Of those 21M fewer CH cellphone users, I was 5.
In 2019, when I paid for fast internet service a year at a time, China Telecom was running a promotion that gave me 5 free SIM cards with data minutes on them.
But China, has a two-tier internet service, wherein domestic internet is very fast and international internet is throttled and monitored. So the gov't intentionally throttles my internet. So after years of upgrades but no improvement in speed, in January 2020 I downgraded my internet speed and got a refund. Because int'l internet usage is always slow in China. So China Telecom deactivated the 5 free SIM cards they had given me.
Sure that's anecdotal. But Red would have me a dead and disappeared CV victim 5 times over. If I alone incidentally accounted for 5 fewer cellphone customers, it's hard to believe those numbers are meaningful. I found it extremely odd that they gave me 5 SIM cards just for paying my internet bill in advance. But when I mentioned it to Chinese friends, they were all familiar with this practice, so doling out lots of extra SIM cards seems commonplace these days. Not sure why people would cancel these SIMs. I canceled mine completely by accident, by bailing on my premium package.