China posts rare drop in population
Pressure to keep economy growing faces a new hurdle
BEIJING — China’s population shrank for the first time in decades last year as its birthrate plunged, official figures showed Tuesday, adding to pressure on leaders to keep the economy growing despite an aging workforce and at a time of rising tension with the U.S.
Despite the official numbers, some experts believe China’s population has been in decline for a few years — a dramatic turn in a country that once sought to control such growth through a onechild policy.
Many wealthy countries are struggling with how to respond to aging populations, which can be a drag on economic growth as shrinking numbers of workers try to support growing numbers of elderly people.
But the demographic change will be difficult to manage in a middle-income country like China, which does not have the resources to care for an aging population in the same way that one like Japan does. Over time, that will likely slow its economy and perhaps even the world’s, and could potentially keep inflation higher in many developed economies.
“China has become older before it has become rich,” said Yi Fuxian, a demographer and expert on Chinese population trends at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
A slowing economy could also pose a political problem for the ruling Communist Party, if shrinking opportunities foment public discontent. Anger over strict COVID-19 lockdowns spilled over late last year into
protests that in some cases called for leader Xi Jinping to step down — a rare direct challenge to the party.
The National Bureau of Statistics reported Tuesday that the country had 850,000 fewer people at the end of 2022 than the previous year. The tally includes only the population of mainland China, excluding Hong Kong and Macao as well as foreign residents.
More than 1 million fewer babies were born than the previous year amid a slowing economy and widespread pandemic lockdowns, according to official
figures. The bureau reported 9.56 million births in 2022; deaths ticked up to 10.41 million.
It wasn’t clear if the population figures were affected by a widespread outbreak of COVID-19 following the easing of pandemic restrictions last month. China recently reported 60,000 COVID-19-related deaths since early December, but some experts believe the government is likely underreporting deaths.
The last time China is believed to have experienced a population decline was during the Great Leap
Forward, a disastrous drive for collective farming and industrialization launched by then-leader Mao Zedong at the end of the 1950s that produced a massive famine that killed tens of millions of people.
China’s population has begun to decline nine to 10 years earlier than Chinese officials predicted and the United Nation projected, said Yi, the demographer. At 1.4 billion, the country has long been the world’s most populous nation, but is expected to soon be overtaken by India., if it has not already.
China has sought to bolster its population since officially ending its one-child policy in 2016. Since then, China has tried to encourage families to have more children, with little success, reflecting attitudes in much of east Asia where birth rates have fallen precipitously. In China, the expense of raising children in cities is often cited.
Zhang Huimin, a 23-yearold Beijing resident, bemoaned the “fierce competition” young people face these days — a fairly typical attitude toward starting a family among her age group.
“Home prices are high and jobs are not easy to find,” she said.
Yi said that his own research shows China’s population has actually been declining since 2018, indicating the population crisis is “much more severe” than previously thought. The country now has one of the lowest fertility rates in the world, comparable only to Taiwan and South Korea, he said.
That means China’s “real demographic crisis is beyond imagination and that all of China’s past economic, social, defense and foreign policies were based on faulty demographic data,” Yi said.
The statistics bureau said the working-age population between 16 and 59 years old totaled 875.56 million, accounting for 62% of the national population, while those aged 65 and older totaled 209.78 million, accounting for 14.9% of the total.
It also reported China’s economic growth fell to its second-lowest level in at least four decades last year, although activity is reviving after the lifting of COVID19 restrictions that kept millions of people at home.
Any slowdown has wider implications. China became a global manufacturing powerhouse in the early 2000s. With millions of its citizens flocking from the countryside to its cities, China’s seemingly endless supply of cheap labor lowered costs for consumers around the world.
Its labor costs have begun to rise — and changing demographics will likely accelerate that trend. As a result, inflation could creep higher in countries that import China’s products, though production may also move to lower-cost countries such as Vietnam, as it already has.