China's population expected to see negative growth before 2025: official

官方表示：中国人口预计将在2025年前出现负增长

Third-child policy Photo:VCG

三胎政策 图片来源：vcg.com

Birth data for 2021 released by 29 provinces and regions in China so far showed that the number of new births in 2021 was the lowest in decades in several provinces, and only 6 among the top 10 provinces with the highest birth numbers exceed 500,000.

截至目前，中国29个省区公布的2021年出生人口数据显示，2021年出生人口数量在几个省份中是几十年来最低的，在出生人口最多的10个省份中，只有6个省份超过50万。

The top 10 provinces with the most births are Guangdong, Henan, Shandong, Sichuan, Hebei, Anhui, Guangxi, Jiangsu, Hunan and Guizhou. Only Guangdong Province has had more than 1 million new births, the Global Times found.

出生人数最多的10个省份是广东、河南、山东、四川、河北、安徽、广西、江苏、湖南和贵州。 《环球时报》报道，仅广东省的新生儿就超过了100万。

According to the provincial data, the number of births in Central China's Hunan Province fell below 500,000 for the first time in nearly 60 years. Central China's Henan Province, the city with the third highest population in China, had fewer than 800,000 births for the first time since 1978. The number of births in East China's Jiangxi Province fell below 400,000 for the first time since the 1950s.

省数据显示，中部湖南省出生人口近60年来首次降至50万以下。中国中部的河南省是中国人口第三多的城市，其出生人口自1978年以来首次低于80万。华东江西省的出生人数自1950年代以来首次降至40万以下。

The growth rate of China's total population has slowed significantly and is expected to enter a negative growth during the 14th Five-Year Plan period (2021-25), Yang Wenzhuang, head of population and family affairs at the National Health Commission, said on the 2022 Annual Conference of China Population Association on Thursday.

在周四举行的中国人口协会2022年年会上，国家卫健委人口与家庭事务司司长杨文壮表示，中国总人口增速明显放缓，预计“十四五”期间（2021-25年）将进入负增长。

Chinese demographers predicted that negative population growth will be the dominant trend in the coming years for a long time and improving the overall quality of the population and changing economic development plans are vital to address the problem.

中国人口学家预测，未来几年人口负增长将是长期的主导趋势，提高人口整体素质和转变经济发展规划对于解决这一问题至关重要。

"This is an inevitable result of a long period of low fertility rate," Huang Wenzheng, a demography expert and senior researcher at the Center for China and Globalization, told the Global Times. "It can be predicted that China's birth rate will continue to shrink for more than a century and the birth rate in first-tier cities will continue to fall. The third-child policy may alleviate some of the problems, but it is unlikely to reverse the trend in the short term."

这是长期低生育率的必然结果，”中国与全球化中心人口学专家、高级研究员黄文政告诉《环球时报》。 “可以预见，一个多世纪以来，中国的出生率将持续收缩，一线城市的出生率将继续下降。三孩政策可能会缓解一些问题，但扭转的可能性不大 短期内的趋势。”

According to the National Health Commission, the average number of children women of childbearing age intends to have been 1.64 in 2021, down from 1.76 in 2017 and 1.73 in 2019. Of the 10.62 million people born in 2021, 41.4 percent are the second child and 14.5 percent are the third child or above, according to a statistical communiqué on China's health development in 2021 released by the National Health Commission on July 12.

根据国家卫健委的数据，2021年育龄妇女的平均生育孩子数预计为1.64个，低于2017年的1.76个和2019年的1.73个。2021年出生的1062万人口中，41.4%是二孩和 国家卫健委7月12日发布的《2021年中国卫生事业发展统计公报》显示，14.5%是三胎以上。

"Low fertility rates mean that there are fewer potential mothers and fathers. The number of people willing to have children is also shrinking fast at the same time. Add these two factors together and we now see the trend of rapid shrinkage in natural population growth rate," Huang said.

黄说：“低生育率意味着潜在的母亲和父亲更少。 与此同时，愿意生孩子的人数也在快速减少。 将这两个因素加在一起，我们现在看到了人口自然增长率快速收缩的趋势。”

Lu Jiehua, a professor of sociology at Peking University, told the Global Times on Sunday that given the current demographic trends, China will inevitably enter a period of negative population growth for a long time, although there might be some fluctuations occurring during this period.

北京大学社会学教授卢洁华周日对《环球时报》表示，鉴于目前的人口趋势，中国将不可避免地进入一个长期的人口负增长时期，尽管在此期间可能会出现一些波动。

To reduce the cost of childbirth, parenting, and education, many cities and regions have rolled out a set of measures, including reducing childbirth and education costs, to aim for a balanced population growth in the long run.

为了降低生育、育儿和教育成本，许多城市和地区推出了一系列措施，包括降低生育和教育成本，以实现人口长期均衡增长

For example, Panzhihua city in Southwest China's Sichuan Province, with 1.23 million population, announced in July 2021 that it plans to dole out money to couples giving birth to more than one child, the first-ever official incentive of its kind to spur more childbirths as part of broad-based efforts to address China's demographic decline in the longer term.

例如，拥有 123 万人口的中国西南部四川省攀枝花市于 2021 年 7 月宣布，计划向生育多个孩子的夫妇发放资金，这是有史以来第一个刺激更多生育的官方激励措施 作为长期解决中国人口下降问题的广泛努力的一部分

"The overall arrangement of the social and economic development needs to be adjusted to adapt to the new pattern of population growth," Lu said. "For a long time in the past, China has relied on demographic dividend to drive economic development. In the future, the demographic dividend may gradually decline or go into debt. In this case, we should explore advantages in areas beyond the demographic dividend to fully improve the overall quality of the population and create new conditions for economic development."

卢说：“需要调整社会经济发展的总体布局，以适应人口增长的新格局。” “过去很长一段时间，中国都是靠人口红利来拉动经济发展的，未来人口红利可能会逐渐下降，或者负债累累，在这种情况下，我们应该在人口红利以外的领域挖掘优势， 全面提高人口综合素质，为经济发展创造新条件。”

Addressing young people's concerns and pressures about having and raising children, stabilizing housing prices and optimizing favorable policies may help alleviate the pressure of negative population growth, experts said.

专家表示，解决年轻人对生儿育女的担忧和压力，稳定房价，优化优惠政策，可能有助于缓解人口负增长的压力。