China’s Population Drops for the First Time in 60 Years

China’s population declined for the first time in sixty years, a turning point that came sooner than some expected amid a demographic crisis that could change the trajectory of the world’s second-largest economy.

The country’s population stood at 1.41 billion at the end of 2022, a decrease of 850,000 compared to 2021, according to data released by China’s bureau of statistics on Tuesday. The last time deaths outnumbered births in China was during Mao Zedong’s disastrous Great Leap Forward campaign, which caused widespread famine and an estimated 30 million deaths between 1958 and 1961.

The historic turn came at least eight years earlier than most had predicted, said Xiujian Peng, a senior research fellow at the Centre of Policy Studies at Australia’s University of Victoria. “It has alarmed a lot of people because the Chinese government did not prepare for this to happen so soon,” Peng told VICE World News. 

Peng blamed China’s disruptive “zero COVID” policy for contributing to the rapid decline in birth rates during the pandemic. Would-be parents were deterred also by economic uncertainty and the loss of access to medical services, as seen in other parts of the world in the early days of the pandemic, Peng said.

This is bad news for China. A double whammy of a shrinking labor force and an aging population has slowed its economy, which in 2022 recorded its weakest growth since the 1970s.