The National Bureau of Statistics of the Communist Party of China (NBSC) said at a press conference on Jan. 18 that it was postponing the release of birth population data for 2020. But according to birth statistics released by some local governments, the mainland’s birth population is declining, even by more than 20 percent in some areas.
Expert: Mainland population collapse has arrived
Liang Jianzhang, founder of China Ctrip and professor at Peking University’s Guanghua School of Management, recently wrote an article on Caixin.com, listing the birth population figures announced by some local governments for 2020.
Among them, Guangzhou will have about 195,500 births, down 9 percent from the same period in 2019; Wenzhou will have about 73,230, down 19.01 percent year-on-year; Hefei will have 23 percent fewer births than in 2019; and Taizhou will have 32.6 percent fewer births year-on-year.
The number of births in Guangzhou in 2020 is the lowest level in the past 10 years, and Wenzhou is at a new low in the past six years.
In the article, Liang said the mainland’s population collapse has arrived and this decline will not bottom out if the fertility rate cannot be significantly boosted.
The Chinese Communist Party proposed a birth control policy in 1955 and began implementing a “one-child policy” in 1979. But since 2013, the Communist Party has said that “if one of the Parents is an only child, they can have two children,” and in 2016, it fully opened up the “two-child policy.
However, data show that the mainland’s population is declining from 2016 to 2020 – 17.86 million new births in 2016 and approximately 17.23 million, 15.23 million, 14.65 million and 13.8 million new births through 2020, respectively.
The mainland is facing an aging population crisis
Radio Free Asia quoted Feinian Chen, a professor of sociology at the University of Maryland, as saying on Feb. 2 that past demographic observations show that there is a huge gap between the 25 to 29 age group and the 30 to 34 age group, with the former being the prime age for women to have children on the mainland, which is about 1 percent less than the next age group, or about 1.4 million, 4 million people.
“There is a huge drop in the number of women who are capable of having children, or are in their prime childbearing years.” Chen Him-nim said that if the fertility rate continues to fall in the future, the pressure of an aging population will follow, which will not only affect the economy but also give rise to social problems such as the care of the elderly population; even if the government intends to save the fertility rate, it will not help for now.
Taiwan scholar Wu Thurzhi has written that China (the Chinese Communist Party) does not seem to have seen a positive program to promote fertility, except for the opening up of the two-child policy; coupled with the current economic conditions on the mainland, as well as the impact of epidemics and international factors, how much spare capacity and resources does the government have to solve the population problem?
Wu says that in the long run, the population problem will be a major problem for China’s economic development; because of the huge urban-rural disparity and the lack of a complete industrial development process in the mainland, the impact of a declining population in the mainland will be more serious than in other countries.
Yi Fuxian, a researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and an expert in Chinese population studies, recently tweeted that “today’s Northeast is tomorrow’s China”, citing the three northeastern provinces on the mainland as an example. One of the reasons for this is aging. Official data from the Chinese Communist Party shows that the birth rate in the three northeastern provinces is only 0.61% in 2019.
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