9.27 million decrease in 6 years of newborns… “irreversible flow”
4 million women of childbearing age between the ages of 15 and 49… “Watch after Corona”
With the announcement that China’s population has declined for the first time in 61 years, an analysis has been made that this is an irreversible trend and that the decline was pushed forward by nine years due to the wrong policies of the authorities.
According to the Hong Kong Myungbo on the 18th, Population Researcher Yee Pu-hsien of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA, said, “It was predicted that China’s population would peak at 1.45 billion in 2030 along with social development and then begin to decline. That has been accelerated means that many of China’s policies over the past few years have been built on faulty demographic data.”
“This is an unprecedented demographic crisis,” he said. “China must make sweeping changes to its social and economic policies, and if the government does not act, many manufacturing sectors will face a shortage of human resources and risk industrial relocation.”
◇ The birth rate peaked in 1987… Last year, the number of newborns fell below 10 million for the first time since the founding of the country.
The National Bureau of Statistics of China announced on the previous day that the country’s population was 1.41175 billion as of the end of last year, down 850,000 from 1.4126 million at the end of 2021.
The annual birth population was 9.56 million and deaths were 10.41 million.
China’s population has declined for the first time since 1961, when the great famine hit by Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward movement.
It is also the first time since the founding of New China in 1949 that the number of newborns fell below 10 million.
In September 1982, China designated the Population Plan and Raising Act, which was referred to as the birth control law, as a basic national policy and implemented the ‘one-child policy’.
The crude birth rate, which is the number of babies born per 1,000 people, peaked at 23.33 in 1987 and has since declined.
In response, in 2013, China introduced the ‘one-child policy’, which allowed at least one of the couples to have two children if they were the only child, and introduced the ‘comprehensive two-child policy’ in 2016.
This is because the pace of population aging has accelerated since 2010 and the working age population (labor population) aged 16-59 has decreased.
After recording about 70% in 2011, the share of China’s labor force continued to decline from 2012, before falling to 62.0% last year.
In this trend, China allowed ‘three children in one family’ in 2021.
However, the crude birth rate last year was 6.77, the lowest since 1949, when population statistics were compiled, as well as 2021 (7.52).
According to the Mingbo, China’s population growth has already slowed since 2000, with annual net population growth falling below 10 million.
Then, due to the Corona 19 pandemic, China’s net population increase for three years from 2020 to 2022 was only 1.67 million.
This is less than half of the net population growth in 2019 alone.
On the other hand, the aging of the population has accelerated, and the number of people aged 65 and over last year was 209.78 million, accounting for 14.9% of the total population, an increase from 2021.
◇ “There is no hope that the population decline tax can be reversed”… “All birth control must be eliminated”
“China’s population decline is irreversible, demographers warn that belief otherwise is futile,” Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post (SCMP) reported.
Chinese demographer Dr. Yafu He told SCMP: “As the endless period of population decline begins in 2022, there is no doubt that China will not see population growth from now on. There is no hope of reversing the decline.” pointed out
At the same time, he emphasized that the most urgent thing to increase the birth rate is to completely eliminate all birth control.
“Although the actual effect is limited because few couples want to have more than three children, changing the ‘three-child policy’ to a policy that allows unlimited births is important to change the mood,” he said.
At the same time, he added that more support should be provided in cash support and care services for childbirth.
On the other hand, there is also a prospect that the situation may change this year when China switched to ‘With Corona’.
Yuanxin, a professor at Nankai University and vice president of the Chinese Population Society, told SCMP, “During the three-year COVID-19 pandemic, many people canceled or delayed pregnancy plans, which had a negative impact on the birth rate.” “he said.
“The three-child policy was introduced in 2021, and local governments have come up with childbirth incentives since then. There is no, and there is some uncertainty surrounding childbirth for two to three years after the pandemic,” he added.
However, he predicted that the birth rate would remain low as the number of fertile women would continue to decline.
Kang Yi, director of China’s National Bureau of Statistics, said the previous day that the number of women aged between 15 and 49 of childbearing age had shrunk by nearly 4 million last year.
The number of newborns in China has almost halved in six years, from 18.83 million in 2016 to 9.56 million last year.
“Considering that the number of newborn babies has decreased by 9.27 million over the past six years and there is a time lag in the impact of the decline in the newborn population on the market, it is predicted that a third of China’s milk powder manufacturers will disappear in the future,” Myungbo said. Analysts say that it has not yet hit bottom, and the maternity and infant related market will be hit in the same way.”
◇ China “There is still a lot of working population”… “Maintain 125 million by 2050”
It is pointed out that China, which used to be a weapon of ‘human tactic’, can no longer count on the ‘demographic dividend’ due to population decline, but the Chinese authorities have denied this.
Kang, director of China’s National Bureau of Statistics, said that the demographic dividend effect does not disappear when the total population declines. “Our current total labor supply is still greater than demand.
We have enough manpower,” he said.
The population dividend effect is the effect of reducing the dependency ratio and promoting economic growth as the proportion of the working age population in the total population increases, which was the driving force behind China’s growth as a population-rich country.
“Since China is still in the early stages of population decline, it will maintain a huge population of at least 125 million by 2050,” said Professor Yu of Nankai University. There is an opportunity to maximize that with policy.”
“We still have huge potential domestic markets and potential productivity,” he said. “Even if we lose 2 million people over the next 10 years, that’s more than the population of all other developing countries combined, and technological advances will gradually reduce labor demand.” said.
Wesu, an economist at the Beijing headquarters of the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU), a British economic analysis agency, predicted, “The ‘silver economy’ will become another growth point in line with the trend of population aging.”
/yunhap news
