Residents Report Overcrowded Crematoriums and Empty Neighborhoods in China
Every year since COVID-19, a wave of respiratory infections has swept across China.

Residents Report Overcrowded Crematoriums and Empty Neighborhoods in China
Masked children, accompanied by adults, wait to be seen by medical staff at the pediatric department of a hospital in Hangzhou, eastern China's Zhejiang province, on Jan. 6, 2025. AFP via Getty Images
By Alex Wu
4/15/2025


Chinese residents across the country continue to reveal on social media and to The Epoch Times that amid ongoing respiratory infections and overcrowding at local hospitals and crematoriums, China’s villages, towns, and even streets in the big cities are looking eerily empty.

Since the outbreak of COVID-19 in China’s Wuhan, a wave of mass respiratory infections has appeared across China almost every year. Because of the regime’s record of publishing unreliable data, including its underreporting of COVID-19 infections in early 2020, analysts and the public often rely on anecdotal stories and evidence.

Mr. Chen, a truck driver in Fujian Province in southeast China who only gave his last name for safety reasons, told The Epoch Times that in the past two years, many people he knows have died. He said he has heard from many of his acquaintances that the situation is similar all over the country.

Early in the pandemic, the nation’s funeral homes were operating at full capacity but unable to keep up with demand. The authorities then expanded and renovated the nation’s funeral homes, and the speed of cremating corpses increased after the renovation, Chen said.

He said that two or three years ago, there were too many bodies waiting for cremation and not enough furnaces to cremate them. “At that time, when sending off relatives, you had to queue for several days, or even half a month to a month.”

In the last few years, Chen said, the number of deaths seen in China remains concerning. Now, many of his relatives and friends have passed away.

China’s Economic Future Can Be Predicted by Population
He compared it with the past. “Only one friend died in ten to twenty years,” he said. “In recent years, I have seen funerals happening everyday. I often drive outside and [always] see hearses.”

Regarding the claim by China’s ruling communist party (CCP) that China has a population of 1.4 billion, Chen said that the official data is not credible.

Mr. Li, a villager in Zhoukou of Henan Province in north China who only gave his last name for safety reasons, told The Epoch Times that in recent days, local hospitals have all been overcrowded with patients and that many people have died from conditions like pneumonia, heart attack, and ischemic stroke.

Most of the deceased were otherwise healthy-appearing individuals in their thirties or forties, he said.

He said that in recent years, local villages with populations of around 500 to 600 people have reported many deaths. Some people died before they could be sent to the hospital, he said of their condition.

“Poor people are like ants, they die and are buried quietly. Their families cannot afford the cremation. This kind of situation is too common nowadays,” he said.

Ms. Tan, a resident of Tonghua in Jilin Province in northeast China who only gave her last name for safety reasons, told The Epoch Times that her daughter brought her child, who was sick, to the hospital for treatment in recent days and found that the local hospital was overcrowded with patients, and has been so for the last few weeks. She also said her friend who attended a relative’s funeral in early April told her that crematoriums remain overcrowded.

Tan said that many people died in recent months in her sister’s neighborhood, including people in their 40s, 50s, and 60s.

One U.S.-based China observer said that many indicators are pointing to a severe decline in China’s population, and that the CCP has severely underreported the deadliness of COVID-19 and the related draconian lockdowns and mandates in its official reports.
In a growing number of videos on Chinese-language social media, people across China are asking, “Where have all the people gone?”
What Is China’s Real Population?
A large number of videos shot by Chinese residents have emerged on social media in recent months showing many abandoned towns and villages across the country and empty streets in the big cities, with people questioning China’s real population in 2025.
The anecdotal descriptions coming out of China, and the authorities’ continued actions to obfuscate global calls for transparency on China’s COVID-19 pandemic data, “illustrate a problem,” the observer Dr. Tang Jingyuan, who is also a physician, told The Epoch Times on April 11.
“That is, China’s overall population has experienced a huge cliff-like plunge within just a few short years—only this can fully and reasonably explain people’s observations,” he said.


Since the first significant wave of COVID-19 in 2020, SARS-CoV-2 “has continued to this day in China and has never weakened,” Tang said.
During the CCP’s “zero-COVID” lockdowns from 2020 to the end of 2022, Tang said the number of people who died from the epidemic in China was already very huge.

Then, he believes an unknown millions more have died since the lockdowns were lifted. Some international organizations have reported conservative estimates of 1.4 million deaths just between December 2022 and February 2023, when the zero-COVID restrictions were lifted, estimating around 65 million new infections weekly.
China’s official total COVID-19 death toll in February 2023 stood at 83,150. For the same period, India reported a confirmed death toll that was magnitudes higher, at 531,794, with the government warning it believes there were many more deaths that went unreported due to undertesting in its 1.4 billion population—similar to China’s population claims at the time.

For the same period, the United States, with its well-tested population of 343.48 million, reported 1.1 million confirmed deaths—the most of any nation.

In 2025, China’s data shared with the World Health Organization put its official death toll at 122,398. India’s confirmed death toll is 533,662, and the United States has confirmed 1.22 million deaths.

The World Health Organization estimates that China’s total COVID-19 deaths could be between 472,110 and 7.46 million, and India’s at between 2.82 million to 11.79 million.
Since early 2020, Tang said, “We can see that every year, there is a very fierce peak of the epidemic across the entire mainland China,” which is a very unique phenomenon that does not seem as severe in any other country, he noted. “But the CCP has used other methods to cover it up, such as saying that it’s a pneumonia epidemic or some other virus.”
Every wave of such an outbreak has caused a large number of deaths in China, Tang believes. “The Chinese Communist government is covering up the number of deaths.”

The CCP delayed the release of its 2020 census data, sparking suspicion from observers that China’s population had plunged from COVID-19. Eventually, the CCP released the data, claiming that China still had 1.4 billion people, which the Chinese people have been questioning.
Some noted in recent videos that when China reported having 1.2 billion people in the early 2010s, both China’s villages and cities were much more crowded, packed with people as far as the eye can see. However, this isn’t the case now with the CCP’s claims of a 1.4 billion population.

As for why China’s fast-shrinking population is only now catching the Chinese people’s attention, Tang said, “There’s a delayed effect to the large-scale disappearance of the population. It takes some time for many signs of it to show up.” He added that China’s ailing centrally planned economy is another reason.

A few years ago, even during the epidemic, China’s economy had not yet encountered a major crisis, he noted.

A woman walks past stores in a shopping mall in Beijing on July 18, 2023. (Greg Baker/AFP via Getty Images)
A woman walks past stores in a shopping mall in Beijing on July 18, 2023. Greg Baker/AFP via Getty Images
“There were still a lot of people from all over the country who rushed to these first- and second-tier cities to work. Even if there were large-scale deaths in these cities, they were quickly filled by a lot of new migrant workers. So it created an illusion that there are still a lot of people in those cities,” he said.

After the Chinese economy declined due to structural problems and the trade war led by the United States, job opportunities in many first- and second-tier cities also decreased, and fewer migrant workers have come to the cities to fill the population gap, he said. “So it suddenly became apparent that the population dropped significantly.”

https://www.theepochtimes.com/...fnwXKJnie%2BxtXhE%3D

Part of this sounds vaguely familiar, at least in the animal world. I have a biology background, and it’s pretty simple:
When deer, wolves, etc overpopulate, disease takes over and culls the herd/pack.
Maybe I’m missing something.

BECAUSE THAT CAN HAPPEN HERE DON'CHA KNOW!?

I hold any "journalism" with the slightest ominous alarmist tone highly suspect these days, hand-wavy attribution be damned.

Is it even true? How do we know? Should I care? Probably not.

quote:

Originally posted by irreverent:
Part of this sounds vaguely familiar, at least in the animal world. I have a biology background, and it’s pretty simple:
When deer, wolves, etc. overpopulate, disease takes over and culls the herd/pack.
Maybe I’m missing something.

Agreed.
History records, communist have directly used methods to "depopulate".
Wonder if they have a hand in this, or is it simply "nature" doing its thing?

quote:

Wonder if they have a hand in this, or is it simply "nature" doing its thing?

Well, between the "one child policy" and the release of the Wuhan China-virus ... I think they have a hand in this.

Remember Mao's Great Leap Forward?
How many died between 1958 and 1962?

Yep. COVID.

Holodomor in 1932-33

Pol Pot Killing Fields Post Vietnam.


and more.

China already faced a demographic urgency to invade Taiwan - or else face insufficient of-age manpower to engage in the full range of their economic and military commitments. The then-unified global response to the Russia-Ukraine conflict quietly had Taiwan as one of those with the greatest benefit, because it cautioned the Central government about what the global response to a Taiwan invasion could evoke.

Fostering closer and more meaningful and robust connections with India seems to hold a lot of merit for the USA presently, particularly if these Chinese demographic reports bear any accuracy.

I just got a flash...how about we re-home all those illegal "migrants" and send them to China? They will undoubtedly be able to lend a hand with all the grave digging that needs doing there. "Two birds with one stone" - Confucius.

On second thought, Xi will want us to pay him a tariff on each of them even if we provide the transport, so there's that. But you heard it here first!

Not mentioned is whatever the Covid injection was that China gave their citizens. ChinaVax or some such thing.

Nowhere else seems to be having the scale of infections that China is having. Natural immunity would prevent a virus from re-infecting the population this way.

They may have administered a kill-shot, either intentionally or not, to their population.

Or the entire story could be false.

quote:

Or the entire story could be false.

Good point.
When you lie all the time... no one believes anything. We damn sure know the population hasn't remained stable at 1.3 billion like they claim.

Rule One of Dealing with The Peoples' Republic of China:

Believe nothing the CCP says, nothing the Chinese "media" says, and nothing said about China's economy, especially if said by the CCP.

quote:

Originally posted by chellim1:

Remember Mao's Great Leap Forward?
How many died between 1958 and 1962?

An estimated 30-45 million back when China had a fraction of the population they do now.

quote:

Originally posted by Sig2340:
Rule One of Dealing with The Peoples' Republic of China:

Believe nothing the CCP says, nothing the Chinese "media" says, and nothing said about China's economy, especially if said by the CCP.

Except the Epoch Times isn't a CCP arm. It's a Go long fang(??) publication. A religious sect that is being persecuted by the CCP. Now, I still am not sure about the story either because the CCP could be the source of these stories being fed to the Epoch Times and they might be getting played.

Just China solving its population problem. Kill off all the old folks then their sole child from the one child policy wont be broke paying for the ailing parents.

quote:

Go long fang(??)

Falun Gong?

I know lots of people in China and they are not saying anything about this.

What they ARE saying is companies are laying off, lots of people can't find work, and if they do the salary is much lower. The "foreigners" (westerners) have mostly left, and western companies are trying to move operations to other countries. And now the U.S. tariffs are kicking them while they're down.

Some tell me they hate Xi because of what he is doing to China. Of course they can't say this too loud or on social media much.

^^^
Perhaps China is due for another “great leap forward”…