China’s population has begun to decline 9-10 years earlier than Chinese officials predicted and the United Nation projected
BEIJING — China has announced its first population decline in decades as what has been the world's most populous nation ages and its birthrate plunges.
Men outnumbered women by 722.06 million to 689.69 million, a result of the strict one-child policy that only officially ended in 2016 and a traditional preference for male offspring to carry on the family name. The last time China is believed to have recorded a population decline was during the Great Leap Forward launched at the end of the 1950s, under then-leader Mao Zedong's disastrous drive for collective farming and industrialization that produced a massive famine killing tens of millions of people.
Yi said that, based on his own research, China's population has actually been declining since 2018, showing the population crisis is “much more severe” than previously thought. China now has one of the lowest fertility rates in the world, comparable only to Taiwan and South Korea, he added. It wasn't immediately clear if the population figures have been affected by the COVID-19 outbreak that was first detected in the central Chinese city of Wuhan before spreading around the world. China has been accused by some specialists of underreporting deaths from the virus by blaming them on underlying conditions, but no estimates of the actual number have been published.
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