BEIJING/HONG KONG (Reuters) Jan,17– China’s population fell last year for the first time in 60 years. This is a historic turning point and the beginning of a long-term population decline, which is expected to have a serious impact on the demographic economy.
The National Bureau of Statistics of China reported that about 850,000 of the population of 1,411.75 million will decline in 2022.
This makes India possibly the most populous country in the world. UN experts last year predicted that India’s population would reach her 1.412 billion by 2022, but did not expect the South Asian nation to overtake China by this year.
However, India only collects population figures every 10 years, and the final census, originally scheduled for 2021, has been delayed due to the pandemic. Longer term, UN experts expect China’s population to fall by 109 million by 2050. That’s more than triple her previous forecast decline in 2019.
The number of Chinese women of childbearing age, defined by the government as ages 25 to 35, has dropped by about 4 million, Kang said.
Her highest death rate since 1974 during the Cultural Revolution was her 7.37 deaths per 1,000, compared to her 7.18 death rate in 2021.
Much of the population decline is a result of China’s one-child policy from 1980 to 2015 and soaring education costs, which discouraged many Chinese from having more than one child or never having children at all. It has even discouraged me.
The one-child policy and traditional preferences for boys also create a severe gender imbalance. According to the latest data, there are about 722 million men in China and 690 million women. A more pronounced imbalance in rural areas has led to a decline in family composition in recent years.
The data was the hottest topic on Chinese social media after the numbers were released on Tuesday.The hashtag “#Does having children really matter?” has had hundreds of millions of hits.
“The main reason why women don’t want children is not for their own sake, but because society and men are not responsible for raising children. For women who give birth, it leads to a severe decline in quality of life and mental life,” wrote a netizen who goes by the username Joyful Ned.
Chinese netizens have also previously complained about pressure on newlyweds to conceive as soon as possible, saying they regularly receive phone calls from local governments asking when they can get pregnant. are reporting.
A demographic expert said China’s three-year stringent zero-COVID policy has further weakened the country’s demographic outlook.
Local governments are introducing measures to encourage people to have more babies, including tax cuts, extended maternity leave and housing allowances, starting in 2021. President Xi Jinping also said in his October The government said it would take more measures to help. But the steps taken so far have done little to stop the long-term trend.
Online searches for strollers on Chinese search engine Baidu are down 17% in 2022, down 41% since 2018, and searches for baby bottles have fallen by more than a third since 2018. . In contrast, the number of searches for nursing homes has recently increased eightfold over the course of the year.
In India, it’s the opposite, with searches for baby bottles growing 15% year-on-year in 2022, and searches for cribs almost quintuple, according to Google Trends.
