China sees a fresh decline in population, despite a rise in births

livemint.com:

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. China’s population continued to decline last year—though births edged up for the first time in eight years—falling for a third straight year as deaths outpaced births. China had seen birth numbers plummet since 2017, the year after it ended the one-child policy, despite Beijing’s encouragement of couples to have three children.

At the same time, the number of deaths in China had been creeping up as the population ages. The data for last year produced a brief reversal of the trend. Births rose to 9.54 million from 9.02 million in 2023, according to data released by the National Bureau of Statistics on Friday.

That is still a far cry compared with the more than 16 million in 2015, the final year of the one-child policy. Meanwhile, the number of deaths dropped to 10.93 million last year from 11.10 million in 2023, Friday’s data showed. That brought China’s total population to 1.408 billion last year from 2023’s 1.410 billion.

Some demographers had expected birth numbers to see a small rebound in 2024, most of which fell in the Year of the Dragon, which is seen as an auspicious one for marriage and births in Chinese culture. The uptick in births isn’t expected to last. China’s fertility rate—the number of children a woman has in her lifetime—is less than half of the replacement rate of 2.1, meaning that each generation will be less than half the size of the one before it.