Women and girls are in the minority of the young generation in China. Photo: RG72 / CC-BY-SA-4.0
Fewer and fewer children are being born in the Middle Kingdom. The population will soon begin to shrink
China’s population grew only minimally in 2020 and is now 1.412 billion. The number of births fell again. Like the one released in Hong Kong South China Morning Post reports In 2020, only twelve million babies saw the light of day in China, 2.65 million fewer than the year before.
In the last two months of 2020 there were 45 percent fewer births than in 2015, the last year before the one-child policy was lifted. The latest decline of 18 percent compared to 2019 may have been heavily influenced by the corona pandemic, but it has only exacerbated an already negative trend.
Obviously, the lifting of the restrictions did not lead to the desired increase in the birth rate. The number of births per 1,000 inhabitants in 2020 was 8.52, lower than ever since the People’s Republic was proclaimed in 1949. Even during the great famine in the early 1960s, the relative number of births was more than twice as high.
Selective abortions
One of the reasons for the long-term decline in births is the decreasing number of women under the age of 30, which in turn is due to the fact that up until five years ago the number of children per family was strictly regulated.
City dwellers were usually only allowed to have one child, unless they had a daughter. Then an additional child was temporarily allowed as soon as the first was five years old. In the villages, and especially among the national minorities, the restrictions were not quite so great.
But overall, among other things, this resulted in a large number of actually illegal selective abortions of female fetuses, so that there is now one in China of childbearing age clear surplus of men gives.
Member of a growing club
In China there is now talk of a population crisis. It is already foreseeable that the population will begin to shrink in a few years. The number of people of working age will peak even sooner.
This means that China becomes a member of a growing club. In large parts of the world the birth rate has long since fallen below the level at which the population would remain stable over the long term.
In this country, the number of deaths has outweighed the number of births since 1972. If it weren’t for net immigration in most of the years, the local population would have shrunk by over five million people.
Overall, global population growth is also continuing to weaken. After the data According to the United Nations, the percentage growth has declined since the early 1990s.
In the second half of the 1980s, the number of people increased by 1.79 percent annually. At the beginning of the 1990s it was then 1.51 percent per year and in the following five year it was 1.34 percent per year. Most recently it was only 1.09 percent annual growth between 2015 and 2020.
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