Historic decline: For the first time in 60 years, China’s population has declined

China’s six-year decline in the birth rate reached a tipping point in 2022, according to official demographic data released on Tuesday. And is that last year was the first year in which it recorded more deaths than births, in fact the first time in 60 years that the country has seen its population shrink.

“At the end of 2022, the national population was 1,411,750 million people,” the Beijing National Bureau of Statistics (ONE) reported, adding that there was “a decrease of 0.85 million people. from the end of 2021”.

The UNO, in turn, indicated that last year there were 9.56 million births, against 10.41 million deaths. The last time China experienced a population decline was in 1962, when the country faced the worst famine in its modern historycaused by Mao Tse Tung’s agricultural policy called the Great Leap Forward (1958-1962).

For experts, Tuesday’s news has important implications, not only for China, but also for the world economy. The drop in the birth rate, added to the growing aging of the population, opens the door to a demographic crisis which it will put pressure on their public coffers and will impact its ability to be a global economic powerhouse.

“The population will definitely continue to decline in the coming years,” said Zhiwei Zhang of Pinpoint Asset Management.

“China will not be able to depend on the demographic dividend as a structural engine of economic growth,” said the expert. “Economic growth should rely more on higher productivitywhich is driven by government policies”.

The reaction in China

News of the population decline quickly trended on Chinese social media, with some people expressing fear for the country’s future.

“Without children, the state and the nation have no future“, wrote a user of the social network Weibo, the Chinese version of Twitter, while a well-known patriotic “influencer” said that “having children is a social responsibility”.

The Chinese authorities have been trying for years to delay the arrival of the moment. They eased restrictions and started offering incentives for couples to have children.

In 2016, abolished its strict one-child policyimposed in the 1980s over overpopulation fears, and in 2021 began allowing couples to have three children.

The city of Shenzhen, for example, currently offers a birth bonus and a monthly allowance until the child turns three. A couple who have their first child automatically receives 3,000 yuan ($444) and the figure rises to 10,000 yuan ($1,480) for their third child.

The eastern city of Jinan, for its part, has started paying a monthly allowance of 600 yuan for couples who have a second child from January 1.

But those permissions failed to stem the population decline.

“Who still dares to have children? The unemployment rate is high (among young people), COVID has destroyed everything,” a 30-year-old from Shanghai told AFP.

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