China yesterday announced its first population decline in decades as what has been the world’s most populous nation ages and its birthrate plunges.
The Chinese National Bureau of Statistics reported that the country had 850,000 fewer people at the end of last year than the previous year.
The tally includes only the population of mainland China, excluding Hong Kong and Macau, as well as foreign residents.
Photo: AFP
That left a total of 1.41 billion people, with 9.56 million births against 10.41 million deaths, the bureau said in a news briefing.
Men outnumbered women by 722.06 million to 689.69 million, a result of the one-child policy that officially ended in 2016 and a traditional preference for male offspring to carry on the family name.
Since abandoning the policy, China has sought to encourage families to have second or even third children, with little success, reflecting attitudes in much of East Asia where birthrates have fallen precipitously.
In China, the expense of raising children in cities is often cited as a cause.
China has long been the world’s most populous nation, but is expected to soon be overtaken by India, if it has not already.
Estimates put India’s population at more than 1.4 billion and continuing to grow.
The last time China is believed to have recorded a population decline was during the Great Leap Forward launched at the end of the 1950s, under Mao Zedong’s (毛澤東) drive for collective farming and industrialization that produced a massive famine killing tens of millions of people.
China’s population has begun to decline nine or 10 years earlier than Chinese officials and the UN projected, said Yi Fuxian (易富賢), a demographer and expert on Chinese population trends at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
That means that 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.
Based on his own research, China’s population has actually been declining since 2018, showing the population crisis is “much more severe” than previously thought, he said.
China now has one of the lowest fertility rates in the world, comparable only to Taiwan and South Korea, he added.
China’s looming economic crisis will be worse than Japan’s, where years of low growth have been blamed in part on a shrinking population, Yi said.
“China has become older before it has become rich,” he said.
The CIA has a message for Chinese government officials worried about their place in Chinese President Xi Jinping’s (習近平) government: Come work with us. The agency released two Mandarin-language videos on social media on Thursday inviting disgruntled officials to contact the CIA. The recruitment videos posted on YouTube and X racked up more than 5 million views combined in their first day. The outreach comes as CIA Director John Ratcliffe has vowed to boost the agency’s use of intelligence from human sources and its focus on China, which has recently targeted US officials with its own espionage operations. The videos are “aimed at
STEADFAST FRIEND: The bills encourage increased Taiwan-US engagement and address China’s distortion of UN Resolution 2758 to isolate Taiwan internationally The Presidential Office yesterday thanked the US House of Representatives for unanimously passing two Taiwan-related bills highlighting its solid support for Taiwan’s democracy and global participation, and for deepening bilateral relations. One of the bills, the Taiwan Assurance Implementation Act, requires the US Department of State to periodically review its guidelines for engagement with Taiwan, and report to the US Congress on the guidelines and plans to lift self-imposed limitations on US-Taiwan engagement. The other bill is the Taiwan International Solidarity Act, which clarifies that UN Resolution 2758 does not address the issue of the representation of Taiwan or its people in
US Indo-Pacific Commander Admiral Samuel Paparo on Friday expressed concern over the rate at which China is diversifying its military exercises, the Financial Times (FT) reported on Saturday. “The rates of change on the depth and breadth of their exercises is the one non-linear effect that I’ve seen in the last year that wakes me up at night or keeps me up at night,” Paparo was quoted by FT as saying while attending the annual Sedona Forum at the McCain Institute in Arizona. Paparo also expressed concern over the speed with which China was expanding its military. While the US
SHIFT: Taiwan’s better-than-expected first-quarter GDP and signs of weakness in the US have driven global capital back to emerging markets, the central bank head said The central bank yesterday blamed market speculation for the steep rise in the local currency, and urged exporters and financial institutions to stay calm and stop panic sell-offs to avoid hurting their own profitability. The nation’s top monetary policymaker said that it would step in, if necessary, to maintain order and stability in the foreign exchange market. The remarks came as the NT dollar yesterday closed up NT$0.919 to NT$30.145 against the US dollar in Taipei trading, after rising as high as NT$29.59 in intraday trading. The local currency has surged 5.85 percent against the greenback over the past two sessions, central
RSS