BEIJING: China’s overall population fell by 850,000 year on year to 1.4118 billion in 2022, the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) announced on January 17. This was the first time China registered negative population growth in 61 years.
About 9.56 million babies were born last year, 1.06 million fewer than the 2021 number. The birth rate stood at 6.77 births per 1,000 people in 2022, down from 7.52 in 2021. Both figures were the lowest since the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949.
By comparison, in 2021, the United States recorded 11.06 births per 1,000 people. The birth rate for the same year in India, poised to overtake China as the world’s most populous country, stood at 16.42. Deaths surpassed births last year in China. The country logged its highest death rate since 1976—7.37 deaths per 1,000 people, up from 7.18 in the previous year, according to the NBS. Jiang Quanbao, a professor with the Institute for Population and Development Studies at Xi’an Jiaotong University, one of the earliest population research institutes in China, said population changes are affected by the number of births, deaths and migration.
Without considering international migration, the negative population growth has been primarily caused by the declining birth rate and the increasing death rate.
Zhang Lilong, an associate professor at the School of Labor Economics of Capital University of Economics and Business, told news portal ThePaper.cn that the decline of the number of newborns is caused by multiple factors, including the later age at which people get married for the first time, the declining number of women of reproductive age (15-49), and an overall decreasing willingness to have children. The increase in the number of deaths is related to the rapid aging of the population.
–The Daily Mail-Beijing review news exchange item
