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And then you have studies like these saying China's rural population is vastly undercounted
https://phys.org/news/2025-03-significant-proportion-world-rural-population.html
>The team suggests these counting errors occur because census data in rural areas is often incomplete or unreliable and population estimation methods have historically been designed for best accuracy in urban areas.
>Andrew Tatem at the University of Southampton, UK, oversees WorldPop, one of the datasets that the study suggests was undercounting populations by 53 per cent. He says that grid-level population estimates are based on combining higher-level census estimates with satellite data and modelling, and that the quality of satellite imagery before 2010 is known to make such estimates inaccurate. “The further you go back in time, the more those problems come about,” he says. “I think that’s something that’s well understood.”
>Researchers found that the negative bias was systemic worldwide, with discrepancies particularly noticeable across datasets in China.