The number of newborns on the mainland continues to decline.
The Central Bank of the Communist Party of China (CBC) recently published a paper calling on the authorities to open up the fertility policy. But the Chinese Communist Party’s institutions to manage the population is not the work of the central bank, the central bank’s paper has attracted extra attention from the outside world. The number of newborns in many places on the mainland declined in 2020, and the newborn population in Zaozhuang, a major fertility province in Shandong, fell by nearly 30%.
According to an April 15 report by “Data Mini Report,” data released by Ningbo, Bozhou, Yinchuan and other eastern, central and western regions in 2020 show that the birth population dropped by more than 10 percent that year. The Ministry of Public Security of the Communist Party of China recently released data on household registration, which also showed that 10.035 million newborns were born in 2020 and registered with public security organs, down 15 percent from the previous year. The decline in the birth population exceeds that of 2019.
In the developed eastern region of the mainland, 43,521 births were recorded in the city of Ningbo in 2020, down 12% from the previous year; according to data from the Wenzhou Health Maternity and Childhood Guidance Center, 73,230 births were recorded in 58 midwifery institutions in Wenzhou from January 1 to December 31, 2020, down 19.01% from the same period in 2019; in the first-tier city of Guangzhou, the number of live births in 2020 also fell back rapidly to 195,500, a drop of nearly 100,000 from 2017, reaching the lowest level in the past 10 years.
In the central region, the trend of population decline remains unchanged. The government of Bozhou City in Anhui just released data showing that the number of births in local medical institutions in 2020 fell 14.29% year-on-year, falling below the 50,000 mark for the first time; Hunan Changde’s birth rate in 2020 was a direct hit of 10 per 1,000 “bottom line”. According to “Changde Daily” news, the city’s births in 2020 fell sharply by 17.2% compared to the previous year.
In the western region, the number of newborns in Yinchuan last year was 24,452, a drop of 11.9%.
Shandong, which once gave birth to a quarter of China’s second children in five months, also saw no growth in births, but instead fell back even more. According to local media reports, the number of newborns in Zaozhuang will be around 36,125 in 2020, a sharp drop of 28.7 percent from 2019, while the number of newborns will not increase this year, and the number of second-child births in Weifang will drop by 8,955 in the first half of 2021, a decrease of more than 30 percent.
According to the report, data disclosed by cities in the east, middle and west one after another indicate that several cities nationwide showed signs of a significant decline in births in 2020, with decreases of more than 10 percent in general, and even close to 30 percent in some cities.
As the number of marriages continues to decline, it will drive the number of births down, according to a Feb. 14 report by China Business First. At the current rate, the annual number of births on the mainland will likely drop to less than 10 million in a few years.
According to a previous release from the Chinese Communist Party authorities, the mainland’s 2020 population figures will be released in April this year. Instead, the CCP’s central bank released a working paper on “Understanding and Responses to China’s Demographic Transition” on April 14, once again putting the topic of population in front of the public. The paper calls for the need to fully liberalize childbirth (three children and above).
The paper stated, “Aging and childlessness in developed countries have caused serious economic and social distress. Compared with developed countries, our population transition is faster, the transition period is shorter, and aging and fewer children are more serious. This means that it is highly likely that our country will face more severe challenges than developed countries in the longer term future.”
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