China’s Population Decline Accelerated Last Year
China’s population decline accelerated last year, worsening a demographic gloom that has taken on increasing urgency for Beijing. China ended 2023 with 1.410 billion people, the National Bureau of Statistics said Wednesday, down from 1.412 billion in 2022, when it hit a historic turning point: the first year the population shrank since starvation years in the early 1960s. Over the past year, China’s population dropped by 2.08 million, more than twice as many as in 2022.
The number of newborns, which has gone into free fall over the past several years, slid to 9.02 million from 9.56 million in 2022. The latest number represents less than half the babies born in 2016, after China abolished the one-child policy. The latest numbers point to a fertility rate—the number of children a woman has over her lifetime—at close to 1.0—a level considered by demographers as “ultralow." Economic headwinds didn’t help the situation.
Another possible factor was China’s sudden abandonment of Covid-restrictions at the end of 2022, which might have led to a sharp rise in deaths early last year. The statistics bureau, which doesn’t break out deaths by month, said the number of deaths increased to 11.10 million in 2023 from 10.41 million in 2022. China last year ceded its centuries-old position as the world’s most populous country to India and is unlikely to be able to reverse the trend of declining births.
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