Beijing.- China had its first overall population decline in decades due to an aging society and a plummeting birth rate, according to official data released Tuesday.
The National Statistics Office reported that the country had 850,000 fewer people at the end of 2022 compared to the previous year. The count includes the mainland population only and excludes Hong Kong, Macao, and Taiwan, as well as foreign residents.
That left a total of 1,411.75 million people, with 9.56 million births and 10.41 million deaths, the office said at a news conference on Tuesday.
It was not immediately clear whether population numbers were affected by the Covid-19 outbreak that was first detected in the central Chinese city of Wuhan before spreading across the world. Some specialists have accused the Asian giant of underestimating deaths from the virus by attributing them to underlying conditions.
China’s population has started to decline 9 to 10 years earlier than Chinese officials predicted and the United Nations projected, said Yi Fuxian, a demographer and expert on Chinese population trends at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“China has gotten old before it got rich,” Yi added.
China has tried to increase its population since officially ending its one-child policy in 2016. Since dropping the policy, the country has tried to encourage families to have a second or even third child, with little success, resulting in It reflects attitudes in much of East Asia where birth rates have plummeted. In China, the expense of raising children in cities is often cited as a cause.
There are still more men than women, 722.06 million by 689.69 million, the agency said, a result of the now canceled one-child-per-family policy and a traditional preference for sons who keep the last name.
China has long been the world’s most populous nation, but India is expected to surpass it soon.
The last time China recorded population decline is believed to have been during the Great Leap Forward in the late 1950s, Mao Zedong’s disastrous push for collective farming and industrialization that resulted in widespread famine that claimed the lives of tens of millions of people.
