/biz/ - Business & Finance

Due to the nature of Chinese telecoms, your national ID is bound to your mobile number account, which is in turn bound to your Alipay account, the one-stop mobile app that manages all monetary transactions, including banking.

If you lose it you lose access to Alipay, which is basically how the Chinese pay for everything from chewing gum to haircuts to groceries.

People don't just cancel their phone numbers because of that. Even if you change your mobile phone number it's a hassle in Mainland China because of that.

When phone number accounts are not paid for a certain period, or if some other actor (relatives? gov?) shut down your personal account related to the country's database, the mobile phone accounts are automatically cancelled.

Here we see a drastic drop in mobile accounts in all major Chinese telecoms. China Mobile alone reports a disappearance of 7 million and 254 thousand. The actual number of coronavirus deaths may be up to 14,472,000 if we take the three major telecoms in China.

Anons from the previous thread raised the issue of multiple SIMs owned by a single person. Whilst that may be the case for business or other reasons, it still doesn't explain the anomaly here.

All sources, including all previous years' data for comparison (2020 is the only time we see this massive drop):
https://www.chinamobileltd.com/en/ir/operation_m.php
https://www.chinaunicom.com.hk/en/ir/operating.php?type=monthly
https://www.chinatelecom-h.com/en/ir/kpi.php