China’s population declined in 2022 for the first time since the early 1960s, despite Beijing’s desperate efforts to reverse a worrying trend of decreasing birthrates. The National Bureau of Statistics on Tuesday announced that China’s population fell from 1.413 billion in 2021 to 1.412 billion in 2022. The drop was the first since 1961, when famines ravished the country. For years, Chinese authorities have launched policies to encourage people to have more children in a bid to avert a looming catastrophe caused by its aging population. But decades of China’s “one-child policy” coupled with recent COVID disruption and rising living costs have seen the birthrate continue to fall, with 9.56 million births in 2022 compared to 10.62 million in 2021. India, which has an estimated 1.4 billion population—which continues to grow—may now be the world’s most populous country, with the U.N. predicting that India will overtake China at some point in 2023.
