Births fell by 3.5% last year on mainland

Births fell by some 3.5 percent last year on the Chinese mainland, from 17.86 million in 2016 to 17.23 million last year, the National Bureau of Statistics said on Thursday.

The decline was attributed to such factors as the drop in the number of women of fertile age and people delaying marriage and pregnancy, the National Health and Family Planning Commission, China’s top health authority, said in a statement on Thursday.

The statistics bureau said the birth numbers were calculated from sample surveys. China loosened family planning policies, adopting a universal second-child policy at the beginning of 2016.

“Surveys show the major reasons couples don’t want to have a second child include the high cost of raising children, a shortage of nursery services and big constraints on women’s careers,” the commission said.

Despite the drop, it was still higher than the average births during the five years before 2015. Of babies born last year, 51 percent were a second child, up by 5 percentage points from 2016, the commission said.

Few people expected that births would fall, given implementation of the second-child policy, said Yuan Xin, a professor of population studies at Nankai University in Tianjin.

“A major reason for the decline in the number of births is the decreasing number of women of fertile age, or between 15 and 49, in China,” he said. Yuan predicted that the number of women in that age group will keep declining by about 5.2 million every year in the next few years.

He also cited the “lack of willingness ... especially among younger couples”.

Economic pressures aren’t the only factor. Young people are less concerned about such traditional values as keeping the family bloodline going or making sure they have children to look after them in old age, Yuan said.

“The situation will only become gloomier in the 14th Five-Year Plan period (202125) under the current family planning policy,” he said.

Yuan suggested more steps to aid couples who want children, such as more nurseries and public kindergartens.

The commission said on Thursday it will improve population monitoring, prediction and research, and help solve difficulties facing couples to promote long-term balanced population development.