Recent figures from China’s National Bureau of Statistics showed that despite policies ranging from childcare subsidies to reported menstrual monitoring, the country saw a fourth consecutive year of population decline and fewer than eight million births—roughly equal to the level in 1738. Online commentary on the news was bleak: "The birthrate is a direct reflection of the state of the economy and people’s level of happiness." "Never mind the birthrate, how about we pay more attention to the adults whose lives are so miserable they want to die, okay?" "The cost of raising kids has become totally unmoored from what people actually earn."

Even more upbeat posts could face censorship, however, in an apparent reflection of the demographic crunch’s political sensitivity. In a WeChat post archived by CDT Chinese, user Xiao Mu recounted how an earlier post putting a positive spin on the new official statistics had been first blocked and then deleted until those figures were removed:

So, I wrote a post arguing that this is actually a good time to have kids, citing the new birth-rate figures they published a couple of days ago. Who’d have thought I’d be barred from posting it?

At first I was bewildered—what possible reason could they have had for blocking it?

I thought the problem must have been the title, so I changed it, still citing the same data in the post itself.

After that, I was able to post it, and it picked up a few views.

I figured perhaps the title had been a bit sensationalist, so changing it seemed like the right move.

I woke up the next morning to find that the post had been deleted.

That’s when I knew something was off.

They must have detected that the post included that data, and judged it to be at odds with the current propaganda orientation, which might have a negative impact.

So I deleted the data and posted one more time. (I’m dead stubborn, and wasn’t going to give up until I figured out what had gone wrong.)

The post is still online as I write this.

Which settles the matter: the data was definitely what they took issue with.

Though I still don’t understand how citing official government data in a post can be unacceptable.

On top of that, what I wrote was positive! I said this is actually the perfect time to have children because as the population decreases, competition will be less fierce, and it won’t be as hard for them to get into kindergartens, schools, and universities. I was encouraging people to have kids!

It’s depressing that even this got deleted.

But it’s clear what’s going on: the platform’s so afraid of negative influences stirring up anxiety and panic, they’re just cutting everything down indiscriminately. [Chinese]