Beijing shrugged off criticism that a partial relaxation of the “one-child” policy in 2014 failed, attributing an unexpected fall in the birth rate last year to superstition and a drop in the number of women of child-bearing age.
Some 16.55 million births were recorded last year – 320,000 less than the previous year, the National Bureau of Statistics announced on Tuesday.
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The health authority predicted last February there would be one million additional births in 2015 after one million couples had applied to have a second child. In 2014, Beijing allowed couples where one partner was a single child to have a second one. The policy was extended to all couples on January 1.
The National Health and Family Planning Commission yesterday said the reason for the drop was two-fold. Many couples, especially in the north, had waited to have a child until the Year of the Goat turned into the Year of the Monkey, which is viewed as a more auspicious animal.
The number of women registering with hospitals for pregnancies rose sharply in the second half of the year. Beijing, for example, recorded a 36 per cent increase in July over the month before.
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The commission also said the number of women of child-bearing age peaked in 2011 and that last year the number of women in their 20s declined by 1.5 million.