Chinese authorities surprised many Chinese by releasing data on Feb. 9 that showed China’s newborns are in decline for the fourth consecutive year, with a 15 percent drop in 2020 births compared to the previous year, meaning the full opening of the two-child policy, which Beijing authorities outlawed in 2016 after decades of forced Family planning, does not appear to have had any effect.
Data released Tuesday by China’s Ministry of Public Security showed that China will register just 10.03.5 million newborns in 2020, down more than 1.7 million from 2019. Meanwhile, the trend of more boys than girls continued, with 5.29 million boys, or 52.7 percent, and 4.745 million girls, or 47.3 percent, of the year’s births.
China’s National Bureau of Statistics did not release birth statistics for 2020 at its Jan. 18 press conference, but birth statistics released by some local governments show a serious decline in China’s birth population, with some places such as Taizhou and Guiyang experiencing population declines of up to 30 percent or more.
The Chinese authorities introduced the “one-child” mandatory birth control measure in 1979, and since the 2000s, the population has been significantly aging. In order to rescue the decline and avoid falling into the trap of being an “old before the rich” country, the Beijing authorities began to implement a two-child policy in 2016. In order to save the population from falling into the trap of “getting old before getting rich”, the Beijing authorities started the policy of having two children in 2016.
The birth rate in 2020 even fell to the lowest level since the Communist Party’s establishment in 1949. Some analysts attribute this to the high cost of housing and Education in China, which has led to a lack of willingness among couples of childbearing age to have children. It also has to do with women becoming more educated and wanting to have children later in Life.
According to population expert and University of Wisconsin-Madison researcher Fuxian Yi in his book “The Great Empty Nest: China’s Family Planning Gone Astray,” one of the major reasons why China’s northeastern economy has fallen from 13.1 percent of the country’s share in 1980 to 5.0 percent in 2020 is the aging of the population in this region. He recently warned in a social media tweet that “Today’s Northeast is the nation’s tomorrow.” Data from China’s National Bureau of Statistics showed that the birth rate in the northeastern provinces was just 0.61 percent in 2019, lower than Japan, which has the highest aging rate in the world at 0.68 percent.
China’s political and intellectual elites (including many top economists) are also blind to the gray rhinoceros of aging population,” said Yi Fuxian. When the Northeast was the first to experience an economic crisis because of its aging population, the elites did not care about this warning, but creatively came up with a bunch of assorted excuses to explain it, and then condescendingly blamed the Northeast and the Northeast authorities for misrepresenting economic data to cover up the recession.”
AFP reported that the newborn figures released by China’s Ministry of Public Security were hotly debated on Chinese social networks, with AFP quoting netizens commenting on Weibo that “the number of registered births is lower than the number of candidates taking university exams each year, and the aging population will get worse.” Another netizen said, “I’m afraid there is something wrong with a society that sees having children as a painful thing.”
Meanwhile, the number of retirees in China will increase to 300 million between now and 2025.
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