China's Population
China's Birth Rate Hits Historic Low
The number of babies born in China last year fell to a almost six-decade low, a four percent fall from the previous year. It was the lowest number of births in China since 1961, the last year of a widespread famine.
Women in the work force who are educated don’t see marriage as necessary to achieving financial security for themselves. Many cannot afford to have children as living costs increase and their jobs demand more time and energy.
Most Chinese older adults rely heavily on their families to pay for health care, retirement and other expenses. Many will have to shoulder the burden of taking care of their parents, in-laws and grandparents, without the support of siblings. Why add children? China’s main state pension fund, which relies on tax revenues from its work force, risks running out of money by 2035 because of a decline in the number of workers,
While China has reversed it one child policy, now allowing two, it still punishes couples who exceed the birth restrictions, and fines single women who bear children.
China’s total fertility rate has fallen to 1.6 children per woman. The Chinese Academy of Social Sciences said last year that China’s population contraction would begin in 2027. Others believe it will come sooner or has already begun.
Women in the work force who are educated don’t see marriage as necessary to achieving financial security for themselves. Many cannot afford to have children as living costs increase and their jobs demand more time and energy.
Most Chinese older adults rely heavily on their families to pay for health care, retirement and other expenses. Many will have to shoulder the burden of taking care of their parents, in-laws and grandparents, without the support of siblings. Why add children? China’s main state pension fund, which relies on tax revenues from its work force, risks running out of money by 2035 because of a decline in the number of workers,
While China has reversed it one child policy, now allowing two, it still punishes couples who exceed the birth restrictions, and fines single women who bear children.
China’s total fertility rate has fallen to 1.6 children per woman. The Chinese Academy of Social Sciences said last year that China’s population contraction would begin in 2027. Others believe it will come sooner or has already begun.
China's Looming Crisis: A Shrinking Population
The Chinese government in 2013 began easing enforcement of the “one child” policy. It then raised the limit to two children for all families in 2016, in hopes of encouraging a baby boom.
It did not work. After a brief uptick that year, the birth rate fell again in 2017, with 17.2 million babies born compared to 17.9 in 2016. In 2018, the total number of births fell to 15.2 million, a drop of nearly 12 percent nationally from 2017. On Friday, the National Bureau of Statistics announced that in 2019, the total number of births fell for the third year, to 14.6 million
China’s fertility rate has officially fallen to 1.6 children per woman, but even that number is disputed. A professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison calculated that the fertility rate averaged 1.18 between 2010 and 2018. The most profound cause of the drop was the “one child” policy. Fewer children were born, and because of cultural preferences for male offspring, fewer of them were girls. Chinese women born during the years following the “one child” policy are now reaching or have already passed their peak fertility age. There are simply not enough of them to sustain the country’s population level.
Some experts believe the population has already started shrinking. In a recent paper, Dr. Yi and Su Jian, an economist at Peking University, argued that the population contracted in 2018, the first year it has done so since the famines of 1961 and 1962 induced by the Great Leap Forward, Mao’s industrialization campaign. The researchers said inaccurate census estimates had obscured the actual population and fertility rates.