Charts of the Day: Gloomy Outlook for China’s Population

China’s population fell in 2022 for the first time since 1961, but the drop shouldn’t have come as a surprise. A string of other data trends over the past few years, from marriages and births to fertility rates, have all presaged the decline.

At the end of 2022, the Chinese mainland had 1.412 billion people, 850,000 fewer than a year earlier, according to data issued by the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) on Jan. 17. The bureau’s calculation was based on a survey of households, although the number involved was not disclosed.

Based on the survey, the birth rate dropped to a record low of 6.77 per 1,000 people in 2022, while 9.56 million babies were born, the lowest in available data going back to 1950, the year after the founding of the People’s Republic of China.

The rate of natural growth in the population, the gap between the birth rate and the death rate, has fallen each year for the past six years and turned negative for the mainland in 2022, NBS data show. However, data from the once-a-decade population census carried out in 2020 show that negative natural population growth rates were seen in 13 provincial-level regions including Hubei, Inner Mongolia, and Shanxi.

The decline in the population is set to continue. Projections from the International Monetary Fund show there is likely to be a decrease of some 8 million by 2027.

Official marriage data also bode ill for births over the next few years. The number of registered marriages on the mainland fell to 7.6 million in 2021 — the lowest in available figures going back to 1985 — from a peak of 13.5 million in 2013, according to data from the Ministry of Civil Affairs.

Economists have estimated that fewer than 10% of children in China were born out of wedlock — a lower rate than in many countries in Europe and the Americas in recent years, data compiled by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development show — as unmarried mothers often face difficulty accessing maternity benefits.

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Zhang Meiting, He Xiaohao, and Zhang Mingzhu contributed to this report.

Contact reporter Zhang Yukun (yukunzhang@caixin.com) and editor Nerys Avery (nerysavery@caixin.com)

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