This is actually a true problem. As offical statistics are often problematic, historians have to take into account various other sources, e.g. private notes, media coverage from contemporaries, crossreferencing the “offical ” event with internal reports or other non-secret notes, secret service infos (if available) and several other sources.
In the end it is often just enough for a rough estimate. We’ll likley never know how many people died during the great jump forward in china, or other things. Just a rough estimation which may very well be off, but is the best we can currently reconstruct with the available data.
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