What Is the Chinese Communist Party Hiding?

Commentary
A flurry of reports propagating various economic and demographic statistics from communist China have been in the news lately. Is China on the rebound after reversing Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s signature—and failed—zero-COVID policy?
Have Chinese economic problems been obfuscated by false numbers from China’s National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) while avoiding the canary in the coal mine, that is, the economic and personal devastation wrought by COVID lockdowns and officially under-reported infections and deaths in recent weeks?
Let us try to make sense of recent Chinese statistics and related news reports.
Demographics
Leading the news is the official report on Jan. 17 that China’s population has shrunk to “roughly 850,000 people for a population of 1.41175 billion in 2022, marking the first decline since 1961, the last year of China’s Great Famine,” as reported by Reuters. The raw numbers are 9.56 million births and 10.41 million deaths in 2022….