China Recorded Less Than 10 Million Births in 2022: Lowest Since CCP’s Rule Began

A nurse cares for a newborn at the Women and Children's Hospital in Fuyang City, Anhui Province, China, on Aug. 8, 2022. CFOTO/Future Publishing via Getty Images

The number of births in China dropped for the sixth consecutive year last year, and is now the lowest since 1949, when the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) took power in China—despite its scrapping the notorious one-child policy in 2016.

On Oct. 12, the National Health Commission (NHC) of China’s communist regime reported 9.56 million births in 2022. This figure was just over half the number of 17.58 million births recorded as recently as 2017.

According to official data, 46.1 percent of the babies born in China last year were first-born children, 38.9 percent of births were a second child, and 15 percent were a third child or later.

The Chinese regime has been ramping up its efforts to curb the declining trend in its population. After the removal of the one-child policy in 2016, Beijing further relaxed its family planning policies in 2021 to encourage people to have more children.

China’s one-child policy, which was implemented from 1979 to 2016, is claimed by the communist regime to have prevented some 400 million births from occurring between 1979 and 2011—including millions through forced sterilization and coerced or forced abortions.

Mrs. Liu fled China to escape a forced abortion. She gave birth to her baby in Los Angeles on Dec. 2, 2011. Jenny Liu/The Epoch Times

Two major reasons for the drop in births are that Chinese people are getting married at a later age and that more people wish to remain unmarried and childless, according to Jiang Quanbao, a professor at the Institute for Population and Development Studies of Xi’an Jiaotong University, in an interview with Yicai, a state-run Chinese media outlet.

In contrast to the plummeting birth rate, China’s population of retired persons is rocketing.

Chinese people over the age of 65—referred to as the “gray tide” in Chinese media—accounted for 14.9 percent of the population in 2022, making it a rapidly aging society.

A Chinese state-run media outlet reported last year that the “biggest gray tide ever” is to be expected in the coming decade. Chinese people born in the 1960s started retiring in 2022, with a projected average number of 20 million people from this age group now retiring every year.

Young People Afraid to Have Children

Amid the continuous significant drop in births over the past several years, the Chinese communist regime has been implementing various measures to boost the fertility of eligible female citizens and promote childbearing—including giving girls as young as 15 folic acid supplements and women as old as 49 assistance from local reproduction-focused medical teams, according to Chinese media reports.

After Beijing’s recent population data announcement, many Chinese netizens on the popular Chinese social media platform Weibo expressed their reluctance to having children, with many fearing that they would not be able to afford to raise them.

A netizen by the name “Love China E5” wrote: “Those young people who want to have children should think beforehand: In the present conditions in China, what you can give to your children—happiness or suffering?”

A child receives a COVID-19 coronavirus vaccine at a school in Handan in China's northern Hebei province, on Oct. 27, 2021. AFP via Getty Images

Another netizen, called “Good Fortune,” expressed his regret at having had a second child. “I’m struggling to make ends meet; I really shouldn’t have brought them into this world, to continue suffering [like me]! I so much regret having a second child. My wife lost her job after giving birth to the second child. Life expenses keep soaring every year, but our income remains stagnant! Life is so tough!”

Another Weibo user expressed his dismay at the future economic outlook in China: “What can we commoners do? The economy is getting worse, and we are becoming poorer. We have no chance to earn a living and we cannot afford to raise a child.”

As early as 2021, a blogger by the name “Les Misérables” published an article on Zhihu, a popular Chinese social media platform, referring to an emerging “population crisis” in China.

“On the surface, it appears as if [young people] don’t want to have children, but in reality, it’s a matter of not daring to. They don’t dare to, which is why they don’t want to,” Les Misérables concluded in his post. The blogger left a question at the end of the post, to which he did not provide an answer: “The core issue is why people don’t dare to have children?”

On top of the aging population issue in China, the Chinese regime reported a record-high youth unemployment rate of 21.3 percent in June. According to the China Macroeconomic Forum’s (CMF) report, the ongoing youth unemployment crisis could persist for the next 10 years and “worsen in the short term.”

The communist regime’s draconian zero-COVID measures added to young people’s fear of having children that would be born and grow up in such a totalitarian society.

In May, a man in Shanghai who reportedly refused to go to a central isolation venue was warned by police that his actions might lead to consequences that would affect his family for “three generations.” The man replied: “We are the last generation.” This “last generation” sentiment represents a large number of young people who protest against the lack of dignity they have experienced under the CCP and its zero-COVID and other draconian policies.

Xia Song and Mary Hong contributed to this report.