China’s population falls by 2.08 million to 1.4097 billion in 2023 as births tumble, adding to demographic concerns

INTERNATIONAL DESK: China’s population fell again last year, having experienced its first decline in six decades in 2022, as the birth rate hit a new low and the number of deaths climbed.

The overall population in mainland China fell by 2.08 million last year to 1.4097 billion, down from 1.4118 billion in 2022, according to official figures released on Wednesday.

Amid a plummeting interest in having children, 9.02 million babies were born last year, down by 5.6 per cent from 9.56 million in 2022, according to the National Bureau of Statistics.

The falling number of new babies resulted in the lowest birth rate since records began in 1949, with 6.39 births for every 1,000 people, compared with 6.77 in 2022.

Last year, 11.1 million people also died, pushing the national death rate to 7.87 per 1,000 people.

Authorities have not disclosed the number of coronavirus-related deaths after China dropped its stringent health control measures at the end of 2022, but the death rate last year was an uptick from 7.37 per thousand the year before.

China’s official population data includes its 31 provinces, autonomous regions and municipalities, as well as servicemen, but excludes foreigners.

The world’s second-largest economy, having once significantly benefited from a demographic dividend, will have to tackle challenges including fewer working-age people, weaker spending power and a strained social security system as its population ages further, researchers have warned.

China’s overall population is set to see steeper decline in the coming years, said professor Peng Xizhe from the Centre for Population and Development Policy Studies at Fudan University.

As the cloud of the coronavirus pandemic wanes, and pronatalist policies “more or less make some difference”, the number of newborns per year might rebound a little but is unlikely to exceed 10 million, he said.

“A rise in deaths related to Covid-19 may have occurred in early 2023 … Looking ahead, as the population ages, annual deaths will continue growing in the future, surpassing 10 million people each year,” Peng said.

“Therefore, with deaths outnumbering births, it’s almost certain that the population will go on with negative growth.”

China’s population growth had been slowing since 2016 as the high cost of raising children, a greater pursuit of individualism and a diversified lifestyle dampen enthusiasm to start a family. The country’s zero-Covid policies, implemented between 2020 and late 2022, are also perceived to have contributed to the slide.

India overtook China as the world’s most populous country in 2023, according to projections from the United Nations.

Li Xunlei, chief economist with Zhongtai Securities, projected that China’s population would dip below 1.4 billion by 2027, and 1.2 billion by 2049.

“It took Japan 12 years [from 1994 to 2006] to transit from an aged society to a super-aged one, whereas China will do it within 11 years,” he said in an article published in October.

According to the World Bank, a country is defined as “aged” when the share of people aged 65 and above is 14 per cent or more, and “super-aged” when it exceeds 20 per cent. In China, the proportion of people aged 65 surpassed 14 per cent for the first time in 2021.

Beijing has rolled out a series of measures in recent years in an attempt to reverse the ageing trend and also boost childbirths, but they have failed to yield results.

In 2021, Beijing eased birth restrictions to allow couples to have three children, having earlier relaxed its one-child policy in January 2016 in favour of a two-child policy.

The three-child policy was followed by a mixture of incentives from local governments, ranging from prolonged parental leave to tax cuts and cash rewards for families with more than one child.

Despite these efforts, China needs to build a more integrated policy system to foster a supportive environment for childbearing, said Yuan Xin, a professor of demography at Nankai University’s School of Economics.

“Such a system should focus on equality and needs to be consistent across the country,” he said.

“There should not be big differences in the treatment of different people because of their birth order, race, the province they live, and whether they’re from urban or rural areas.”

Concerns over equality have risen in the past few years as some local governments rolled out measures to stimulate births based on controversial criteria.

In Weifang, Shandong province, a policy issued in March last year stated that families do not have to pay tuition fees for their third child attending high school, but the offer did apply to the first two children.

It sparked criticism over educational equality, which is one of the major issues behind the reluctance to have children.

Lu Jiehua, deputy director of the Centre for Healthy Ageing and Family Studies at Peking University, also said that authorities should also do more to provide follow-up support instead of only offering a one-off subsidy after a child is born.

“We need to improve policies on maternity insurance and family tax, so the government will play a better role in guaranteeing basic living standards and benefiting people’s livelihood,” he said in a research paper published by the Population and Health journal in October.

Peng, the Fudan University professor, added that the key to motivating people to have children is an improvement in gender equality, which is a basic national policy contained within China’s constitution, but one that is still poorly implemented and not properly supervised.

“In reality, it is still hard to find more paternal engagement in parenting and a better balance of family and work for women,” he said.

“Unlike the stock market, which may be immediately stimulated by a policy, it takes a much longer time for measures to work when it comes to making people willing and able to reproduce.”

Despite the downward trend, Chinese women remain more active in the labour market than their peers in any other major economies, with a labour participation rate of 63.73 per cent according to the World Economic Forum’s 2023 Global Gender Gap Index.

But their burden in childcare and unpaid work at home is far greater than men.

In 2020, mothers were the main carers for children in more than 52 per cent of Chinese families with children at grade nine and younger -generally corresponding to children ages 15 and below – a sharp contrast to just 6.2 per cent where fathers played that role, according to a report by researchers from Peking University. The remainder are primarily cared for by grandparents or nannies.

“China definitely needs to spend more money on encouraging births, but what’s more important is rebuilding confidence and reshaping culture, which will not happen without the efforts of one or two generations,” added Yuan of Nankai University. (SCMP)