Analysis of information sources in references of the Wikipedia article "1942年河南饥荒" in Chinese language version.
A detailed survey organized by the Nationalist government in 1943 of the impact of the famine came up with a toll of 1,484,983, broken down by county. The official population registers of Henan show a net decline in population from 1942 to 1943 of one million people, or 3 per cent of the population. If we assume that the natural rate of increase in the population before the famine was 2 per cent (as was the case prior to the outbreak of war, but not during the war), the resulting figure of 5 per cent of the population or 1.7 million people is assumed after the famine. This is consistent with the official figure, and includes both fertility loss (decline in births due to the famine) and outward migration as well as excess deaths. Whereas no reliable data on migration is available, comparison with other famines would suggest that fertility loss and excess deaths would have made a similar contribution to total population loss, which means that the tally of excess deaths is likely to have been well under one million. [...] The statistical tallies of the 1942 famine carry political significance today. The death toll of ‘over 3 million’ cited by Xia Mingfang implies that the ‘Nationalist famine’ in Henan was quantitatively worse than the ‘Communist famine’ that occurred 15 years later.
