China population declines: For the first time in decades, China has fewer people than it did at the start of last year, according to official figures released Tuesday. The world’s most populous country has worried for years about an ageing population’s effect on the economy and society. Still, the population was not expected to go into decline for almost a decade.

The National Bureau of Statistics reported that the country had 8,50,000 fewer people at the end of 2022 than the previous year. The tally includes only the population of mainland China, excluding Hong Kong and Macao and foreign residents. Over one million fewer babies were born than the previous year, amid a slowing economy and widespread lockdowns, according to official figures. The bureau reported 9.56 million births in 2022, compared to 10.62 million in 2021. Deaths rose from 10.14 million to 10.41 million.

“The trend comes much earlier” 

China’s population has begun to decline 9-10 years earlier than Chinese officials predicted and the United Nation projected, said Yi Fuxian, a demographer and expert on Chinese population trends at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “China has become older before it has become rich,” Yi said. China has sought to bolster its population since officially ending its one-child policy in 2016. Last year, the country adopted policies to encourage couples to have three children.

Men outnumbered women by 722.06 million to 689.69 million, the bureau reported a result of the one-child policy and a traditional preference for male offspring to carry on the family name. Since abandoning the policy, China has sought to encourage families to have second or even third children, with little success, reflecting attitudes in much of east Asia where birth rates have fallen precipitously. In China, the expense of raising children in cities is often cited as a cause.

India is likely to surpass China

China has long been the world’s most populous nation but is expected to soon be overtaken by India if it has not already. Estimates put India’s population at more than 1.4 billion and continue to grow. The last time China is believed to have experienced 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 said 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 now has one of the lowest fertility rates in the world, comparable only to Taiwan and South Korea, he added. That means that China’s “real demographic crisis is beyond imagination and that all of China’s past economic, social, defence, and foreign policies were based on faulty demographic data,” Yi told The Associated Press.

China’s economic crisis could be one of the reasons 

China’s looming economic crisis will be worse than Japan’s, where years of low growth have been blamed in part on a shrinking population, Yi said. China’s statistics bureau said the working-age population between 16 and 59 years old totalled 875.56 million, accounting for 62.0% of the national population, while those aged 65 and older totalled 209.78 million, accounting for 14.9% of the total.

If handled correctly, a declining population does not necessarily predict a weaker economy, said Stuart Gietel-Basten, professor of social science at Khalifa University in Abu Dhabi. “It’s a big psychological issue. Probably the biggest,” Gietel-Basten said.

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.

Is COVID-19 responsible for the decline in population?

It wasn’t immediately clear if the population figures have been affected by the COVID-19 outbreak that was first detected in the central Chinese city of Wuhan before spreading around the world. China has been accused by some specialists of underreporting deaths from the virus by blaming them on underlying conditions, but no estimates of the actual number have been published.

The United Nations estimated last year that the world’s population reached 8 billion on Nov. 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 said global population growth fell below 1% in 2020 for the first time since 1950.

Also Tuesday, the bureau released data showing 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 slump.

The world’s No. 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 the activity is reviving after restrictions that kept millions of people at home and sparked protests were lifted.

Gietel-Basten said that China has been adapting to demographic change for years by devising policies to move its economic activities up the value chain of innovation, pointing to the development of the semiconductor manufacturing and financial services industry. “The population of India is much younger and is growing. But there are many reasons why you wouldn’t necessarily automatically bet your entire fortune on India surpassing China economically in the very near future,” he said.

Among India’s many challenges is a level of female participation in the workforce that is much lower than China’s, Gietel-Basten added. “Whatever the population you have, it’s not what you’ve got but it’s what you do with it … to a degree,” he said.

(With inputs from AP)

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