A report published by China’s state-affiliated National Business Daily on Tuesday, August 15, revealed that the country’s fertility rate has plummeted to an unprecedented low of approximately 1.09 in the previous year. This alarming development coincides with Beijing officials’ mounting concerns over the dramatic decline in marriages within China during 2022, which further exacerbates the nation’s diminishing birth rate and aging population.
Citing data from China’s Population and Development Research Center, the state media report highlighted that Beijing is now ranked at the bottom in terms of fertility rates among countries with populations exceeding 100 million.
These revelations come in the midst of the Chinese government’s efforts to address the dwindling number of new births, as the country experienced its first population decrease in six decades while simultaneously grappling with an increasingly aged demographic.
China’s fertility rate had already ranked among the lowest globally, alongside countries like South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore. In response, Beijing has implemented urgent measures and incentives aimed at bolstering birth rates, including financial incentives and enhanced childcare facilities.
Conversely, as reported by Reuters, many women have been deterred from having more children or even having any due to the high costs of childcare and the need to interrupt or halt their careers. Nonetheless, Chinese authorities have begun promoting the notion of shared responsibility for childcare.
In June, China reported a historic low in the number of marriages, with only 6.83 million couples registering their unions in 2022. This decline was attributed to Covid-19 restrictions that confined tens of millions to their homes or compounds for prolonged periods last year.
In a separate report from Hong Kong’s Family Planning Association, also released on August 15, the proportion of childless women in the city more than doubled over the past five years, reaching 43.2 percent in the previous year.
Furthermore, the survey conducted in the special Chinese administrative region unveiled that the percentages of women with one child and two children both declined by around 10 percentage points, settling at 27.4 percent and 25.2 percent, respectively.
Meanwhile, despite a heightened desire among Hong Kong women to have children, the average number of children per woman fell from 1.3 in 2017 to an all-time low of 0.9 last year, as indicated by the report.
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