China population: ‘dire reality’ of crisis underlined as coronavirus blamed for tumbling 2020 births

Chinese mothers gave birth to just 12 million babies last year, down from 14.65 million in 2019, as the overall population grew to just 1.412 billion in 2020

Researchers at Renmin University found the coronavirus particularly dampened the willingness of women under 30 to give birth last year

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China’s overall population rose to 1.412 billion in 2020, but the number of new births fell for a fourth consecutive year to 12 million. Photo: AFP

Published: 10:15pm, 22 Nov 2021Updated: 9:14am, 23 Nov 2021

The number of Chinese newborns dropped by 45 per cent in the last two months of 2020 compared to the final year of the notorious one-child policy five years earlier, according to a new research paper, as the coronavirus particularly dampened the willingness of women under 30 to give birth.

Chinese mothers gave birth to just 12 million babies last year, down from 14.65 million in 2019, marking an 18 per cent decline year on year and continuing the descent to a near six-decade low, while the national birth rate dropped to a record low of 8.52 births for every 1,000 people.

This represented the first time the birth rate had fallen into single figures, according to the China Statistical Yearbook 2021, recently released by the National Bureau of Statistic (NBS).

An already existing downward trend in China’s number of newborns resulting from a declining population of women under the age of 30 was exacerbated by the outbreak of the coronavirus at the end of 2019 and resulting lockdowns and nationwide restrictions in the first few months of last year, the research paper showed.

Researchers at Renmin University used China’s birth data in 2015, the last year of the one-child policy, as a baseline and found that an uptick in births only lasted two years as the monthly number of newborns in 2018 and 2019 remained below the levels seen in 2015, with a monthly decline of 10 to 15 per cent.