For the first time in sixty years, China’s population has declined within the space of one year, foreshadowing an impending demographic crisis that will plague the nation for decades to come.
The Chinese government released figures Tuesday showing that 9.56 million children were born in 2022 while 10.41 million Chinese citizens died, a net population loss of 850,000 and the first year-on-year decline the country has experienced since 1961.
The news led one official to note that China is entering “an era of negative population growth,” BBC reports.
The last time China experienced a population decline was during Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward from the late ’50s to early ’60s, with death estimates ranging from 23 to 55 million citizens resulting from widespread famine and starvation.
China’s birth rate hit a historic low in 2021 with only 6.77 births per 1,000 people. By comparison, for the same year, the United States boasted a birth rate of 11.06.
Demographers cite China’s “one-child” policy, initiated in 1979, as the leading culprit for the country’s cratering population.
“I don’t think there is a single country that has gone as low as China in terms of fertility rate and then bounced back to the replacement rate,” Philip O’Keefe, a professor at the University of California, Irvine and demography expert, told the New York Times.
The government tried to offset earlier missteps by easing the “one-child” policy in 2016 and incentivizing family benefits in 2021, but these initiatives have failed to reverse its plummeting birth rates.
China confronts a lopsided demographic pyramid– characteristic of neighboring Asian nations including Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea–where rapidly aging populations and a shrinking workforce will place massive economic strains on national social services.
Strict “zero COVID” policies have continued to plague economic productivity. In 2022, China’s economy grew at 3 percent, its second-worst gross domestic product growth rate since 1976, when Mao Zedong died and Beijing ushered in a period of market liberalization.
The government announcement even surprised demographers who anticipated China would experience such a shortfall a decade later. Yi Fuxian, a population expert at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, warned that “China has become older before it has become rich” in comments to the Wall Street Journal.
With a birth rate of 16.42, India is set to assume the mantle of the world’s most populous country in 2023.