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China set to lose over 50 million people in population crisis
Plummeting birth and marriage rates and a rising proportion of elderly are long-term concerns for the country with the world's second-largest population.
www.newsweek.com
By 2025, China's population is projected to drop from its 2021 peak of 1.41 billion to 1.36 billion, Ada Li, a senior industry analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence, said in a forecast based on United Nations data.
China's efforts, including ending its decades-old one-child policy in 2016 and increasing the cap to three children in 2021, have failed to reverse its declining birth rate. Official data from 2023 revealed births dipped for the seventh consecutive year, with deaths outnumbering births for the second year in a row.
The long-term outlook is even grimmer. The United Nations estimates China's population will shrink by 50 percent by the end of the century. The Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences earlier this year predicted an even steeper 60-percent drop.
Li noted that 2024, a dragon year in the Chinese calendar, could boost births temporarily as the year is considered auspicious. However, she cautioned that zodiac-related birth increases have historically been short-lived and pointed to the sharp decline in marriages as a cause for concern.
Marriage strongly correlates with births in China and other East Asian societies.
"Policymakers are likely to step up the pace of reform as they take aim at the barriers standing between reproductive-age couples and their desire to build families," Li said.
Demographer Yi Fuxian of the University of Wisconsin-Madison has previously cast doubt on dragon years, pointing out they have generally had a negligible effect on births in China in recent decades.
Newsweek reached out to the Chinese Foreign Ministry with a written request for comment.
Exacerbating China's demographic challenges is its rapidly aging population. Yi has predicted that those aged 60 and older could make up 40 percent of the population, a trend that could weigh heavily on economic productivity.
By 2035, China's dependency ratio—the proportion of dependents to the working-age population—is forecast to reach 53 percent, up from 46 percent in 2021, according to a January report from the Economist Group's Economist Intelligence Unit.
Starting next year, the government will raise the statutory retirement age for the first time in a bid to encourage older Chinese to keep working.
China's neighbors South Korea, Taiwan, and Japan are facing the same demographic headwinds. South Korea, which has the world's lowest fertility rate at 0.72 births per woman, has spent hundreds of billions of dollars to encourage child-rearing and is even launching a new government ministry dedicated to its population crisis.
