Beijing: The Population of China Starting to Decrease

News Analysis

The Chinese regime declared on Aug. 1 that China’s population has begun to decline, and the problems of aging and low birthrate have become worse.

This is the first time that Beijing has announced its population is in a phase of negative growth since the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) took power in 1949.

“China’s total fertility rate (TFR) was lower than 1.3 in recent years … Women’s willingness to have children continues to decline,” The National Health Commission wrote in state-run Qiushi magazine on Aug. 1. “Women of reproductive age desire to have 1.64 children on average in 2021. This is less than 1.73 in 2019 and 1.76 in 2017.”

Chinese women have babies in their 20s and early 30s. “The ‘post-90’ (23-32 years old) and ‘post-00’ (13-22) are major childbearing generations. They want 1.54 and 1.48 kids in their lives,” the commission said.

TFR is the average number of children a woman has during her life. A community can be sustained when the TFR stays above 2.1, according to the United Nations.

“A declining population is a nightmare for the Chinese economy. China needs sufficient low-paid workers since it is the world’s factory,” Wang He, the U.S.-based China affairs commentator told The Epoch Times on Aug. 3. “In fact, throughout the previous years, we have observed the negative consequences of the declining population.”

These impacts include factories having to pay higher salaries to workers, which could increase manufacturing costs in China and make them higher than in other developing nations; social security no longer having enough money to cover  retiree benefits; schools closing due to insufficient enrolment; and maternity hospitals and businesses that cater to children filing for bankruptcy, Wang said.

Declining Population

“[China’s population] will enter the period of negative growth in the 14th five-year-plan (2021-2025),” wrote the National Health Commission. It asked the Chinese people to “shoulder the responsibility” of having more children as an “urgent” task.

A low fertility rate leads to a relative increase in the aging population. The commission predicted that more than 30 percent of China’s population will be older than 60 by 2035.

The claim is corroborated by the UN study that was published on July 11. According to the study, China’s population began to decline in the first half of 2022, will continue to decline, and on the current trajectory, would be practically halved by 2100.

China’s demographic slide is different from those in Western countires. As nations have become wealthier, the fertility rates have decreased in developed nations. The Chinese regime mandated one offspring per family in the late 1970s when the majority of Chinese people lived in poverty.

Tens of millions of fetuses were destroyed by the policy, which also caused gender inequality because women had sex-selective abortions and some families even abandoned or killed female infants. Therefore, there are fewer potential mothers today than there would have been had the one-child restriction not been in place.

The regime recognized the demographic problem in the 2010s and changed its one-child restriction to a two-child limit, then to a three-child policy.

The National Health Commission stated that the primary barriers to having children are the financial burden of raising a child, the lack of childcare, and women’s concerns about the advancement of their careers.

Unwanted Consequences

“A diminished demographic advantage harms China’s economy,” Wang said. “The biggest problem is that there will be a shortage of cheap labor for manufacturing.”

China has grown into an industrial powerhouse since the regime opened the borders for trade in December 1978. The huge populace that works hard for little pay was the driving force behind this. However, the situation altered in the late 2010s when Chinese state-run media revealed that the manufacturers were unable to fill positions even when offering higher salaries.

A decline in manufacturing capacity impacts the domestic market too. People have to spend more to get the same products.

“We observed an increase in the number of global brands shifting production from China to Vietnam, Thailand, and other developing nations,” Wang said. “The U.S-China trade war (which increased tariffs to 25 percent) did contribute to these migrations, but the main reason is China no longer has the high-quality, low-cost labor it formerly had.”

Chinese citizens with urban household registrations are eligible for social security benefits—others aren’t. Also, people with urban household registrations and their employers contribute to social security. These monies are used to pay retiree social security benefits.

However, the Chinese regime first said in November 2020 that the working-age population had shrunk relative to that of the non-working-age population.

In March, China’s Ministry of Finance released data that the regime had to add almost 700 billion yuan (about $104 billion) to make up the shortfall in the social security benefits. The ministry predicted that the social security program will face a shortfall of 8 trillion to 10 trillion yuan (about $1.2 trillion – $1.5 trillion) in 5 to 10 years.

“Retirees in Heilongjiang, Liaoning, and several other provinces have experienced that they didn’t get their social security benefits on time,” Wang said.

Because of the low birth rate, the maternity facilities are unable to take in enough patients to sustain operations, state-run China Newsweek reported on March 26.

The maternity department at Dongba Hospital in Beijing used to deliver 3,000 to 5,000 babies annually, the report said. That prosperity has vanished in recent years. The department delivered fewer than 150 infants in 2021.

“Our hospital [Dongba] may close our department at any time,” a maternity nurse told China Newsweek. “In the future, expectant women who live nearby will have to visit other hospitals.”

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.