China had a one child policy for decades starting in the late 70s. As we know, Chinese value sons more than daughters (how many of us know Chinese here in the US whose first born is a son?). Naturally, as a result of this favoritism, there would be far fewer baby girls either born or allowed live in China, eventually resulting in a lack of women able to have children.

The Chinese must have known that because of their one-child policy their population would eventually collapse. How do they save face and avoid admitting that their policy caused this collapse? Create a pandemic, either real or not, to blame it on.

The ratio of deaths to weddings eventually would become high and peak at some point, so it is probably true that there is currently an unnatural imbalance, but it is being blamed on the wrong event. The Chinese can see this imbalance and they must know the real reason, but are being told that it's because of covid, not their government's former one child policy. Gaslighting on an epic scale.

Edit: Bubble's comment about China getting money from the IMF, World Bank, etc. - these organizations couldn't possible have been fooled into believing China's reported population count.