China’s population drops for a second year despite government push for more babies

China’s population declined last year for the second year in a row, officials said Wednesday, spurred by record-low births and a wave of Covid-19 deaths.

HONG KONG — China’s population declined last year for the second year in a row, officials said Wednesday, spurred by record-low births and a wave of Covid-19 deaths that have deepened demographic worries in the world’s second-largest economy.

The total population of mainland China was 1.409 billion at the end of last year, the National Statistics Bureau said, down more than 2 million from 2022. That compares with a decline of 850,000 from 2021 to 2022, China’s first population decline in six decades.

There were around 9 million newborns last year — a birthrate of 6.39 per thousand — more than half a million fewer than the previous year and the lowest since the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949.

It was the second year in a row that China recorded fewer than 10 million births, with young people citing a lack of work-life balance, the high cost of living and the persistence of traditional gender roles as reasons for their reluctance to have families.

Officials said there were more than 11 million deaths, the most since 1974, when China was in the throes of the Cultural Revolution. A U.S. study found last year that China had almost 2 million excess deaths in early 2023 after officials abruptly lifted three years of “zero-Covid” restrictions, unleashing the coronavirus on a population that had barely been exposed to it.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/china-population-declines-second-consecutive-year-rcna134054

---