China’s birth rate plunged to a record low in 2023, accelerating an overall population decline causing alarm among local policymakers desperately trying to reverse the trend. The country’s population shrank for a second consecutive year, dropping 0.15 percent—or 2.08 million people—and leaving the overall population at 1.409 billion last year. The decline was dramatically larger than the 850,000 drop in 2022, which was itself the first population shrinkage recorded in China since 1961, during the Great Famine. A wave of COVID-19 deaths occurred when lockdown restrictions were lifted in early 2023, helping to push the overall death rate to its highest level since 1974 amid the Cultural Revolution. The contraction also comes despite government incentives for couples to have more children, with lawmakers fearing that a rapidly aging population will create a crisis in the country’s pension and elderly care systems.
Read it at Reuters
