China's demography is at crossroads after it marked a population decline for the first time since 1961. According to the National Bureau of Statistics, the country had 850,000 fewer people at the end of 2022 than over the previous year.
That leaves China's population at 1.411.75 billion, with 9.56 million births against 10.41 million deaths. The figures, however, only counts the people of mainland China and not Hong Kong and Macao as well as foreign residents.
The decline comes in the wake of predictions that India will surpass China as the world's most populous nation this year.
Amid fears that this would have profound implications for its economy, China's National Bureau of Statistics head Kang Yi has stated that there was no reason to worry as the country's overall labor supply still exceeds demand, reported Reuters.
The decline in population is the first since the end of 1950s, which saw Mao Zedong's disastrous drive for collective farming and industrialisation that led to a massive famine killing tens of millions of people.
The Bureau figures also revealed that men continued to outnumber women by 722.06 million to 689.69 million, a result of the strict one-child policy that only officially ended in 2016. The number of Chinese of working-age between 16 and 59 totalled 875.56 million, which is 62.0 per cent of the national population. There were 209.78 million people aged 65 and above, accounting for 14.9 per cent of the total.
The Bureau report also mentions increasing urbanisation in a country. The permanent urban population increased by 6.46 million to reach 920.71 million, or 65.22 per cent in 2022. The rural population fell by 7.31 million.
Demographic downturn
Most attribute the current demographic downturn to the one-child policy imposed between 1980 and 2015, the repurcusion of which is still being felt. Though the policy was repealed in 2016, and government has since introduced measures to encourage people to have more children, including the three-child policy and housing subsidies, it did nothing to reverse the aftermath of the disastrous trend.
Other reasons cited include sky-high education costs that deter many from having more than one child or even having children at all. The lack of affordable childcare, rising living costs and gruelling work hours too are also cited as detterents.
In fact, after the news of population decline broke, Chinese social media was trending with topics in this regard. One hashtag,"#Is it really important to have offspring?" had hundreds of millions of hits.
"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," a comment read.
Though the authorities have mentioned nothing about whether or not Covid-19 had any implication on the trend, many attribute China's stringent zero-Covid policies to have caused damage to the country's demographic outlook.
Health agencies across the world have accused China of underreporting deaths from the virus by blaming them on underlying conditions.