China’s population has declined for the 3rd straight year

In order to get its citizens to have more children and stop its population decline, China has tried everything, even declaring having children as patriotic. But, for the third year in a row, its population has declined.

Although the increase in the number of births, for the first time in seven years, is not surprising, it can reverse the process of population aging and decline.

China is staring at a surge in child labor that is spilling over into the economy. Hospitals are closed, and businesses that sell baby milk are out of business. Thousands of kindergartens have closed and more than 170,000 preschool teachers will lose their jobs by 2023.

The country’s birth rate, according to a former kindergarten teacher in the southern city of Chongqing, is “off the cliff”. China’s kindergarten enrollment will drop by more than five million by 2023, according to recent data.

On Friday, the National Bureau of Statistics reported that 9.54 million babies were born last year, up slightly from 9.02 million in 2023. million – China’s population has declined for the third year in a row.

Small tumors in newborns, in part because of the Chinese zodiac’s age of the dragon, haven’t changed the broader trend, experts say. The birth rate in China is falling and young people are not wanting to have children.

“In the short and long term, the number of annual births in my country will continue to decline,” said Ren Yuan, a professor at the University’s Institute of Population Studies. Fudan.

Adding to China’s economic woes is the lack of children. An aging working population is straining an underfunded pension system, and an aging society relies on a creaking health care system. China also reported on Friday that its economy would grow by 5 percent in 2024, a number that was in line with expectations but many experts said did not fully reflect a crisis of confidence in the economy. households reeling from a four-year property crisis.

To encourage people to have more children, the authorities offer tax breaks, cheaper housing and money. The city promises to cover the cost of in vitro fertilization. In some parts of the country, they even promise to remove restrictions that penalize single mothers.

The government has called on local officials to set up an early warning system to monitor major population changes in villages and towns across the country. Some officials even knock on doors and call women to ask about their menstrual cycles.

Businesses are also involved. In 2023, travel site Trip.com began paying employees nearly $1,400 a year for each child from birth to age 5. Last week, the founder of electric car maker XPeng said he would give workers nearly $4,100 if he had a third child.

“We want our employees to have more children,” founder He Xiaopeng said in a video posted on social media. “I think the company should take care of the money, so that the workers can have children.”

China is not the only problem, which will overtake India in 2023 as the world’s most populous country. Declining birth rates are often a measure of a country’s progress on the economic ladder because fertility rates tend to fall as income and education rise. But China’s sudden population decline has come faster than the government expected. Many families earn more than they did a decade ago, but have lost income due to the housing crisis.

Officials have long feared the day when there won’t be enough workers to support retirees. The government now has little time to prepare. More than 400 million people will be 60 or older in the next decade.

China faces two challenges in this regard. Public pension systems are severely underfunded and many young people are reluctant — or unable — to contribute. Little retirement age just got worse. After years of deliberation, the government decided on a 15-year plan to gradually raise the official age to 63 for men, 58 for white-collar women and 55 for women in the workforce. ‘the company. The changes took effect this month.

The party finally loosened the birth limit in 2015 to allow families to have two children, a relaxation that sparked a sudden boom. Hospitals had to add beds to the corridors because there were not enough.

But the moment did not last long. Since 2017, births have started to decrease every year since last year.

In 2021, China’s beleaguered authorities loosened its birth policy again, allowing couples with three children. Too late. The following year, so few children were born that the population declined for the first time since the Great Leap Forward, Mao Zedong’s failed attempt that led to widespread starvation and death in the 1960s.

China has one of the lowest fertility rates in the world, well below what demographers say is the replacement rate needed to keep a population growing. This threshold requires each couple, in general, to have two children.

Experts say the number of births could fluctuate.

“For a country of 1.4 billion, an extra half a million births is not much of a rebound,” Wang Feng, professor of sociology at the University of California, Irvine. “This is compared to the lowest year, in 2023, when the epidemic stopped.”

Many young Chinese are quick to confuse the reasons for not having children: the rising cost of education, the increasing burden of caring for their aging parents and the desire to live a so-called “Double” lifestyle. Income, No Kids”.

For women, emotions are especially strong. Daughters who are the only children in their families have access to education and work that their parents often do not. They have grown into empowered women who see Mr. Xi’s calls for them to do their patriotic duty and have children as a step too far. Many of these women said that deep-rooted inequality and a lack of legal protection made them reluctant to marry.

The massive decline in child births has huge implications for health care, education and even the consumer market. Companies that made money selling baby leaf tea make shakes with calcium and selenium for adults with fragile bones.

Nestlé, the world’s largest food company, is closing a plant for the Chinese market that employs more than 500 people worldwide in Europe. The company will focus on selling premium baby products and expand its offering to adult foods in China, a spokesman said.

The pressure on China’s healthcare system is becoming more apparent. Dozens of hospitals and maternity clinics have reported closings in the past two years.

On social media forums, obstetrician-gynecologists have spoken out about low pay and losing their jobs. A doctor told state media that obstetrics, once considered a place of “iron rice” with job security, has become a “rusted grain of steel”.

And some small hospitals stopped paying their workers, Han Zhonghou, a former hospital official in northern China, told a Chinese newspaper.

“The life of a mother and child hospital,” said Mr. Han, “is getting more and more difficult every year.”