The United Nations’ premature declaration that India has surpassed China as the world’s most populous country calls into question the reliability of its projections. Moreover, the UN’s support of harsh population control policies in the two countries in the past does not reflect well on the organisation.

With clear and frequent discrepancies in the data, no one knows the true extent of China’s ageing demographics. What is clear is that to improve China’s economic prospects, Li Qiang needs to boost births and raise the retirement age.

Chinese policymakers must somehow implement policies to revive interest in marriage and reduce the cost of raising children without crashing the economy. But even if they increase the number of births, they will almost certainly be unable to reverse demographic trends that have taken hold across the globe.

Overhyped projections and a lack of mutual trust are damaging Sino-US relations, and strategic misjudgments based on bad data could be costly. Both sides are ageing rapidly, turning any potential war into a frolic between a sick cat and a skinny dog.

More effective than realised, the one-child policy put the brakes on China’s economic growth, created a state pension time bomb, and forced Beijing to export excess capacity, reshaping the global economy.

There’s no denying that China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and South Korea have done an impressive job of keeping Covid-19 death tolls low. But they, and others, are likely to have declining fertility rates, which will cost their economies dearly down the road.

The unexplained discrepancies in official data from different sources for China’s birth rate and population size only underline how the government manipulates the figures to justify its population control policies, and allow past mistakes to go unpunished.

China has inflated its population data so much that its status as the world’s most populous country may be false. This happens so provinces can get education subsidies and Beijing can hide the results of decades of family planning.

Growth trajectories must take into account the fact that China is ageing faster than the US. The experiences of Japan, Taiwan and South Korea bear out the correlation between growth and demographics, and economists optimistic of China’s growth prospects should take note.

A look at China’s ratio of working-age population to seniors is ominously similar to Japan’s in 1992, boding ill for the Chinese dream and the global economy as a whole.