What’s happened?
China’s population has peaked and is now shrinking, according to official data from the country’s National Statistics Bureau. The country had 1.41 billion people at the end of 2022, 850,000 fewer than a year earlier – with the number of deaths (10.4 million) outstripping the number of births (9.6 million). This is the first time this has happened since 1961, the final year of the Great Famine under Mao Zedong. Demographers knew this historic inflection point was coming, but it has arrived sooner than predicted – as recently as 2019, the UN was forecasting China’s population would peak
