Beijing’s household births hit a ten-year low last year.
Statistics from the Information Center of the Beijing Municipal Health and Wellness Commission show that the number of births to the household population in Beijing in 2020 was 100,368, a new ten-year low, down 32,266 compared to 2019, a decline of about 24.32%.
According to the First Financial News on April 27, Beijing’s 2020 household births decreased by 32,000 compared to 2019, while the number of deaths of Beijing’s household population in that year was 97,649, a difference of 2,719 from the number of household births in that year, which is the smallest gap between the two since 2007.
According to the data, Beijing’s household population of 13,592,000 in 2017 was the highest since the 1970s, but has been declining every year since then.
Along with the decline in births to the household population, the number of births to Beijing’s resident population has also declined for several years in a row.
At the end of 2016, Beijing’s resident population reached 21.729 million, with a resident birth rate of 9.32 per 1,000; at the end of 2017, the resident population was 21.707 million, with a resident birth rate of 9.06 per 1,000; and at the end of 2018, it was 21.542 million, with a resident birth rate of 8.24 per 1,000.
The so-called resident population refers to the population that has actually lived in the city for more than six months. Regardless of whether one has a local household registration or not, as long as one regularly resides in the local area, one falls under the category of local resident population.
Because the Chinese Communist Party has been late in releasing data from the seventh national census, which was scheduled to be released in early April this year, provinces and cities have been releasing their respective 2020 household birth populations. The data show a significant drop in the household population births in some cities, with several cities releasing data with a decline of one to two percent, with some places plummeting 32 percent compared to the same period in 2019.
According to the 21st Century Business Herald, at least 26 prefecture-level cities on the mainland have disclosed corresponding population data, with Shenyang, Fushun, Taizhou, Yangzhou, Zhenjiang, Changzhou, Wuxi and Weihai falling through the important barrier of zero natural population growth rate in eight cities. Shenyang, a new first-tier city, will have a natural population growth rate of -3.34‰ in 2020, and Fushun, another city in Liaoning, will have the lowest natural population growth rate among the cities that have released data so far, at -13.3‰.
According to Huang Wenzheng, a population scholar and invited senior researcher of 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, and this situation should appear in a few years, and there will be an accelerating trend.
Liang Jianzhang, founder of China Ctrip and professor at Peking University’s Guanghua School of Management, believes that the mainland’s population collapse has arrived and that this decline will not bottom out if the fertility rate cannot be significantly increased.
And the population decline has sparked industry concerns about the future of the mainland’s economy.
Liu Qian, president of the Economist Group Greater China, said too low a fertility rate is bad for an aging society and for a long-term sustainable economy.
According to Fuxian Yi, a researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the mainstay of society and economy is the population, with which there is a series of economic activities such as production, consumption and innovation. And aging is a gray rhinoceros for China. An aging population leads to a decline in consumption, a decline in the economy, a decline in innovation, a decline in the workforce, and a decline in manufacturing, which is the general direction of China’s future.
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