China's Population
Last week we learned that China’s population shrunk last year, for the first time in 60 years, by 850K, the net result of 9.6M live births, and 10.4M deaths. It is worth taking these numbers with a pinch of salt. Accurately accounting for some 1.4B people is difficult, especially down to a sub-1M difference between deaths and births. It’s possible that future revisions will show that China’s population has been shrinking since the beginning of the 2020s, or that it won’t start shrinking until 2025 or beyond. What is clear for anyone with even cursory knowledge of Chinese demographics, however, is that this headline was coming sooner rather than later. China’s fertility rate has long since declined below the replacement level, and mortality is now rising as the population ages. But does it matter that China’s population is now shrinking?
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External links and sources for this essay:
How China came to regret is one-child policy, Vox.com by Bryan Walsh, Jan 2023
How much does aging really hurt a country?, Noah Smith, Jan 2023
China’ family planning policies, Wikipedia
The demographic transition (internal link), and related articles from my demographics project, all of which can be found here.
The end of China’s one-child policy, Feng Wang, Baochang Gu, and Yong Cai, Brookings March 2016