(Dmytro “Henry” Aleksandrov, Headline USA) Communist China announced its first overall population decline in six decades, while people are more likely to grow old than to get born.
The National Bureau of Statistics reported that, at the end of 2022, China had 850,000 fewer people than over the previous year, not counting the populations of Hong Kong, Macao and foreign residents, according to the New York Post.
In a Tuesday briefing, the bureau said that China now has a total of 1.411.75 billion people, with 9.56 million births against 10.41 million deaths.
Because the Chinese government implemented the strict one-child policy that only officially ended in 2016, the Chinese were forced to have only one child, a boy, to carry on the family name. If a woman got pregnant with a girl, the baby was killed. That resulted in men continuing to outnumber women by 722.06 million to 689.69 million.
After abandoning the policy, CCP tried to encourage families to have more than one child but failed, since it is too expensive to raise children in China’s big cities.
China has been the most populous nation for a very long time, but, due to the recent news, is expected to be soon overtaken by India, if not already.
The last time when China had a population decline was at the end of the 1950s when, because of the dictator Mao Zedong, tens of millions of people were killed due to massive famine.
Since people are not having kids or not having more than one child in big cities due to high prices, the population is going to plummet even more as China becomes even more urban than it used to be before. In 2022, the permanent urban population increased by 6.46 million to reach 920.71 million, or 65.22%. The rural population, on the other hand, fell by 7.31 million.
It is not clear how the COVID-19 outbreak has affected the population figures after the Chinese created a virus in one of their Wuhan labs.
