January 17, 2023
Updated 6 hours ago
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China’s population has declined for the first time in 60 years, with the national fertility rate hitting a record low 6.77 births per 1,000 people.
The country’s population in 2022 1.4118 billion has decreased by 850,000 compared to 2021.
China’s birth rate has been declining for years, prompting several measures to slow the trend.
In 2015, seven years after ending the onechild policy introduced in the 1970s to limit the size of Chinese families, China entered an “era of negative population growth.”
The fertility rate in 2022 fell to 6.77 from 7.52 in 2021, according to China’s National Bureau of Statistics, which released the figures Tuesday (Jan. 17).
The contrast to other countries is great. In 2021, the United States recorded 11.06 births per thousand population and the United Kingdom 10.08 births.
The birth rate for the same year in India, which is expected to overtake China as the world’s most populous country, was 16.42. In Brazil, the birth rate was 13.46 in 2020, the year with the most recent complete statistics.
In China, deaths exceeded births for the first time last year. China recorded its highest death rate since 1976 7.37 deaths per 1,000 people, up from 7.18 the previous year.
Earlier data showed that a demographic crisis was imminent and that in the long run it would reduce China’s labor force and increase government health and social security costs.
Results from a 2021 census showed China’s population is growing at its slowest pace in decades. In other East Asian countries like Japan and South Korea, the population is shrinking and aging.
“This trend will continue postCovid and maybe get worse,” says Yue Su, an economist at the Economist Intelligence Unit. Su is among the experts who believe that China’s population will continue to shrink until 2023. China is still struggling with the coronavirus pandemic.
“High youth unemployment and declining income expectations could further delay marriage and child planning and reduce the number of births.”
And the death toll in 2023 is likely to be higher than before the pandemic due to Covid infections, the expert says. China has faced an escalation in some cases since it abandoned its zerotolerance policy on Covid last month.
China’s demographic trends have been shaped over the years by the controversial onechild policy, introduced in 1979 to curb population growth.
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China’s onechild policy reinforced a culture that favored boys over girls.
Families who did not follow the rules were fined and, in some cases, even lost their jobs. In a culture that historically favored boys over girls, politics has produced forced abortions and skewed gender relations.
The policy was abandoned in 2016 and couples could now have two children. In recent years, the Chinese government has offered tax breaks and better maternal health services, among other incentives, to reverse, or at least slow, the decline in the birthrate.
But this policy has not resulted in a sustained increase in births. Some experts say this is because policies to encourage childbirth have not been matched with efforts such as more help for working mothers or access to childcare.
In October 2022, Chinese President Xi Jinping said that raising birth rates is a priority. Xi told a Communist Party congress in Beijing that his government would “employ a proactive national strategy” in response to the country’s aging population.
In addition to encouraging couples to have children, China also needs to improve gender equality in families and in the workplace, says Bussarawan Teerawichitchainan, director of the Center for Family and Population Research at the National University of Singapore.
Scandinavian countries are proof that such measures can improve fertility rates, she says.
“They are not in a doomsday scenario right now,” says Paul Cheung, Singapore’s former chief statistician. According to him, China has “a lot of staff” and “a lot of time” to deal with its demographic crisis.
Experts say raising birth rates alone will not solve the problems behind China’s slowing growth.
“Increasing fertility will neither improve productivity nor increase domestic consumption in the medium term,” says Stuart GietelBasten, professor of public policy at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. “How China responds to these structural problems will be even more important.”
impact on the world
China is likely entering a new phase of population decline that will result in India becoming the world’s most populous nation by midApril and having just over half the 1.4 billion people it has today by 2100.
And 2100 is a symbolic year that should mark the moment when world population as a whole peaks and then begins to decline. But not before we go from 8 billion today to 10.4 billion people in the future.
The speed at which this change is occurring, without the majority of China’s population having managed to become rich before aging, threatens the balance society needs between a workingage population and an increasingly older population that lacks resources for health and also needed for retirement .
China’s fertility rate is currently estimated at 1.18 children per woman, already below the 2.1 children per woman needed to keep the population stable.
Population decline affects the entire world because China is a global economic powerhouse and any imbalance or economic downturn reverberates in many other countries.
A practical example of this is that if the labor force dwindles, China will struggle to continue making cheap products for export which tends to affect inflation rates around the world.