From 19FortyFive, January 19:
Tuesday, China announced its first population decline since 1961. The official National Bureau of Statistics reported that last year 9.56 million people were born and 10.41 million died.
China’s total population in 2022, officials announced, was 1.412 billion, down 850,000 people from the preceding year.
The country’s long demographic slide has begun. By the end of this century, China’s population will be about a third of what it is today. The projected decline is the steepest in history in the absence of war or disease.
There are indications that Chinese officials have been substantially overstating China’s population. The population, according to the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Yi Fuxian writing in the middle of last year, was 1.28 billion, not the official 1.41 billion. China’s population began to decline, Yi wrote, in 2018. He pointed out that Beijing’s demographic numbers have not been consistent with other data, official and unofficial....
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