The decrease from the previous year was more than twice as high as the one recorded for 2022, when the nation’s population fell for the first time since 1960, losing 850,000 people.
Beijing: As the nation struggles with an impending demographic crisis, China’s population drop picked up speed in 2023, according to official figures released on Wednesday. This continued the country’s downward trend after more than 60 years of development.
After India surpassed China as the most populous nation in the world last year, Beijing is now rushing to increase declining birth rates through pro-fertility rhetoric and subsidies.
“By the end of 2023, the national population was 1,409.67 million… a decrease of 2.08 million over that at the end of 2022,” the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) in Beijing announced on Wednesday 2023.
Last year’s decline was more than double the fall 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 Wednesday, down from 9.56 million births in 2022.
China ended its strict “one-child policy”, imposed in the 1980s amid overpopulation fears, in 2016 and started letting couples have three children in 2021.
But that has failed to reverse the demographic decline for a country that has long relied on its vast workforce as a driver of economic growth.
Many attribute the decline in birth rates to the rising expense of living and the rising proportion of women entering the labour and pursuing higher education.
He Yafu, an independent Chinese demographer, told AFP that it is “basically impossible to reverse the trend of China’s population decline.”
“Even if fertility is encouraged, it is impossible for China’s fertility rate to rise to replacement level, because now the younger generation has fundamentally changed its conception of fertility and is generally unwilling to have more children,” said He.