China’s dwindling population will touch negative growth by 2025 and may continue to shrink for more than a century, a media report said on Monday, as it highlighted the need for improving the overall quality of the population and changing economic development plans to address the problem.
The growth rate of China’s total population has slowed significantly and is expected to enter a negative growth during the current 14th Five-Year Plan period (2021-25), Yang Wenzhuang, head of population and family affairs at the National Health Commission, said at the Annual Conference of China Population Association on Thursday.
Chinese demographers predicted that negative population growth will be the dominant trend in the coming years for a long time and improving the overall quality of the population and changing economic development plans are vital to address the problem, the Global Times newspaper reported.”This is an inevitable result of a long period of the low fertility rate," said Huang Wenzheng, a demography expert and senior researcher at the Centre for China and Globalisation.
"It can be predicted that China’s birth rate will continue to shrink for more than a century and the birth rate in first-tier cities will continue to fall.