China’s population declines for 1st time since 1960s

China has announced its first overall population decline in recent years amid an aging population and a declining birth rate.

The National Bureau of Statistics reports the country will have 850,000 fewer people by the end of 2022 than last year. It is only the population of mainland China, but does not include independent Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan as well as foreign residents.

That leaves a total of 1.41175 billion, with 9.56 million births against 10.41 million deaths, the bureau said in a briefing on Tuesday.

Men also continued to outnumber women by 722.06 million to 689.69 million, the bureau said, as a result of the now-abandoned one-child policy and the traditional preference for male offspring to take on the family name.

China has long been the world’s most populous country, but is expected to soon be overtaken by India.

The last time China is believed to have recorded a population decline was during the Great Leap Forward in the late 1950s – Mao Zedong’s drive for collective agriculture and industrialization led to a massive famine that killed tens of millions of people.

The bureau said that Chinese people of working age between 16 and 59 numbered 875.56 million, accounting for 62 percent of the national population, while those aged 65 and over numbered 209.78 million, accounting for 14.9 percent of the total.

India is expected to become the most populous country by 2023

The statistics also show increasing urbanization in a country that until now was largely rural. Over the year 2022, the permanent urban population will increase by 6.46 million to reach 920.71 million, or 65.22 percent, while the rural population will decrease by 7.31 million.

There was no immediate comment on the possible effect on population figures of the COVID-19 outbreak, which was first detected in the central Chinese city of Wuhan before spreading around the world. China has been accused by some specialists of under-reporting deaths from the virus by blaming the prevailing conditions, but no actual number estimates have been published.

The United Nations estimated last year that the world’s population will reach eight billion on November 15 and that India will replace China as the world’s most populous country by 2023.

In a report released on World Population Day, the UN also said that global population growth will drop below 1 percent in 2020 for the first time since 1950.

Economic growth is also down

Also on Tuesday, the bureau released data showing China’s economic growth fell to the second-lowest rate in at least four decades under pressure from anti-virus controls and a slump in real estate.

The world’s No. 2 economy will grow by 3 percent in 2022, less than half of the 8.1 percent the year before, the data showed.

This is the second lowest annual rate since at least the 1970s after 2020, when it grew to 2.4 percent at the start of the coronavirus pandemic, even as activity resumed after restrictions that kept millions of people at home and led to protests were lifted.