Officials Report China’s 1st Annual Population Fall in Decades, Economic Crisis Accompanied by COVID-19

A patient with COVID-19 lays on a bed in a hallway at Tangshan Gongren Hospital in China's northeastern city of Tangshan on Dec. 30, 2022. (Noel Celis/AFP via Getty Images)

China’s population fell last year for the first time since the 1960s, according to Chinese officials, because of fewer births and an increase in deaths, strengthening fears about a long-term economic decline.

The decline, by roughly 850,000 people to a total of 1.41175 billion in 2022, according to the country’s National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), is the first drop officially reported by China since 1961—the last year of the country’s Great Famine.

The number of Chinese women classified as being of childbearing age—between 25 and 35— declined by roughly 4 million.

The NBS also reported that there were 9.56 million births in 2022, down from 10.62 million a year earlier. Births last year came in at the lowest rate on record, falling to 6.77 per 1,000 individuals from 7.52 per 1,000 in 2021.

Meanwhile, deaths rose from 10.14 million in 2021 to 10.41 in 2022, data show. The rate, which rose to the highest since 1974, hit 7.37 per 1,000 people in 2022. China recorded 9.93 million deaths in pre-pandemic 2018.

The gender ratio remained skewed in 2022, with 722.06 million males and 689.69 million females, meaning that there were 1.05 men for each woman in the country.

The number of the working-age population— which includes 16- to 59-year-old individuals—came in at 875.56 million, or 62 percent of the national population. Those older than 65 are 14.9 percent of the total. The population data doesn’t include people from Hong Kong, Macao, or foreign residents.

Demographic and Economic Crises

A falling, aging population can negatively affect a country’s economy. Some experts expect China’s economic crisis to be worse than what occurred in Japan in the 1990s. Japan’s shrinking population has been blamed for years of low growth.

China’s population data release came as Beijing announced that the country’s gross domestic product grew just 3 percent in 2022, down from 8.1 percent in 2021.

The blame for the declining population falls mainly on the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) decadeslong one-child policy that was imposed in 1979. The Chinese regime resorted to forced sterilization and abortion to enforce the rule, which was lifted in 2016.

In recent years, China’s Total Fertility Rate (TFR), which is defined as the rate at which the population exactly replaces itself, is estimated to have fallen below 1.3, while in 1992, the rate fell below 2.1. The TFR must be above 2.1 for population growth to remain constant.

The low birth rate is an indication that younger Chinese citizens are now unwilling to have children, Frank Tian Xie, a professor in business and an associate professor of marketing at the University of South Carolina–Aiken, told The Epoch Times in an interview last year.

“Housing, education, child care, and medical costs all add up to an absolutely prohibitive cost of having ... children,” he said. “Young people simply do not want to get married or have children as a result of the high costs.”

COVID-19 Impact

It’s unclear how much the 2022 population figures were affected by COVID-19 deaths. While China officially has declared a small number of deaths, the regime has been accused of furnishing false data and underreporting such numbers.

China has reported less than 5,300 COVID-19 deaths in total, according to Worldometer, which tracks such data. The World Health Organization (WHO), which says Chinese authorities have  underreported deaths, puts total cumulative COVID-19 deaths in China at 34,028 as of Jan. 16.

In response to international pressure, Chinese officials on Jan. 14 acknowledged that 59,938 COVID-related deaths had occurred between Dec. 8, 2022, and Jan. 12. However, many question the “official” figure, and remain in the dark about China’s COVID death toll.

In recent months, the virus has been spreading with greater intensity in China, with funeral homes across the country seeing higher activity than normal.

“We now have 400 to 500 [cremated corpses] per day. Originally 90 [corpses] per day is already capped,” an employee of a funeral home in Shanghai told The Epoch Times on Dec. 28, 2022. “The staff are already working overtime.”

Based on estimates cited by the Chinese language edition of The Epoch Times, the COVID-19 pandemic and the CCP’s “zero-COVID” measures have brought about hundreds of millions of deaths in China. The CCP is hiding the actual extent of the human cost of the pandemic from the international community and also is likely to be misrepresenting the population decline, the report said.

UPDATE: This article has been updated to make clear that the findings are based on the CCP’s official data.