The Chinese economy grew at one of the lowest levels in the last 40 years, authorities said.
The COVID-19 pandemic and the real estate crisis influenced it to only reach 3% growth in 2022. Beijing had set a goal of 5.5% expansion for last year, lower than the 2021 level.
Tuesday’s figures are the worst since a 1.6% contraction in 1976, the year of Mao Zedong’s death, and excluding 2020, after the coronavirus emerged in the city of Wuhan in late 2019.
However, this was not the only worrying situation, the demographic crisis affecting the country was also revealed as the population decreased for the first time in more than 60 years.
“By the end of 2022, the national population was 1,411.75 million,” reported the National Statistics Office (ONE) in Beijing, specifying that it is “a decrease of 0.85 million since the end of 2021.”
Analysts expect an accelerated decline and an aging population that could affect economic growth and put pressure on public finances.
The last time China’s population declined was in 1960, when the country faced the worst famine in its modern history, caused by Mao Zedong’s agricultural policy called the Great Leap Forward.
China in 2016 lifted its strict one-child policy, imposed in the 1980s due to fears of overpopulation, and in 2021 began allowing couples to have three children.
The Chinese population is also “getting used to small families because of decades of one-child policy,” he told the AFP Xiujian Peng, a researcher at the University of Victoria, in Australia. (YO)
Source: Eluniverso
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