Headline Roundup • January 17th, 2024
China’s Population Declines for Second Year
Summary from the AllSides News Team
China’s population fell for the second straight year in 2023, officials said Wednesday, as the country’s leaders failed to convince citizens to have more children.
The Details: China’s population dropped by 2.08 million in 2023, from 1.4118 billion to 1.4097 billion — even steeper than 2022’s decline of 850,000. Births dropped for the seventh straight year, with 500,000 fewer babies born in 2023 than in 2022.
For Context: China also faces several other challenges, including slowing GDP growth, high youth unemployment, an aging population, strained international business relations, and mounting debt. In late 2023, the country’s leaders announced several actions to shore up its post-pandemic economic recovery. Like China, the U.S. also has birthrates below replacement levels, but enough people migrated to the U.S. in 2023 that its population still grew by 1.6 million people. China’s population decline helped still-growing India become the world’s most populous country in 2023.
How the Media Covered It: Coverage was common in most center and left-rated mainstream news outlets; right-rated outlets tend to cover international news less frequently. Most coverage framed the decline as a failure of China's leaders to encourage more births. Some coverage displayed sensationalist language like “Beijing Scrambles To Find Solutions.”
Featured Coverage of this Story
Gilles Sabrié for The New York Times
China’s ruling Communist Party is facing a national emergency. To fix it, the party wants more women to have more babies.
It has offered them sweeteners, like cheaper housing, tax benefits and cash. It has also invoked patriotism, calling on them to be “good wives and mothers.”
The efforts aren’t working. Chinese women have been shunning marriage and babies at such a rapid pace that China’s population in 2023 shrank for the second straight year, accelerating the government’s sense of crisis over the country’s rapidly aging population and its economic future.
...
Kevin Frayer/Getty Images
China’s population is continuing to shrink despite Beijing’s thorough attempts to encourage more births, Bloomberg reported on Wednesday.
The Chinese population sharply declined by 2 million people in 2023, more than double the loss of the prior year, according to official data China’s government released on Wednesday. Beijing has tried to alleviate the crisis by scrapping its one-child policy and encouraging families to have more children, but those efforts have had little effect in stalling or reversing the decline.
The population crisis is due in part to a record-low number of births, which fell...
China’s population fell by 2.08 million last year to 1.4097 billion people, down by 2.08 million from 1.4118 billion in 2022.
The official population data includes its 31 provinces, autonomous regions and municipalities, as well as servicemen, but excludes foreigners.
In terms of gender, China’s male population stood at 720.32 million in 2023, while the female population was 689.35 million.
“The population contraction observed in 2023 aligns with our earlier projections,” said Yue Su, principal economist for China at The Economist Intelligence Unit.
AllSides Picks
Headline Roundup
Trump Signs Order Renaming Lake Ontario to Lake America
August 27th, 2026
Headline Roundup
New USPS Mail-In Voting Rules Take Effect After Courts Lift Injunctions
August 27th, 2026
Headline Roundup
COVID Fraud Charges Draw Different Media Focus on Democratic Party Ties
August 27th, 2026
Blog
Meta Settles with 29 States
AllSides Staff
August 27th, 2026
