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Births in China Fall to Lowest Level in Nearly Six Decades

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Saturday, 18 January, 2020, 00:50
Births in China Fall to Lowest Level in Nearly Six Decades

Hina’s birthrate dropped to the lowest level since at least 1949 last year and the labor force continued to shrink, in the latest sign of slowing growth prospects for the world’s second-largest economy.

The number of births per 1,000 people declined to 10.48, the lowest level on record according to National Bureau of Statistics data going back to when the Communist Party took power. China’s working-age population — those aged 16 to 59 — declined by 890,000, the figures released Friday showed. The number of newborns in 2019 fell to 14.65 million, a decrease of 580,000 from the year before.

China has struggled to arrest the country’s declining birthrate for years, easing its stringent one-child policy in 2013 and allowing each family to have two children in 2016. Still, top leaders have resisted calls to fully lift restrictions on the number of babies each family can have even as the birthrate in 2018 has dropped to lows unseen since the turmoil of Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward.