HONG KONG — China said Tuesday that its population declined last year for the first time in six decades, a historic shift with profound implications for the world’s second-largest economy.
Officials from the National Bureau of Statistics said mainland China had 1.41175 billion people at the end of 2022, compared with 1.41260 billion a year earlier, a decrease of 850,000. There were 9.56 million births — a record low birth rate of 6.77 per thousand — and 10.41 million deaths.
The announcement was part of a larger release of economic data for 2022, a year when President Xi Jinping’s strict “zero-Covid” policies weighed heavily on growth. Officials reported a 3% increase in gross domestic product, beating expectations but still one of the weakest figures in decades.
The economy is expected to improve in 2023 as China emerges from pandemic isolation, Kang Yi, director of the National Bureau of Statistics, said at a news briefing in Beijing. He also said that China’s population decline was not cause for worry and that the overall labor supply still exceeded demand.
The number of births in China has been declining for about a decade, undermining the ruling Communist Party’s consumption-driven growth model and raising questions about whether China can overtake the U.S. as the world’s largest economy. The United Nations has said India will surpass China as the world’s most populous nation later this year.
China’s 9.56 million births are a decrease of almost 10% from 2021, when about 10.6 million babies were born. The death rate of 7.37 per 1,000 people was up from 7.18 in 2021, when China recorded 10.14 million deaths.
As in other countries, a decline in births means an aging work force for China, which built its economic might largely on a manufacturing sector dependent on cheap labor. Officials said Tuesday that working-age people ages 16 to 59 made up 62% of the national population — down from about 70% a decade ago — while people 60 and older accounted for almost 20%
A major reason for China’s declining population is the rise of the middle class, said Kent Deng, a professor of economic history at the London School of Economics and Political Science.
“Once you have well-qualified, well-educated urban people, they will decide not to produce a lot of kids,” he said, especially given China’s rising cost of living.
Covid is also believed to have played a role, although China appears to have experienced the vast majority of its cases and deaths in the last few months. After international criticism that it has not been transparent about the severity of its current outbreak, China said over the weekend it had recorded almost 60,000 Covid-related deaths since early December, when it abruptly ended three years of anti-Covid measures after rare mass protests. Experts say the true death toll could reach 1 million or more in the coming months.