Chinese Number Spoofing 

Experts and analysts are suggesting that China is fudging the numbers. Data analysts suggest that China is artificially inflating the size of its population and the current power of its military. These analysts have used phone records to come to this conclusion and suggest that this may be a way for the CCP to compete with their neighbor India, a country whose population has surpassed 1 billion. It would be an extreme gamble but it is possible that China is lying about the total number of people living in the country. Note that this is not something that can be confirmed by anyone, China lies about all sorts of things and they have all the reasons in the world to lie about this.