Why is China’s birth rate declining?

China’s birthrate plummeted for a fifth consecutive year in 2021, a record low since the founding of Communist China in 1949. The rate only just outnumbered deaths in 2021, and now the world’s most populous country is teetering on a demographic crisis that could weaken its economy and incite political instability.

What do the statistics reveal?

According to China’s Bureau of Statistics, births fell to 10.62 million in 2021, or only 7.5 births per 1000 people. In the same year, 10.14 million deaths were recorded, a mortality rate of 7.18 per thousand, amounting to a natural growth rate of 0.34 per thousand head of population. This growth rate is the lowest since China’s great famine of 1959-61, where millions of fatalities led to a population decline. 

New births in 2021 dropped 11.6 per cent from 12.2 million in 2020, where the birth rate was 8.52 births per 1,000 people. Chinese demographers have warned that if the trend continues, China’s population could soon begin to irreversibly contract. The country’s working-age population is already declining, and these statistics will add pressure on the country’s ability to pay and care for an increasingly elderly country.

Speaking to Reuters, Zhiwei Zhang, the chief economist at Pinpoint Asset Management, said: “The demographic challenge is well known but the speed of population ageing is clearly faster than expected. This suggests China’s total population may have reached its peak in 2021. It also indicates China’s potential growth is likely slowing faster than expected.”

What’s being done about it?

The Chinese government has been ramping up efforts to encourage families to have more children to counter the decline. In 2016, the Chinese government did a U-turn and scrapped their one-child policy to replace it with a two-child limit after realising the decades-old policy had culminated in a rapidly-ageing population and shrinking workforce.

As the birth rate continued to fall year on year, authorities have since further loosened the policy to three children. Ning Jizhe said in 2021, that 43 per cent of the children born were a second child in the family and posited that the three-child policy is expected to add births gradually, and that “China’s total population will remain above 1.4 billion for a period of time to come.”

As well as allowing couples to have three children, China has been adopting policies aimed at reducing the financial burden of raising children, including banning for-profit-after-school tuition (a lucrative industry) and pledging better access to childcare and maternity leave. 

Huang Wenzheng, a demography expert with the Beijing-based Center for China and Globalization, said birth numbers are likely to fluctuate in the ten million range before declining further without greater policy. “Policies will provide greater support for the birth rate in the longer run,” he told Reuters. “Career advancements could be tied to whether you have children or not; economic incentives; or even direct cash payouts by society to meet the cost of raising a family.”

Why is this happening?

Ning Jizhe, head of the National Bureau of Statistics, told state media yesterday that the decline of births stemmed from a confluence of factors, from “a decrease in the number of women of childbearing age, a continued decline in fertility, changes in attitudes toward childbearing and delays of marriage by young people.”

For decades local governments forced millions of women to abort “illegal” pregnancies under the one-child policy. Nowadays, the flurry of propaganda slogans and policies to encourage more births fails to sway women who are deterred by the escalated cost of urban living, from high property prices to rising education costs. 

Professor Wang Feng, from the University of California Irvine echoed Wenzheng’s sentiments and told The Guardian that he believes the policies announced are “mostly rhetoric, or at most like Band-Aids.”

He added: “Without addressing the deeply rooted causes discouraging young Chinese from getting married and having children, from gender inequality to high living cost, what we are seeing now is likely just the beginning of a further decline in birth rate and a prolonged process of population decline in China.”