China’s population stalls with births in 2021, lowest in modern history

Last year’s 10.62 million births, down from 12.02 million in 2020, barely surpassed 10.14 million deaths, the National Bureau of Statistics said on Monday, adding that the day may be near when China’s population will begin to shrink. Some analysts believe the population may have already peaked.

At the end of 2021, China’s population was 1.413 billion, up only 0.034% from 1.412 billion a year ago at the end of 2020. The birth rate – the number of births per thousand people – fell to a new low of 7.52 in 2021 compared to 8.52. In 2020, a dire demographic underlines Beijing’s challenge in lighting up the picture.

Since an uptick in 2016, when China ended a four-decade one-child policy and allowed married couples to have two children, the number of births each year has declined. The birth rate in 2019 was already the lowest in the country’s modern history.

Nearly one in five Chinese is age 60 or older. Monday’s figures showed a further increase in that percentage, to 18.9% in 2021, from 18.7% in 2020.

“The demographic challenge is well known, but the pace of population aging is clearly faster than expected,” Zhiwei Zhang, an economist at Pinpoint Asset Management, said in a note. This suggests that China’s total population may reach its peak in 2021, Mr. Zhang said.

Working-age Chinese—defined as people aged 16 to 59—now account for 63% of the total population.

China, which only a few years ago harshly restricted how many children couples can have, is now struggling to persuade them to have more. Since Beijing said last year that all couples can have up to three children, local governments have tried measures including cash prizes and longer maternity leave to promote the birth. To facilitate marriages, local authorities organize matchmaking events and discourage the use of dowry.

These efforts have yielded no significant results. The latest official data shows that China’s marriage registrations, after declining sharply in 2020, continued to fall in the first nine months of last year.

More young women make career development a higher priority than starting a family, moving away from the values ​​taught by the government and older generations.

Gender imbalance also contributes to the decline in marriage rates, said He Yafu, an independent demographer based in Guangdong. The traditional preference for boys, along with the now defunct one-child policy, has skewed China’s sex ratio. Census data shows that in Chinese ages 20 to 40, males outnumber females by 17.5 million, although the gap across the country has narrowed in recent years.

Officials have partly attributed the low birth numbers to the Covid-19 uncertainty. For two years, China has used some of the strictest measures anywhere to keep Covid-19 out, taking a toll on its people and economy. Now, the highly permeable Omicron variant poses the biggest challenge ever to the strategy.

But researchers and officials also point to underlying factors, such as declining numbers of women of childbearing age, that suggest low births have become a new normal.

Population growth has also slowed during the pandemic in other major economies, including the US. The US population grew 0.1% in the 12 months ending July 1, the lowest rate on record, the US Census Bureau showed late last year.

China’s fertility rate – the number of children a woman will have in her lifetime – fell below replacement levels in the early 1990s and fell to 1.3 in 2020, even below Japan’s 1.34. After hitting a record low of 1.26 in 2005, Japan’s rate, one of the world’s lowest, began to recover from government support, although it has started to fall again in recent years.

Highlighting the sensitivity of the issue surrounding demographics, China suspended the social-media account of a popular Chinese economist after an article suggested him spend $314 billion to boost its fertility rate. Did it, went viral online.

To deal with the growing demographic challenges, the central government has said that it will adopt measures like raising the statutory retirement age, but no announcement has been made yet.