Chinese government mouthpiece Global Times (GT) quoted observers as saying that “the negative population growth is the inevitable result of the country’s long-term low fertility rate but the country’s demographic dividend will not disappear as some pessimists claim.”

The world’s most populous country China is witnessing negative population growth for the first time in 61 years, decreasing by 850,000 in 2022, data released by the National Bureau of Statistics of China (NBS) showed.

Experts say the looming demographic crisis could stymie economic growth and strain government finances.

“#China’s population started shrinking in 2022 for 1st time in six decades as births decline from 10.6mln to 9.6 mln despite efforts to enourage bigger families. A total of 10.41 million people died, Nation facing increasingly seriously demographic crises (sic),” Holger Zschaepitz, an author of ‘Schulden ohne Sühne?’ a book on states’ addiction to debt, tweeted,

Su Hainan, a research fellow from the China Association for Labor Studies, told the GT that the population decline was “a natural result of social and economic development, which is similar to the population growth trajectories of Western countries in Europe, the US and Japan.”

According to the NBS data the population at the working age from 16 to 59 was 875.56 million, accounting for 62.0 percent of the total population.

“The population aged 60 and over was 280.04 million, accounting for 19.8 percent of the total population; the population aged 65 and over was 209.78 million, accounting for 14.9 percent of the total population,” the data added.

In the existing demographics, the share of the urban population in the total population is 65.22 percent, 50 percentage points higher than that at the end of 2021. .

“The data is not unexpected and conforms to the law of population development. Negative population growth is the inevitable result of the country’s long-term low fertility rate,” the Global Times said, quoting Yuan Xin, a professor from the Institute of Population and Development at Nankai University’s School of Economics.

The GT also quoted Su Hainan, a research fellow from the China Association for Labor Studies, saying it as “a natural result of social and economic development, which is similar to the population growth trajectories of Western countries in Europe, the US and Japan.”

“The country’s population saw a net increase of 480,000 in 2021 and a net decrease of 850,000 in 2022. The gap is very small for 1.4 billion people. So I believe the national population is still hovering around the zero growth stage,” Hainan is quoted to have said by the GT.