What is the population of Shenzhen? This question remains tough to answer because there is the official hukou population, the official long-term population, and the population of everyone who lives here or is here… Anyway, according to the Shenzhen Statistics bureau website, in 2022 the city’s population was 17.66 million. However, according to journalist Nan Zhaoxu, who does wonderful work ferretting out those bureaucratic nooks and crannies where alternative truths might be found, on Jan 1, 2022, the city processed 22.19 million covid swabs, making the difference between the official and resident populations about 4.5 million souls. Long story short: Since the mid 2010s, I have thought of the city as home to 20 million people. I am now bumping that figure up to 22 million.

This may mean that ways of counting people are finally catching up to the city’s actual number of residents because both population turnover and growth seem to have significantly slowed. However, it may also be the case that different bureaus have different forms of legitimacy as well as quite different relationships to the city. Public health, for example, was tasked to test everyone in the city. In contrast, education bureaus are only responsible to official youth. In this sense, the city’s “population” is the result of bureaucratic actions (such as registering people), rather than a group that exists as such.