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What China’s Falling Population Means for the Country’s Future

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Please have more babies. That’s China’s message for couples after decades of limiting most families to just one child. Why the turnabout? The reason is that births have now fallen for six years in a row, leading to a population drop last year for the first time since the 1960s. Even before the historic overall decline, the working-age population had been shrinking for years, and projections show that one quarter of the population will be 60 or older by 2030. This threatens economic growth, which has been predicated on a vast labor supply — not to mention there may not be enough able-bodied people to take care of all those seniors. The upshot is that China’s economy may struggle to overtake the US in size and the country could lose its status as the world’s most populous to India this year.

The Politburo decided in 2021 to allow all couples to have a third child, five years after changing its one-child policy to allow women to have two. (Family-planning policies were totally stricken from a new Civil Code, leaving room for the government to scrap birth limits altogether.) The change to allow two kids worked at first: The number of newborns in 2016 was 17.9 million, a jump of more than 1 million from the year before. However, births dropped each year after that, to 9.56 million in 2022, the lowest since at least 1950. Some regions have started offering incentives for couples to have kids, from extending parental leave to offering subsidies and providing baby loans. Shenzhen, which neighbors Hong Kong, is working on plans to subsidize parents until their children turn three.