Number of newborns registered in China falls 15% amid fears of population decline

Number of newborns registered in China falls 15% amid fears of population decline

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China’s demographic problems could pose serious problems for the world’s second largest economy when the current working-age population reaches retirement age. Experts worry that if the trend continues or if the population starts to shrink, China may age before it gets rich.

According to the latest data from the National Bureau of Statistics, there were 250 million people over the age of 60 in China last year, about 18% of the population.

Stuart Gietel-Basten, professor of Social Sciences and Public Policy at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, said that while births are likely to drop in most countries in 2020 as a result of the coronavirus pandemic, the statistics of China are in line with an overall downward trend.

“Covid’s impact probably exaggerated it and in the coming years the declines are unlikely to be so bad, but this structural downward trend is likely to continue,” he said. “The number of babies born will never be so high in the future, because the number of pregnant women is decreasing, and will decrease rapidly (in the years to come).”

While China’s demographic change is still nothing compared to some of its hyper-aging neighbors – such as Japan and South Korea, whose populations are declining now – it still poses potential problems in the future, especially for the generation of ” a child “ages.
In effect from 1979 to 2015, the “one-child policy” limited most couples in China to a single baby, as part of an attempt to control a rapidly growing population while the country was still developing. Draconian enforcement of the rule has led couples to be hit with heavy fines or penalties, while millions of women have been forced to have abortions if they discover they are carrying a second child.
As a result of the policy, China’s fertility rate has dropped dramatically, from a peak of almost six births per woman between 1960 and 1965 to 1.5 between 1995 and 2014. At the same time, the number of people over 65 has increased from 3.36% in 1965 to almost 10% in 2015, when the policy of one child was changed to allow two children. In 2019, people over 65 represented 12.6% of the total population
Since 2016, couples can have two children, but it seems to have been too late to reverse the decline, with parents adopting the common trend in most developed countries to have fewer children. The next national census, counting in November, is expected to show a decline for the first time in decades, and could mean that India overtakes China as the most populous country.
By 2050, a third of the population, about 480 million people, is expected to be over 60, with many younger workers from families with only one child supporting their parents and two grandparents, in a country where social services for the elderly are still are missing. The uncertainty about the official figures released by the government may also mean that the situation is worse than it looks today.

China’s leaders are well aware of the potential toll that an aging population can cause, damaging the country’s economy as it is about to become the largest in the world, and have been trying to encourage people to have children – after decades of punishing those who did.

In 2018, the People’s Daily, the official spokesman for the ruling Communist Party, published a full-page editorial saying “Giving birth is a family issue as well as a national one”, which warned that “the impact of low birth rates in the economy and society started to appear. “
Women, who have borne the brunt of the one-child policy, are also being criticized in the new effort to have more children. After decades of encouraging women to enter the labor market, the pressure to marry and give birth is increasing, even though many women of the millennium generation are turning away entirely from the idea of ​​marriage.

Between 2013 and 2019, the number of people who first married in China fell 41%, from 23.8 million to 13.9 million. While the decline is driven in part by demographics – one child’s policy means that there are simply fewer people to marry – there has also been a shift in attitudes towards marriage, especially among young women, some of whom are increasingly disillusioned. with the institution for its role in consolidating gender inequality, experts say.

“With the increase in education, women have gained economic independence, so marriage is no longer a necessity for women as it was in the past,” said Wei-Jun Jean Yeung, a sociologist at the National University of Singapore who studied marriage and family in societies Asian women, told CNN last year. “Women now want to pursue self-development and a career before getting married.”

The Chinese millennium generation will not marry and the government is concerned

But gender norms and patriarchal traditions have not kept pace with these changes. In China, many men and in-laws still expect women to take care of most children and housework after marriage, even if they have full-time jobs.

“Just putting up a poster saying that having two kids is great is not enough, it is far from enough,” said Gietel-Basten, the demographer at HKUST, pointing to the economic impact that women still suffer as a result of having children. “There is simply no support from social policy to offset this negative impact.”

As the trend became apparent, along with the drop in birth rates, the Chinese government increased the pressure on young people, especially young women, to marry and settle. In 2007, the State-backed China Women’s Federation coined “remaining women” to describe unmarried women over 27, a term that has already been adopted by the Ministry of Education and is widely used in state media to embarrass women who get married late avoid marriage altogether.

The government has also made it more difficult to end existing marriages, with China’s national legislature last year introducing a 30-day “reflection” period for people asking for a divorce. This was met with widespread criticism, particularly amid mounting protests over domestic violence in China.

Gietel-Basten said that pressuring an increasingly smaller population of women to have more children is unlikely to have much effect, especially since the lack of children, now rare in China, may increase to levels seen elsewhere in the region. Instead, the government should prepare, as some of its neighbors have begun to do, for an aging society, to offset the potential repercussions.

“Yes, the population is aging and, in the future, the population will decrease, what you need to do is say how we can make the most of the people we have,” he added. “You can do this by increasing productivity, through changes in education, reforms in the pension system, in the health system, investing now to mitigate major problems in the future.”

CNN’s Joshua Berlinger and Nectar Gan contributed reporting.

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