Chinese demographers predict that India will overtake China as the world’s most populous country by 2023 or 2024, earlier than the last UN prediction that this would happen by 2027.
The once-in-a-decade census released by China on Tuesday said China’s population grew at its slowest pace to reach 1.41178 billion, up by 5.38 percent compared with 2010, keeping its status as the world’s most populous country. The annual average growth rate of 0.53% in the decade was down from 0.57% growth in the 2000-2010 decade.
China has been witnessing a steady drop in the birth rate in the last 10 years while India’s fertility rate is around 2.3. In 2019, India had an estimated population of 1.37 billion and China 1.43 billion, according to the UN figures.
Experts say, China is also facing the risk of falling into the trap of low fertility, as total fertility rate of 1.3 is very low and the number of Chinese women in child-bearing age – 22 to 35 years will decline sharply by more than 30% over the next decade, according to existing demographic data. Officials said, “China’s aging process is accelerating,” with number of residents aged 60 and above grown to 264 million by 2020, up 5.44% from 2010.
A Chinese university think tank as reported by local media projected that China’s population will gradually stop growing in the next five years, reaching a “turning point” at some point in the latter half of the decade depending on multiple variables. The drop in population was expected to lead to labour shortages and a fall in consumption levels, impacting the world’s second largest economy’s future economic outlook.
According to Chinese officials, the population quality has improved steadily but the data also indicates some structural problems in China’s demography, including drops in working-age population and the number of women of childbearing age, the increasingly severe aging problem, falling total fertility rate, and low number of births.
State media report quoting experts on the latest census data said that China’s total fertility rate of 1.3 includes the effect of second-child policy introduced by China in 2016, and leaving out the effect, the total fertility rate would only be around 1.1. which is nearly half of the fertility rate of 2.1, the replacement level of population according to UN. It is even 0.5 lower than the 1.6 average fertility rate of many developed countries in Europe and America, and 0.3 lower than Japan, which is experiencing a serious fertility problem.
China faces the severest population problem in the world, reflecting exorbitant child-rearing costs and inadequate support for families. And as urbanization only intensifies, China’s fertility rate will continue to decline — very likely to the lowest in the world, far lower than that of all established powers, including Japan. Without significant policy changes, China faces a dramatic plunge in population that would lead to a rapid decline in innovation, economic growth and national strength.
In view of the demographic crisis, China stopped the one-child policy in 2016 and allowed two children, but it has had very limited impact to halt the declining population as few people came forward to have a second child. China is expected to lift all restrictions on the number of children that a couple can have.
(Source: DD News International)
Dr. Niranjan B Poojar 
Bhagyashree Gupta 
Balaji Subramanian