Interview [in Chinese] with the head of the National Statistics Bureau here, in which the very first question is (paraphrased) "Lots of people don't believe these figures. Are they really true, or have they been altered already?"
The NSB head denies alteration, of course, but since he then goes on to say (in by far his shortest answer) that their numbers show only 13 million unregistered people in China - a wildly implausible figure, given how common heihaizi ("black children," with "black" having the sense of "off-book, illegal) are in the countryside - this seems doubtful. I've never met an only child from the countryside, come to think of it; every time I've asked people have, on average, two siblings.
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