With the lowest birth rate since 1949 and serious aging, last year it lost 850,000 inhabitants and will be surpassed by India as the most populous country.
In a historic change that will have consequences for the entire planet, China, the country with the most inhabitants, is already losing its population. It does so for the first time since 1961, when it suffered from the ‘Great Leap Forward’ famine due to Mao Zedong’s disastrous statist and agrarian collectivism mistakes. Although the current moment is very different, this change in demographic trend will affect the world economy in the future with repercussions that are yet to be seen. The first, as the UN predicts, is that India will overtake China this year as the most populous country on Earth.
According to data announced Tuesday by the National Bureau of Statistics, deaths exceeded births last year in China, which lost 850,000 inhabitants. From 1,412,600 million in 2021, it went to 1,411,800 in 2022 as the birth rate continued to plummet, which fell by almost 10%. Last year, Chinese mothers brought 9.5 million babies into the world, while in 2021 there were 10.6. With these data, the birth rate marked an all-time low of 6.77 births per 1,000 people, much lower than the 7.52 in 2021 and the lowest figure since records began in 1949. By comparison, India presents 16.42 births per thousand people and even highly developed nations, such as the United States or the United Kingdom, show a higher birth rate: 11.06 and 10.08, respectively.
With its largest increase since 1976, the national mortality average stood at 7.37 per thousand inhabitants, which means an increase compared to the 7.18 deaths in 2021 and a demographic reduction of 0.6 per thousand inhabitants. people. An even higher mortality is expected for this year due to the deaths caused by the covid after the end of the restrictions in December, which has officially already claimed almost 60,000 lives in just one month. And this is counting only those who have died in hospitals and not at home, so the real number is even higher. 90% of the deceased are over 65 years of age.
accelerated aging
Added to this demographic crisis is the aging of the Chinese population, which already has 280 million people over 60 years of age. They are 13 million more than in 2021, when they accounted for 18.9% of the census. For their part, those over 65 years of age have gone from 200 to 209.7 million, 14.85% of the population.
With fewer and fewer children and more elderly people, the consequences will be paid by the population of working age, which remains at around 875.56 million people. With ages between 16 and 59, they account for 62% of the population, half a point less than in 2021. This reduction in the workforce, which has been key to China’s economic growth since its opening to capitalism, will bring more pressure to the meager pension system in force in the country. To make matters worse, the unemployment rate among young people between the ages of 16 and 24 is around 17%, a very high figure that prevents them from thinking about having a family.
In just four decades, China has gone from the invasive “one-child policy” to curb its overpopulation to suffering from a serious demographic problem, as often happens in other advanced nations not only in the West, but also in Asia, such as Japan and South Korea. South. By 2050, the UN estimates that its population will fall to 1,313 million and, in 2100, below 800 million, which will complicate its plans to unseat the US as the leading economic power.
Due to the high cost of educating a child, and even more so in a society as competitive as China’s, current couples no longer form large families like their parents. Before, they faced fines and dismissals for having more than one child or were forced to abort and even kill the girls that were born, which has caused there to be more men than women due to the preference for boys. In fact, not even the end of the “one-child policy” in 2016 brought about the expected ‘baby boom’. In some cities, local authorities offer incentives such as tax discounts and labor benefits, and even checks of up to 19,000 yuan (2,600 euros) as in Shenzhen. But few couples want to have more than one child and China, so far the world’s most populous country, continues to slide into demographic decline.
#China #loses #population #time #famine