BEIJING: China’s birth rate dropped last year to its lowest level since the Communist country was founded in 1949, adding to concerns that an ageing society and shrinking workforce would pile pressure on a slowing economy.

To avoid a demographic crisis, the government relaxed its one-child policy in 2016 to allow people to have two children, but the change has not resulted in an increase in pregnancies.

In 2019, the birth rate stood at 10.48 per 1,000 people, down slightly from the year before, according to data from the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) released on Friday.

The number of births has now fallen for three consecutive years; still, there were 14.65 million babies born last year.

He Yafu, an independent demographer based in southern Guangdong province, said the number of births was the lowest since 1961, the last year of a famine that left tens of millions dead. He said there were around 11.8m births that year.

US-based academic Yi Fuxian, senior scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said that even though China has abolished its one-child policy, there has been a shift in the mindset of the population, with people now used to smaller families.

He added that a higher cost of living is also a factor, noting that daycare is expensive and inconvenient in China, posing as another deterrent.

He believes that China’s population is over-estimated, and according to his work, the real population “began to decline in 2018”.

According to official figures, China’s population stood at 1.4 billion by the end of 2019, increasing by 4.67m from the year before.

While China’s limit on family sizes could be removed altogether eventually, the demographer He said citizens were still being punished for having three children, even though some areas have reduced punitive measures.

China has signalled that it might end limits on family size as a draft of the new Civil Code — due to be introduced at the annual session of the rubber-stamp parliament in March — omits all mention of “family planning”.

The one-child policy was introduced by top leader Deng Xiaoping to curb population growth and promote economic development, with exceptions for rural families whose first-born was a female, and for ethnic minorities.

The measure was mainly enforced through fines but was also notorious for forced abortions and sterilisations.

The result was dramatic: fertility rates dropped from 5.9 births per woman in 1970 to about 1.6 in the late 1990s. The replacement level for a population is 2.1.

Published in Dawn, January 18th, 2020