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17 January 2023

China's Population Is Shrinking

In China, births dropped 10% from 2021 to 2022, and 19.45% from 2020 to 2022. 

China's Total Fertility Rate (TFR) (which is roughly speaking the number of children per lifetime per woman of a statistically average women sampling across the lifespan in a single year) in 2022 was about 1.05, which is half of the replacement rate.

Some of this is no doubt due to China's zero tolerance policy resulting in epic COVID lockdowns. It isn't clear how indicative the last two years will be of long term fertility trends in China.
The National Bureau of Statistics [in China] on Tuesday announced a decline of 850,000 people to a new total population of 1.4118 billion — the first such decline in 60 years. The birthrate reached its lowest level on record at 6.77 per 1,000 people, down from 7.52 in 2021.
From the Washington Post.
China’s fertility level has continuously declined over the past decades. The total fertility rate (TFR) decreased from 5.81 in 1970 to 2.75 in 1979. In the 1980s, the TFR fluctuated above the replacement level. Since the 1990s, the fertility rate has declined to below the replacement level. The 2010 and 2020 censuses yielded TFRs of 1.18 and 1.30, respectively. 
China’s National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) reported the annual births of 10.62 million for 2021, a sharp decline of 11.50 percent compared to the 12 million births enumerated in China’s 2020 census. While China’s registered birth rates are widely considered to be underestimated owing to child underreporting, it is generally recognized that China’s fertility has decreased to very low levels since the 1990s. As with other countries that have experienced population transitions, China’s fertility decreased to the replacement level and continued to decrease to extremely low levels, rather than being sustained at the replacement level as expected. Following the TFR of 1.3 in 2020 census, the decline in births in 2021 indicated that the fertility level decreased further.
From the journal Population Health Metrics.

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