn raises serious questions about China's political stability, since the only thing keeping the Communist Party in power anymore, besides brute force, is its ability to keep the economy humming.

A bigger population also has environmental consequences, of course. China already has the worst air pollution in the world, not to mention severe shortages of clean water, arable land and forests. Naturally, these problems intensify as population increases. Remember the terrible floods of 1998 that left tens of millions of Chinese homeless? The central government quickly accepted blame for the deforestation that triggered the floods, and it pledged to move people out of the floodplains downriver to prevent a recurrence. But resettlement has proven a practical impossibility, because decades of rapid population growth has caused all available land to be occupied long ago. Flood victims have instead movedback onto the floodplains and rebuilt, thus insuring even more devastation next time.

There's something weird about the widespread western acceptance that China's population is "only" 1.2 billion. The figure is largely propaganda, manufactured by the Chinese government for its own purposes, and easily identified as such.

Eager to please their bosses, government bureaucrats up and down the line of command in China routinely massage population statistics in order to make official policies look good. "If the central government sets a target of 18 births per thousand people this year, provincial leaders tell country officials no, they must achieve sixteen, and county leaders tell village officials no, it must be fourteen," says Gu Baochang, a demographer with the semi-official China Population Information & Research Center in Beijing.

Undercounting also enables local officials to keep more tax revenues, rather than send them to Beijing. One village in Hubei province was recently found to have under-counted its residents by 14 percent -- a margin that, if extrapolated nationally, amounts to 185 million extra people.

Beijing now claims that China's population was 1.248 billion people in 1998 and that Chinese women average 2.0 births apiece. But no one who knows the situation on the ground in China can credit such claims. In six weeks of investigative travel throughout China in 1996 and 1997, I spoke freely with scores of families. Every rural family had at least two children. Many had three or four. Some even had five or more. True, most urban couples I met did adhere to the one-child policy. But since 70 percent of Chinese live in rural areas, the government's claimed fertility rate of 2.0 clearly was mathematically impossible. Since that figure undergirds the overall population estimate, the 1.2 billion number is equally suspect.

Tomorrow, the United Nations will hold a "Day of Six Billion" to mark humanity reaching six billion people. If China does have 1.4 billion - or more -- people, it means that nearly one out of every four humans on the planet is Chinese. What happens in China is therefore central to our species' fate in the 21st century. In particular, the question of whether we will act quickly and decisively enough to save ourselves from environmental self-destruction cannot be answered without considering China.

Intelligent action requires sound analysis and information. What reason is there to continue accepting the Chinese government's phony population figures? Since when are journalists and intelligence analysts obliged to believe whatever a government claims is true? Clearly, both China and the rest of the world have an interest in devising a more accurate measurement of China's vast population. Meanwhile, let's at least stop reporting "official" numbers that are patently false.

Mark Hertsgaard is a leading environmental journalist who has frequently written about China. His article in the Atlantic Monthly, "Our Real China Problem" , published in November 1997, remains one of the best overviews of the subject, although much has changed in China since then, some for the better, some for the worse. In his most recent book, "Earth Odyssey" , Hertsgaard writes about China's environmental problems in the context of global issues such as overpopulation, air and water pollution, soil loss, and global warming.