21 million cell phone numbers disappeared in China. I believe their death rate is much higher than they let on...maybe by tenfold.
The thing is that many Chinese have two cell phones - one from their company and one their personal. They need the personal one for payments etc (nearly all payments in China are mobile).
It could be that the 21 million are mostly company phones.
It could be that they are from dead people.
There just isn’t enough to make a conclusion on right now — though the hiding of deaths of 21 million would be high and also they could have HIDDEN the 21 million less numbers fact
“21 million cell phone numbers disappeared in China.”
The earliest reference to that story is 3/22 that I can find. Seems like several online news outlets picked it up a day later and ran updates a couple of days after that. Bloomberg has a business article referencing it only insofar as how it affects Chinese telecom stocks listed on various exchanges.
I wonder if this is legit? Some of these investor news rags are pretty goofy.