For the third year in a row… China’s population has declined

China said Friday that its population will decline in 2024 for the third year in a row, in a series of declines that follow more than six decades of growth, while the country faces a rapid aging of the population and a continuing decline in birth rates.
China, which was the largest country in terms of population in the world, fell in 2023 to second place after losing its position to India, which surpassed it in population.
Beijing seeks to boost declining birth rates through subsidies and propaganda encouraging procreation.

Continuous decline

By the end of last year, the population reached 1.408 billion, according to the National Bureau of Statistics in Beijing, down from 1.410 billion in 2023.
But the decline was less severe than the previous year, when it was more than double the decline recorded in 2022, according to the data.
In 2016, China ended the strict “one-child policy” that it imposed in the 1980s due to fears of overpopulation, and began 2021 by allowing couples to have three children.
But this has failed to reverse the demographic decline in a country that has long relied on its huge workforce as an engine of economic growth.

China’s aging

People over the age of 60 are expected to make up about a third of China’s population by 2035, according to the Economist Intelligence Unit, a research group.
Data released on Friday showed that the number of people aged 60 years or over reached 310.31 million, which is a few percentage points less than a quarter of the country’s population, and more than 297 million recorded in 2023.
But the data also showed that China’s birth rate, which is among the lowest in the world, rose slightly from the previous year to 6.77 per thousand people.
Officials said last September that they would gradually raise the legal retirement age, which was set at 60 and is among the lowest in the world and has not been raised in decades.