Dire warning for China: Births may fall below 10mn annually

BEIJING: The Chinese government should quickly abolish the policy of limiting two children per family, otherwise births in the world’s most populous country could slide below 10 million annually in the next five years, an expert told state media on Monday.

Dong Yuzheng, head of the Guangdong Academy of Population Development, is the latest to sound a warning about China’s falling birth rate following a word of caution from Cai Fang, a member of the monetary policy committee of the People’s Bank of China (PBOC), the country’s central bank, about the population entering negative growth by 2025.

“China’s total population may also fall in a few years.” Dong said.

Only last week, the PBOC had made public a work report by its staffers, which made the radical suggestion that the government allow three or more children per household to compete economically with India and the US in the future.

The report and the experts’ cautionary opinions come ahead of China publishing data from the country-wide census conducted in late 2020.

The once-a-decade census is likely to reveal a grim demographic picture - a fall in the number of young people, a rapidly ageing population and an antipathy among couples to have more children because of rising living costs.

The number of babies born in China fell by 580,000 to 14.65 million in 2019 and the birth rate of 10.48 per thousand was the lowest since 1949 when present methods of collating data began, according to the National Bureau of Statistics.