China is facing an impending demographic crisis, and official figures released on Wednesday indicated that the country’s population decrease picked up speed in 2023. This continued a decreasing trend that began more than six decades ago.
After India surpassed China as the most populous nation in the world last year, Beijing is now rushing to increase declining birth rates through pro-fertility rhetoric and subsidies.
“By the end of 2023, the national population was 1,409.67 million… a decrease of 2.08 million over that at the end of 2022,” Beijing’s National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) said Wednesday.
Last year’s decline was more than double the fall reported for 2022, when the country lost 850,000 people as its population shrank for the first time since 1960.
“In 2023, the number of births was 9.02 million with a birth rate of 6.39 per thousand,” the NBS said Wednesday, down from 9.56 million births in 2022.
In response to concerns about population growth, China lifted its stringent “one-child policy” in 2016 and began allowing couples to have up to three children in 2021.
However, in a nation that has historically depended on its sizable labor population to propel economic expansion, this has not been able to stop the demographic downturn.
Many attribute the decline in birth rates to the rising expense of living and the rising proportion of women entering the labor and pursuing higher education.
“The trend of China’s population decline is basically impossible to reverse,” He Yafu, an independent Chinese demographer, told AFP.
“Even if fertility is encouraged, it is impossible for China’s fertility rate to rise to replacement level, because now the younger generation has fundamentally changed its conception of fertility and is generally unwilling to have more children,” He said.
To postpone an economic crisis as the pool of working-age adults shrinks, He said the government should roll out more incentives including childrearing stipends, “developing universal child-care services, and increasing the rate of children under the age of three entering nursery schools”.
