The Chinese regime may be downplaying how fast its population is shrinking, and a recent policy to promote three-child families has poor chances of improving birth rates, a fertility expert told the Reuters Next conference on Friday. Fuxian Yi, senior scientist in the obstetrics and gynecology department at the University of Wisconsin, said he estimated that the regime’s 2020 population was 1.28 billion rather than the 1.41 billion census number reported and that fertility rates were lower than reported. Yi estimates that China’s population has been shrinking since 2018. The Chinese regime did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The country’s rapidly shrinking birth rate has raised concerns of slower economic growth and the potential challenges created by fewer workers supporting an older population. Beijing scrapped its decades-old one-child policy in 2016, replacing it with a two-child limit to try to stave off those risks. In May a …