Official: China's population expected to see negative growth before 2025

Head of population and family affairs at the Chinese National Health Commission Yang Wenzhuang has said that the growth rate of China's total population has slowed significantly.

It is expected to enter a negative growth during the 14th Five-Year Plan period (2021-25), he said at the 2022 Annual Conference of China Population Association.

"The overall arrangement of the social and economic development needs to be adjusted to adapt to the new pattern of population growth," Global Times reports referring to the Chinese specialists.

"This is an inevitable result of a long period of low fertility rate. It can be predicted that China's birth rate will continue to shrink for more than a century and the birth rate in first-tier cities will continue to fall. The third-child policy may alleviate some of the problems, but it is unlikely to reverse the trend in the short term," Huang Wenzheng, a demography expert and senior researcher at the Center for China and Globalization, told the Global Times.

According to the Chinese National Bureau of Statistics, China's population increased by only 480,000 people up to 1.4126 billion inhabitants in 2021. The birth rate was 7.52 per 1,000 people, the death rate was 7.18. The natural increase was 0.34. About 62.5 per cent of the Chinese population are people aged 15-59, and 18.9 per cent are older 60.