China has recorded its first population decline in decades.
The National Bureau of Statistics reported on Tuesday, January 17, 2023 that the country had 850,000 fewer people at the end of 2022 than the previous year. The tally comprises only the population of mainland China, excluding Hong Kong and Macao as well as foreign residents.
The bureau disclosed at a briefing that, this left a total of 1.41 billion people, with 9.56 million births against 10.41 million deaths.
Men outnumbered women by 722.06 million to 689.69 million, a result of the strict one-child policy that only officially ended in 2016 and a traditional preference for male offspring to carry on the family name.
Since abandoning the one-child policy, China has tried to encourage families to have two or even three children, with little success, reflecting attitudes in much of east Asia where birth rates have fallen rapidly. In China, the expense of raising children in cities is often cited as a cause.
China has long been the world’s most populous nation, but has been overtaken by India. Estimates put India’s population at more than 1.4 billion and continuing to grow.
The last time China is believed to have recorded a population decline was during the Great Leap Forward launched at the end of the 1950s, under then-leader Mao Zedong’s disastrous drive for collective farming and industrialization that produced a massive famine killing tens of millions of people.
Yi Fuxian, a demographer and expert on Chinese population trends at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, noted that China’s population has begun to decline 9 to 10 years earlier than Chinese officials predicted and the United Nation projected.
Yi said that, it means China’s real demographic crisis is beyond imagination and that all of China’s past economic, social, defense, and foreign policies were based on faulty demographic data.
Yi added that, based on his own research, China’s population has actually been declining since 2018, showing the population crisis is “much more severe” than previously thought.
China’s statistics bureau said the working-age population between 16 and 59 years old equaled 875.56 million, accounting for 62.0% of the national population, while those aged 65 and older totaled 209.78 million, accounting for 14.9% of the total.
Increased Urbanization
The statistics also showed increasing urbanization in a country that traditionally had been largely rural. Over 2022, the permanent urban population increased by 6.46 million to reach 920.71 million, or 65.22%, while the rural population fell by 7.31 million.
It was not immediately clear if the population figures have been affected by the COVID-19 outbreak.
Last year, the United Nations estimated that the world’s population reached 8 billion on November 15 and that India will replace China as the world’s most populous nation in 2023. India’s last census was scheduled for 2022 but was postponed amid the pandemic.
In a report released on World Population Day, the U.N. also stated that global population growth fell below 1% in 2020 for the first time since 1950.
Also on Tuesday, the bureau released data which shows that China’s economic growth fell to its second-lowest level in at least four decades last year under pressure from anti-virus controls and a real estate decline.
The world’s Number 2 economy grew by 3% in 2022, less than half of the previous year’s 8.1%, the data showed.
That was the second-lowest annual rate since at least the 1970s, after the drop to 2.4% in 2020 at the start of the coronavirus pandemic, although businesses are reviving after restrictions were lifted.
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