Report said China’s population had fallen by 3.1 million this year.By Gu Ting
for RFA Mandarin
2023.12.27
Chinese censors deleted an article on Wednesday that reportedly leaked full-year population figures for 2023, revealing a plummeting birth rate despite ongoing efforts by the ruling party to encourage people to have families.
While official figures won't be confirmed until Jan. 17, the Mother and Infant Daily news service said 7.88 million babies were born across China 2023, 1.68 million fewer than in 2022.
Given that 11 million people died this year, China's population has therefore fallen by 3.12 million, the population of a medium-sized Chinese city, the report said, citing the City Data account on Baidu's Tieba forum site.
The City Data post had been deleted by Wednesday evening local time, suggesting that the topic is a highly sensitive one for the ruling Chinese Communist Party, which is keen to sing the praises of the economy in a bid to boost people's confidence in the future.
However, the reported figures were in line with earlier estimates, including one by Peking University School of Medicine scholar Qiao Jie, who told a forum in August that the number of newborns has plummeted by 40% over the past five years.
"The number of births in 2023 is expected to range from 7-8 million," Qiao was quoted as saying by the China Business News.
The journal China Philanthropist predicted in May that new births this year would come in under the 8 million mark, extrapolating figures that were available at the time.
In 2022, China's National Bureau of Statistics reported a drop in population of around 850,000 to 1.41175 billion, the first fall since 1961, the last year of China's Great Famine.
Authorities also announced a nationwide poll of 1.4 million people in October, as the Communist Party struggles to encourage more people to marry and have kids, Reuters reported.
https://www.rfa.org/english/news/china/china-birth-rates-plunge-12272023160425.html
