China’s population will fall in 2022 for the first time in decades, a historic change that is expected to have long-term consequences for the domestic and global economy.
The world’s most populous country has long been an important source of labor and demand, driving growth in China and the world.
On Tuesday, the Bureau of National Statistics announced that the total population will fall by 850,000 in 2022 to 1.41175bn, the first decline in 60 years.
“This is a historic turning point, the beginning of a long-term and irreversible population decline,” said Wang Feng, an expert on Chinese demographic change at the University of California, Irvine.
The decline officially began last year, when deaths exceeded births, but some demographers argue that the trend would have started earlier.
China’s zero-Covid policy to contain the coronavirus appears to have greatly slowed the country’s birth rate, as couples delay or decide not to have children amid the health crisis and economic slowdown. Last year, 9.56 million babies were born, down from 10.62 million the year before.
The birth rate in 2022 is the lowest since records began more than seven decades ago – 6.77 births for every 1,000 people, down from 10.41 in 2019.
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The decline is due to Beijing’s one-child policy implemented in 1980, which limits the number of children a couple can have to below the average of 2.1 needed to keep the country’s population stable.
Authorities repealed the policy in 2016, replacing it with a two-child limit, but the number of births has fallen every year since then.
The national death rate is 7.37 per 1,000 people in 2022, the highest since 1970, and up from 7.09 in 2019.
Fuxian Yi, a demographer at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, estimated that China’s population began to decline in 2018, but that the decline was masked by “incorrect demographic data”.
“China is facing a demographic crisis that is far beyond the imagination of the Chinese authorities and the international community,” Yi said, noting that the trend will act as a long-term drag on the country’s property market, an important engine of growth.
“China cannot rely on the demographic dividend as a structural driver for economic growth,” said Zhiwei Zhang, president and chief economist at Pinpoint Asset Management. “Economic growth should depend more on productivity growth, driven by government policies.”
Some economists say the rise in automation will offset rising labor costs as the workforce shrinks.
But analysts generally agree that the country’s social welfare and medical infrastructure are ill-prepared for an aging population.
China’s sudden departure from its strict zero-Covid policy last month and a rapid rise in infections followed in hospitals. Wang said this should be a “wake-up call for China to speed up reform of its still inefficient and unequal health care system”.
China’s demographic turning point puts it on the same path as Japan, where the population began to decline in 2010 and has continued to decline every year.
The UN estimates that China’s population will drop to 1.31 billion by 2050 and 767 million by the end of the century. Estimates by 2050 will make China 3.5 times the size of the US, which is expected to have 375 million people. It is now 4.7 times larger than the US.
The UN 2022 forecast also projects that India will overtake China as the world’s most populous country this year. India’s current population is 1.4066 billion.
Additional reporting by Tom Mitchell in Singapore and Ryan McMorrow in Beijing