Beijing: China has announced a population decline for the first time in recent years amid a rising elderly population and a falling birth rate in the country. According to the National Bureau of Statistics, the country will have 850,000 less population at the end of 2022 than the previous year. The bureau counts only the population of mainland China, excluding Hong Kong, Macao, and self-governing Taiwan, as well as foreign residents. The bureau said on Tuesday that the country’s population stood at 1.411.75 billion with 9.56 million births against 1.041 million deaths.
Of these, 72.206 crores are men and 68.969 crores are women. In China, in the year 2016, the ‘one family one child’ policy was scrapped. Also, there is a trend in the country to give preference to the male child to carry forward the family name. After abolishing this policy, China encouraged families to have more than one child, although this did not achieve much success. The high cost of raising children in China’s cities is often cited as a reason. This is seen only in most parts of East Asia, where the birth rate has declined rapidly.
China has long been the world’s most populous country, but India is likely to overtake it soon. The estimated population of India is now 1.4 billion and it is increasing continuously. It is believed that the last ‘Great Leap Forward’ There was a decline in the population during Mao Zedong’s disastrous campaign for collective farming and industrialization is believed to have led to a famine that killed millions.
According to the bureau, there are a total of 875.56 million people of working age in China aged 16 to 59, which is 62.0 percent of the country’s total population. At the same time, the total number of people aged 65 years and above is 20.978 crore, which is 14.9 percent of the total population. The permanent urban population is expected to increase from 646 million to 920.71 million in the year 2022, which is 65.22 percent of the total population, while the rural population declined by 73.1 million. There was no direct comment on the possible impact on population figures of the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. The first case of infection was reported in Wuhan city of China.
The United Nations last year estimated that the world’s population had reached eight billion on November 15 and that India would soon replace China as the world’s most populous country in 2023. In a report released on World Population Day, the United Nations said that for the first time since 1950, global population growth declined by one percent in 2020. At the same time, the world’s second-largest economy (China) grew three percent in 2022, which is less than half of the previous year’s 8.1 percent.
