An inconvenient truth? China omits key figures that may have highlighted its demographic time bomb from official statistics
Data that can help track falling fertility rates may have indicated that two-child policy was failing to resolve problem of ageing society
A key data series on China’s fertility rate has been axed from the country’s latest statistical yearbook, depriving the public of crucial figures to judge the effectiveness of the country’s two-child policy.
China’s National Bureau of Statistics has been publishing the data on the “age-specific fertility rate of childbearing women” – the measure of how many children were born to different age groups – annually since 2004.
But in the 2017, China’s statistics yearbook, which sets out the data from the previous 12 months, the bureau said it had decided to remove these figures, which help to calculate the country’s overall fertility ratio.
The bureau gave no reason why it stopped publishing the data and did not reply to questions from the South China Morning Post.
According to figures from the statistics agency, there were 17.86 million births in China last year, up from 16.55 million in 2015. But the age-specific data is important when calculating demographic trends.
The statistics agency’s number, which indicated a fertility ratio of 1.05 in 2015, ran counter to an estimated fertility rate of 1.6 from the National Heath and Family Planning Commission, the body that is responsible for China’s family planning policy and ruthlessly implemented the country’s one-child policy for decades.