Earlier this month the UN Population Division (UNPD) released World Population Prospects: The 2022 Revision, an extraordinarily detailed global demographic update with estimates and projections to the year 2100 for every country on Earth. The gigantic compendium is full of facts and figures, most of them of interest only to specialists. Hiding in this data forest, however, was a noteworthy tidbit that has thus far attracted little notice. According to the UNPD’s demographers and statisticians, China’s population has peaked—and in fact began shrinking earlier this year.
The transition from a rising to a diminishing population was barely detectable: from a projected 1,425,925,000 in January of this year to 1,425,887,000 as of July 1 in the “Medium Variant” series.[1] But over time, China’s rate of population decline is projected to accelerate, to 0.1 percent per year by the end of this decade, more than a quarter of a percent annually in 2035, and nearly 0.5 percent per year as soon as 2045. That trajectory would bring China’s headcount down to 1.31 billion by 2050—about 115 million below the UNPD’s current 2022 estimate.
This marks a major reassessment of China’s demographic outlook by one of the world’s leading demographic authorities. The UNPD’s own 2019 World Population Prospects, for example, did not envision a peaking of China’s population until 2031. For its part, the US Census Bureau still projects that the Chinese population will not reach its apogee until 2030.[2] Given the plodding nature of demographic change, a difference of almost a decade in predicted crests is anything but small.
The driver hastening China’s
population decline, in the new UNPD numbers, is plunging Chinese childbearing—a
tendency predating COVID-19 but continuing on into the pandemic. UNPD’s latest figures
see 18.4 million Chinese births in 2017 but only 10.8 million for 2022—implying
a breathtaking 40-plus percent collapse in just five years! (Prior UNPD work
had assumed over 15 million births in 2022, and the US Census foresaw 14
million.)
In the UNPD’s assessment, China’s
present birth drop is not a “COVID shock”—projected births keep right on
falling after 2022, dropping below the 10 million mark in 2030.
While COVID-19 must have played some role in the late diminution of China’s population, its scale isn’t clearly massive. Some serious, non-CCP assessments of China’s pandemic death toll offered ballparks as high as 2 million people, but even excess mortality on that scale would account for less than 10 percent of the difference between the UNPD’s previous and current projections for China’s 2022 population. (Implicitly, the latest UNPD numbers suggest “excess mortality” in the low hundreds of thousands in China for both 2020 and 2021).
The new “facts on the ground” prompting UNPD’s major revision of Chinese birth numbers are of course the birth statistics published by China’s National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) since the last round of UNPD projections. Beijing reported birth totals for 2017–2020 very close to the new UNPD numbers and to the US Census Bureau estimates in those years. The three sets are almost identical for 2018–2020.
According to the NBS, China’s
birth totals began a swan dive in 2016, the year after the One Child Policy was
shelved. Such timing was curious—not to say counterintuitive—and raised
questions about the quality and accuracy of Beijing’s birth numbers. China’s
vital statistics are notoriously problematic—despite the nation’s remarkable
developmental strides, vital registration has flagged—and demographers grew
accustomed to guessing about the scale of the undercount during the One Child
regimen. But parental (and other) incentives to undercount ought to have ended along
with the One Child Policy, lending credence to the apparent drop in Chinese
births—and perhaps in population too.
Some think the birth plunge has been even greater than the UNPD and Census Bureau surmise. Dr. Yi Fuxian of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, an obstetrician and independent critic of China’s official demographic numbers, contends that China’s population actually began shrinking back in 2018. In light of the major revisions underway at the cautious and circumspect UN Population Division, such bold challenges may now merit more serious scrutiny.
The latest UNPD revisions should
be only the beginning of a reassessment of what we know about China’s
population situation, and how we know it. These big questions about China’s
population statistics, furthermore, should offer a broader cautionary note about
the reliability of all sorts of other quantitative information about China—not
least those bearing more directly on the country’s economic performance.
[1] UNPD’s new numbers for China show it as still having some natural increase (excess of births over deaths) in 2022, but it was miniscule, at 235,000, with outmigration tipping the scales to effect a decline in total population.
[2] The Census Bureau last updated its China projections in 2021, prior to the release of the most recent official fertility estimates from China.
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