China’s birth rate problems underlined as Ningbo projects 27 per cent drop in newborns for 2020
- Ningbo, with about 8.5 million residents, is so far the only Chinese city to publish a half-year population update
- Local authorities do not speculate on what factors may be to blame, but the number of China’s newborns sank to a six-decade low in 2019
One of the most populous cities on China’s east coast predicts that the number of local births will plummet by 27 per cent this year from 2019, further signalling that the country is facing a demographic crisis.
Local authorities in Ningbo, where the population of roughly 8.5 million is similar in size to that of New York, said in a recent report that the number of newborns in the city looks to be about 36,000 in 2020. That would mark a steep decline of 27 per cent from last year’s 49,464 births.
In the first half of this year, Ningbo reported 17,945 new births, down nearly 20 per cent from a year earlier, according to the half-year report published by the city’s health authorities in late August.
The Health Commission of Ningbo did not give a specific reason for the deep fall in new births. However, the trend is clear in the world’s second-biggest economy that its population is quickly ageing while the labopur force and fertility rate continue to decline.
While China has allowed every couple to have two children since 2016, when it ended the notorious one-child policy that was enforced for nearly four decades, the desire among citizens to get married and have babies has plunged.
And according to Ningbo authorities, China’s two-child policy is losing traction. Among the women who gave birth in Ningbo in the first half of the year, the proportion of those having their second child was 38.9 per cent, down 2.5 percentage points from a year earlier.
China’s birth rate falls to near 60-year low, with fewest babies since 1961
As a result, Ningbo authorities said they plan to improve public services and infrastructure to provide more daycare options, in hopes of encouraging people to have children.
Few local governments in China release their birth figures regularly. Chongqing municipality in southwestern China published monthly birth figures in 2019 in an effort to boost data transparency, but this resulted in a controversy over the quality of its data. Chongqing decided to halt the release of monthly data this year, after what it claimed was “unfair coverage from the Western media”.
Nationwide data shows that the number of newborns in China sank to a nearly six-decade low last year. Mothers in China gave birth to 14.65 million babies last year, down from 15.23 million in 2018, according to data from the National Bureau of Statistics released on Friday.
Last year’s figure was the lowest since 1961.
