Tue 17 January 2023:
For the first time in more than 60 years, China’s population has decreased, according to the official data. This is a momentous shift for the most populous country in the world, which now anticipates a prolonged period of population reduction.
The 1.4 billion-people country has seen birth rates fall to record lows as its workforce ages, a drop that analysts warn could stymie economic growth and put additional strain on the country’s already-strained public finances.
The mainland Chinese population stood at approximately 1,411,750,000 at the end of 2022, Beijing’s National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) reported on Tuesday, a decrease of 850,000 from the end of the previous year.
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The number of births was 9.56 million, the NBS said, while the number of deaths stood at 10.41 million. Men also continued to outnumber women in China by 722.06 million to 689.69 million.
The new figures represent the country’s first population decline since 1961, when the Great Leap Forward, Mao Zedong’s disastrous agricultural strategy, led to the greatest famine in modern history.
China has held the title of most populated country in the world for a while, but is expected to soon be overtaken by India, if it has not already.
India’s population is estimated to be around 1.4 billion.
People shouldn’t be concerned about China’s population drop, according to Kang Yi, the head of the NBS, because there is still an excess of labor supply in the nation.
Even though China relaxed its rigorous “one-child policy” in 2016 and permitted couples to have three children starting in 2021, the demographic loss has not been stopped by the policy change.
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According to United Nations analysts, China’s population may fall by 109 million by the year 2050, which is more than quadruple the decline they previously predicted for that year.
China has tried many initiatives to avoid a “demographic crisis”, including dropping the one-child policy and increasing parental leave as well as subsidies. However, such efforts do not appear to have worked.
The economic effect of a declining population is also a prime concern for China, as for decades, the country’s large working-age population — almost 70 percent of people in 2010 — was the engine behind growth in the economy.
According to Xiujian Peng, a senior research fellow at the Centre of Policy Studies at Australia’s University of Victoria, that the fertility rate in China is now much lower than countries such as the United States, Australia, and “even lower than Japan”.
China’s government likely did not expect such a significant drop in the population figures, she said, as authorities had already relaxed the one-child policy. However, the effect of COVID-19 on job insecurity and other factors such as the rising costs of living in China, particularly housing and education, has meant that policies to reverse the decline in fertility have not worked.
Since 2018, online searches for baby bottles have decreased by more than a third, while searches for baby carriages plummeted by 17% in 2022 according to the China’s Baidu search engine. In contrast, last year saw an eightfold increase in searches for senior care facilities.
The opposite is happening in India, where searches for cribs increased nearly five times while searches for infant bottles increased by 15% year over year in 2022, according to Google Trends.
SOURCE: INDEPENDENT PRESS AND NEWS AGENCIES
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