• China’s population declined for the first time since 1961 due to a plunging birth rate, the country’s statistics office said.

• China’s population in 2022 — 1.41175 billion — fell by 850,000 from 2021, the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) said.

• The NBS announcement comes at a time when China’s economic growth fell to its second-lowest in five decades, registering a paltry three per cent increase in 2022.

• According to a recent report by the World Population Prospects 2022 by the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division, India is projected to surpass China as the world’s most populous country in 2023.

• India is projected to have a population of 1.668 billion in 2050, more than China’s 1.317 billion by the middle of this century, the report said.

Key points of the NBS report:

• China registered about 9.56 million new-borns last year, down from 10.62 million in 2021.

• China’s birth rate stood at 6.77 births per 1,000 people in 2022, down from 7.52 in 2021.

• The death rate nationwide stood at 7.37 per 1,000 people last year, putting the natural growth rate at negative 0.6 per 1,000 people.

• The last time China reported a population decline was in 1961, the last year of China’s Great Famine.

• China’s concern is not simply a declining population, which was accentuated by the decades-old ‘one-child policy’, scrapped in 2016, but also a rapidly ageing population.

• China implemented a ‘third-child policy’ in May 2021 and rolled out a series of stimulus measures to boost population growth.

• As per the revised policy, Chinese people can now have up to three children. 

• China conducts a nationwide population census every decade, with the latest being done in 2020.

• A number of cities, provinces and regions across the country have rolled out incentive policies such as issuing subsidies to families with a second or third child.

• China, previously an agrarian country, has now been rapidly urbanised with 920.71 million living in urban areas, an increase of 6.46 million by the end of 2021, totalling to 65.22 per cent.

• The share of urban population in the total population was 65.22 per cent, 0.50 percentage point higher than that at the end of the previous year.

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