I was wondering how this could possibly happen, and I recently ran across a plausible explanation.
For all their vaunted controls, CCP only has a few points of official contact with citizens before they enter the workforce and start paying taxes. It’s first vaccination for babies, and then entering primary school.
The subnational governments (provinces?) rely on subsidies from the national government for funding, and they get paid for vaccinations and primary school enrolments.
So in the 90s and 2000s, local officials and doctors were padding their budgets by claiming vaccinations and schoolchildren who didn’t exist. And the national government actually wasn’t aware of the scale of the fraud until these nonexistent children “grew up” and were expected to join the workforce starting in the early 2020s- and they just weren’t there. And it turned out to be a LOT of Chinese babies who never existed.
The CCP just stopped publishing a whole bunch of economic numbers over the last few years. You know it’s a sign of a super good economy when you can’t even make up commie lies anymore.