The population of some major cities on the mainland has entered the ranks of negative natural growth.
As of April 20, major cities on the mainland have basically released their 2020 natural population growth statistics bulletins, including Shenyang and other major cities with negative natural population growth rates in 2020, indicating that after small and medium-sized cities, some major cities on the mainland have also entered the era of “negative population growth”.
According to the 21st Century Business Herald, at least 26 prefecture-level cities on the mainland have disclosed the corresponding population data, with eight of them falling through the important barrier of zero natural population growth rate.
The data for Shenyang, a new first-tier city on the mainland, shows a natural population growth rate of -3.34 per 1,000 in 2020 (for the household population, which is not stated below.) In 2020, Shenyang’s birth rate will be 6.68 per 1,000, 1.67 thousand points lower than the previous year, and its death rate will be 10.02 per 1,000, 1.71 thousand points higher. The natural population growth rate is -3.34 per thousand, down 3.38 thousand points from 0.04 per thousand in 2019.
Shenyang became the first new Tier 1 city to see its natural population growth rate fall below zero.
Fushun, another city in Liaoning, became the city with the lowest natural population growth rate among the cities that have released data so far, at -13.3‰. Jiangsu’s five cities, Taizhou, Yangzhou, Zhenjiang, Changzhou and Wuxi, all move into the ranks of negative natural population growth in 2020. Weihai in Shandong is also a city with negative natural population growth.
Among them, Wuxi, a large city with a household population also exceeding 5 million, will have 39,216 births in 2020, with a birth rate of 7.75‰; 40,020 deaths, with a mortality rate of 7.91‰, and a natural population growth rate of -0.16‰ in that year.
In addition, some cities are approaching the zero mark, although they have not fallen below zero. Ningbo has a household population of 6.137 million at the end of 2020, including 3.063 million in the urban area. The birth rate is 7.12 per thousand and the natural population growth rate is 0.75 per thousand, which is already approaching the zero growth mark.
In this regard, Wang Guangzhou, a researcher at the Institute of Population and Labor Economics, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said, “The situation is not the same from different cities in China. Previously there were many small towns in China that already had negative natural population growth, and now it is some big cities that are also gradually entering the zone of negative population growth, which is a major turnaround that happened silently and may not be felt by many people yet.”
According to Huang Wenzheng, a population scholar and invited senior researcher at the China and Globalization Think Tank, there are many big cities gradually entering the stage of negative natural population growth, and the natural population of the whole country will also be negative in the future, a situation that should occur in a few years and will have an accelerating trend.
Recently, China’s population issue has become a hot topic, and even the Communist Party’s CCTV and central bank have joined in, and experts and scholars have continued to speak out.
On April 18, the CCP’s CCTV focused on the mainland’s population living alone in its program, with 2018 data showing that the mainland’s single adult population is up to 240 million, with more than 77 million adults living alone, and the number is expected to approach 100 million by 2021.
On April 14, the Communist Party’s central bank released a rare working paper on “Understanding and Responses to China’s Demographic Transition,” which came as a surprise and sparked widespread concern as the central bank is the unit that manages monetary policy and population issues do not fall under its jurisdiction. The paper says that the mainland has a serious aging problem and calls for full liberalization of childbirth (three children and above).
While the Central Bank is concerned about the Chinese people not having children, CCTV is worried about the number of single people on the mainland. The reason for this is that the Chinese Communist Party authorities had planned to release the 2020 population data for the mainland in April, but so far there is no sign of it, triggering concerns about a significant decline in the mainland’s newborn population in 2020, and from some of the local data released so far, the decline in the mainland’s newborn population in 2020 is alarming.
According to data from First Financial on April 18, in 2019, 14.65 million people were born on the mainland, only about 58% of the population born in 1987 (the peak year of population birth in the past 40 years). As of now, relevant data for 2020 have not been released, but several cities have released data on a decline of one to two percent.
The population decline has sparked concern among mainland scholars and calls for the CCP to open up childbirth.
Professor Dong Yuzheng, a mainland population expert and director of the Guangdong Institute of Population Development, said that according to the current trend, the annual number of births during the 14th Five-Year Plan could fall below the 10 million mark.
Dong Yuzheng believes that the number of births has been declining too fast in the past few years, “as a large country of 1.4 billion people, if the number of births a year is less than 10 million, what is the ratio? Divided into 31 provinces, the number of each province only how many? If we follow this trend, it may not take more than a few years for our total population number to grow negatively.”
Some commentators believe that low fertility rate and aging population will be the biggest worries for China’s economy in the future. With labor shortages around the world in recent years and difficulty in recruiting laborers even with wage increases, demographic issues are already having a negative impact on the economy.
According to Fuxian Yi, a researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the main body of the social economy is the population, and only with the population can there be a series of economic activities such as production, consumption and innovation. In a March 5 interview with Voice of America, he said China’s labor force began to decline around 2014, and the median age has surpassed that of the U.S. by 2018, and is now 42 years old, compared with 38. Aging is a gray rhino for China, and it will be an inescapable, long-term challenge for the country. An aging population leading to declining consumption, a declining economy, declining innovation, a declining workforce, and a declining manufacturing sector is the general direction of China’s future, and “the Chinese economy will never overtake the United States.”
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