So I was calling a friend to see if she knew any Chinese demographers, and she said, “I’m just riffling through my email, and I see that incomplete statistics show there were 200 executions in China — in the two weeks leading up to the Lunar New Year.”
“What!” I said, “What was so special?”
“Oh, I think they just wanted to get it all done before the holidays.”
She also tells me — apropos demography — that Mao thought Malthus was a Capitalist plot.