I don't think it's an actual lie, maybe more incompentence.
Western governments don't try to lie about it (I hope) and they still underestimate the real numbers by ~50%. China shockingly doesn't publish (perhaps they don't even have that data) excess deaths for the whole country and they never did.
So it's impossible to try and figure it out from there. They are doing some serious mental gymnastics (
https://edition.cnn.com/2021/12/01/china/china-birthrate-202...
) about changes in birth rate to explain change in total population though. So, perhaps there are more excess deaths there as well
Western governments don't try to lie about it (I hope) and they still underestimate the real numbers by ~50%. China shockingly doesn't publish (perhaps they don't even have that data) excess deaths for the whole country and they never did.
So it's impossible to try and figure it out from there. They are doing some serious mental gymnastics ( https://edition.cnn.com/2021/12/01/china/china-birthrate-202... ) about changes in birth rate to explain change in total population though. So, perhaps there are more excess deaths there as well