China facing aging challenges
Print Edition
CHINA’S working-age population continued to fall in 2014, the government said yesterday, as the world’s most populous nation struggles to address a spiraling demographic challenge made worse by its one-child policy.
The total population of China’s mainland stood at 1.37 billion at the end of 2014, according to the National Bureau of Statistics, an increase of 7.1 million over the end of 2013. It remains the world’s largest, although India has been catching up in recent years.
The working-age population — those between the ages of 16 and 59 — dropped to 915.8 million last year, the bureau said, down 3.7 million from the end of 2013.
The population aged 60 and over, in contrast, rose by more than 10 million to 212.4 million, or 15.5 percent of the total population.
Projections show that 25 percent of the population — or 350 million Chinese — will be aged 60 or older by 2030, compared with just 5 percent as late as 1982.
China introduced its controversial family planning policy, which limits most couples to only one child, in the late 1970s in an effort to rein in population growth.
But an aging — and increasingly male — populace is now starting to pose fundamental challenges.
The government moved to relax the rules in late 2013 to allow couples to have two children if at least one of the parents is an only child. Yet far fewer couples have applied to have a second child than expected.
Nearly 116 boys were born for every 100 girls in 2014, while the sex ratio in the total population was 105 males to 100 females.
Zhou Haiwang, vice director of the Institute of Urban and Population Development Studies at the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, said: “The government should allow more couples to have a second child in order to ease the unbalanced population structure due to a low birth rate.
“Chinese women’s total fertility rate, the number of children that a woman gives birth to in her life, was only 1.3 to 1.4, while it is about 2 in developed countries like the United States. If the rate remains at such a low level, China will be further burdened by the larger number of elderly people.”
China’s migrant population has swelled by 8 million in the past year to 253 million, the bureau said.
China also released its official Gini coefficient for 2014 yesterday. The figure is a common measure of income inequality, with 0 perfect equality and 1 total inequality. Some academics view 0.40 as a warning line. Last year, China’s declined to 0.469, the bureau said, from 0.473 in 2013.
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