The number of newborns has gone into free fall over the past several years. Official figures released Wednesday showed that China had fewer than half the number of births in 2023 than the country did in 2016, after China abolished the one-child policy. The latest number points to a fertility rate—the number of children a woman has over her lifetime—that is close to 1.0, a level considered by demographers as “ultralow.”
The worsening demographic gloom has taken on increasing urgency for Beijing. The country hit a historic turning point in 2022, marking the first year the population shrank since the starvation years in the early 1960s.
Over the past year, China’s population dropped by 2.08 million, more than twice the drop in 2022. China ended 2023 with 1.410 billion people, the National Bureau of Statistics said Wednesday, down from 1.412 billion in 2022.
Economic headwinds didn’t help the situation. Another possible factor was China’s sudden abandonment of Covid-19 restrictions at the end of 2022, which might have led to a sharp rise in deaths early last year.
The statistics bureau, which doesn’t break out deaths by month, said the number of deaths increased to 11.10 million in 2023 from 10.41 million in 2022.