Xiong Yue has made up her mind not to have a second child. “It’s too energy-consuming and my family has reached a consensus not to have another kid,” the 33-year-old stay-at-home mother of a 2-year-old in Shenzhen, Guangdong Province, told Beijing Review.
Young people’s willingness to have children is declining in China. According to a press conference held by the National Health Commission in January, the number of children that the surveyed women of childbearing age planned to have on average was 1.76, 1.73, and 1.64 in 2017, 2019 and 2021, respectively.
According to the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), the number of newborns fell to 10.62 million in 2021, marking a decline for five consecutive years, and the birthrate was 7.52 per 1,000. Both the number of newborns and birth rate were the lowest since 1949.
Total fertility rate (TFR)—the number of children per woman—fell to 1.47 in 2019 and 1.3 in 2020, below the warning line of 1.5. Demographers believe that once the TFR falls below 1.5, a country will fall into the low fertility trap and birth rates won’t easily rebound.
In the year after the universal two-child policy was introduced in 2015, the number of newborns was 17.89 million, 1.31 million more than the previous year. However, the number of newborns went down to 17.23 million in 2017, 15.23 million in 2018 and 14.65 million in 2019.
The China Population and Development Research Center predicted that China will enter a stage of negative population growth in 10 years.
The declining birth rate has been coupled with an exacerbating aging population problem. According to the seventh population census conducted in 2020, the number of people aged above 60 reached 264.02 million, accounting for 18.7 percent of the population, and that of those above 65 was 190.64 million, accounting for 13.5 percent of the population.
Compared with the previous census conducted a decade earlier, the seventh population census showed the proportion of the population aged above 60 increased by 5.44 percentage points and that of people above 65 rose by 4.63 percentage points.
According to international standards, a country or region is defined as an aging society when its 65-plus population reaches 7 percent of the population, and a deeply aging society when its 65-plus population reaches 14 percent of the population. According to such standards, China became an aging society in 2000 and was on the edge of a deeply aging society in 2020, with its 65-plus population reaching 13.5 percent. -The Daily Mail-Beijing Review News Exchange Item
