China’s National Bureau of Statistics on Friday reported the population declined for the third straight year in 2024, even though there was a small and surprising increase in the number of births for the first time in seven years.
According to the Chinese government, 9.54 million babies were born in 2024 – a small increase from 9.02 million in 2023, but at least not a decline. The birth rate was calculated at 6.77 births per thousand people, a bit higher than the 6.39 rate posted the previous year.
However, 10.93 million people died in 2024, leaving a net population loss for the third year in a row. The total population was 1.408 billion, which is 1.39 million smaller than China reported in 2023. India surpassed China as the world’s most populous nation in 2023.
Demographic experts took little encouragement from the tiny bump in births last year, arguing it was largely a result of marriages delayed by the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic, plus some extra enthusiasm among the public for having babies during the Year of the Dragon – widely considered the most auspicious year in the Chinese zodiac for children.
Out-of-wedlock birth rates are low in China, due to cultural tradition and a lack of child care benefits for single women, so a surge of marriages is almost always followed by a spike in births.
“Much of China’s population decline is rooted in entrenched structural reasons: Without fundamental structural transformations – from enhancing the social safety net to eliminating gender discrimination – the trend of population decline cannot be reversed,” assistant sociology professor Yun Zhou of the University of Michigan told Reuters on Friday.
One of those structural problems is a distinct shortage of young women. Thanks to China’s oppressive “One Child” population control policy, which ran from 1979 to late 2015, and the preference of parents to make their one child male, a huge number of women simply were not born.
“The number of Chinese women of reproductive age, defined by the United Nations as 15-to-49, is set to drop by more than two-thirds to under 100 million by the end of the century,” Reuters noted.
The shadow of the One Child years still hangs heavy over China, which is also grappling with the same phenomenon of declining birthrates that affects most prosperous, industrialized populations around the world. Due to rising costs of living and lost career opportunities from raising children, young people are postponing marriage and family until later in life, resulting in catastrophic population decline.
Another factor in China’s population decline is a pronounced rate of urbanization, as young people move in huge numbers from rural communities to big cities. Human fertility generally tends to decline in urban settings. China’s urbanization rate ticked up to 67 percent last year.
China, like other countries experiencing population decline, has tried to address the issue with expanded subsidies and benefits for families with children, and some companies have even pitched in with extra bonus payments for employees who have young children. When that didn’t work, Chinese officials began trying to shame women into having more babies – in some cases by going door-to-door to harangue them in person.
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