China's population decline will accelerate in 2023, official data show, extending a downward trend after more than six decades of growth as the country grapples with a looming demographic crisis.
Once the world's most populous country, China was overtaken by India last year, with Beijing now trying to boost a declining birth rate through subsidies and fertility promotion propaganda.
"At the end of 2023, the country's population is 1,409.67 million people, which is 2.08 million people less than that at the end of 2022," said the National Bureau of Statistics of Beijing ( NSB).
Last year's drop was more than double the drop reported for 2022, when the country lost 850,000 people as its population shrank for the first time since 1960.
"In 2023, the number of births was 9.02 million with a birth rate of 6.39 per thousand," the NBS said, down from 9.56 million births in 2022.
In 2016, China ended its strict "one-child policy" imposed in the 1980s due to fears of overpopulation, and in 2021 began allowing couples to have three children each.
But that has failed to reverse the demographic collapse in the country, which has long relied on its vast workforce as an engine of economic growth.
Many blame the declining birth rate on the rising cost of living, as well as the increasing number of women entering the workforce and pursuing higher education.
"China's declining population trend is impossible to reverse," He Yafu, an independent Chinese demographer, told AFP.
"Even if the birth rate is encouraged, it is not possible for China's fertility rate to rise to the level of population replacement, because now the young generation has fundamentally changed its conception of the birth rate and generally does not want to have more children," he said. Heh.
To stave off the economic crisis as the number of working-age adults declines, he said the government should introduce more incentives, including childcare subsidies, "develop universal childcare services and increase the number of children under three-year-olds who enter kindergartens"./BGNES
