China’s demographic debacle means authorities must act now, learn from other countries, senior health official urges

Urgent steps must be taken to prevent China’s population from ‘spiralling out of control’, says director of department overseeing population and family development

Countries such as South Korea and Japan waited too long and did not intervene enough, he warns

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China’s national birth rate fell to an all-time low last year, and authorities across the country are scrambling to get couples to have more children. Photo: Getty Images

Published: 9:30pm, 10 Feb 2023

Local governments across China should take a page from other countries’ efforts to boost fertility rates, while also pushing for more supportive birth measures to lower child-rearing costs, a senior Chinese health official said as the nation appears precariously perched on a demographic tipping point.

“Oftentimes, when population issues emerge, it’s already passed the optimal time to solve them … and we need to expedite the push for pronatalist measures during this important window of opportunity [before 2025],” said Yang Wenzhuang, a director with the National Health Commission (NHC), in an op-ed for the latest issue of the commission’s monthly Population and Health magazine.

Yang, who is in charge of the Department of Population Monitoring and Family Development, noted how the population problems that developed countries have faced – along with their response – serve as a good reference as China copes with its own demographic changes.

“Studies show that, when European countries rolled out pronatalist measures, the fertility rates were already below 1.5 [births per woman], and they only started to rebound slowly after about 10 years,” he wrote. “The main reason births remained low in Japan and South Korea was the delayed and weak intervention.”

Yang also urged governments at all levels in China not to miss the opportunity during the current five-year planning period (2021-25) to quicken the pace of research and initiation of measures to prevent the population from “spiralling out of control”.