BEIJING/HONG KONG: For the first time in six decades, China’s population decreased last year. This historic development is likely to signal the beginning of a protracted period of population reduction, which will have a significant impact on the country’s economy and the rest of the world. China’s population drops for the first time since 1961.
The decline, which is the greatest since 1961, the final year of China’s Great Famine, supports forecasts that India would surpass China as the world’s most populated country this year.
By the end of 2022, China’s population had decreased by almost 850,000, to 1.41175 billion, according to the National Bureau of Statistics.
In the long run, according to UN analysts, China’s population would fall by 109 million people by 2050, which is more than quadruple the decline they had predicted for 2019.
Domestic demographers bemoan the fact that China will age before it becomes wealthy as a result, slowing the economy as revenues decline and government debt rises as a result of skyrocketing health and welfare spending.
“China’s demographic and economic outlook is much bleaker than expected. China will have to adjust its social, economic, defence and foreign policies,” said demographer Yi Fuxian.
He added that the country’s shrinking labour force and a downturn in manufacturing heft would further exacerbate high prices and high inflation in the United States and Europe.
Kang Yi, head of the national statistics bureau, told reporters that people should not worry about the decline in population as “overall labour supply still exceeds demand”.
The lowest birth rate ever recorded was 6.77 births per 1,000 people in China in 2017, down from 7.52 births per 1,000 people in 2021.
According to Kang, there were 4 million fewer Chinese women who were of reproductive age, which the government defines as 25 to 35.
The death rate was 7.37 per 1,000 people, which was the highest since the Cultural Revolution in 1974 and lower than the figure of 7.18 in 2021.
A significant portion of the population decline is attributable to China’s one-child policy, which was in place from 1980 to 2015, as well as exorbitantly expensive schooling expenditures, which have discouraged many Chinese from having more than one child or any at all as China’s population drops for the first time since 1961.
After the results were revealed on Tuesday, the data quickly became the most popular trending subject on Chinese social media. There were hundreds of millions of clicks for the hashtag “#Is it truly important to have offspring?”
“The fundamental reason why women do not want to have children lies not in themselves, but in the failure of society and men to take up the responsibility of raising children. For women who give birth this leads to a serious decline in their quality of life and spiritual life,” posted one netizen with the username Joyful Ned.
According to population experts, China’s strict zero-COVID policies, which were in place for three years, have further harmed the country’s demographic outlook.
Since 2021, local governments have implemented policies to support more births, such as tax breaks, extended maternity leaves, and housing subsidies. Additionally, President Xi Jinping stated in October that the government would implement additional supportive measures.
However, the current steps haven’t really done anything to stop the long-term tendency.
Online searches for baby bottles have decreased by more than a third since 2018, while searches for baby carriages plummeted by 17% in 2022 on 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 were up 15% year over year in 2022, according to Google Trends.
