Quality and not quantity says China while India is the new most populous country in the world

The UN projections for China indicate that it will lose this month the title of most populous country on Earth in favor of India, a fact that has been received coldly in the Asian giant, which already saw its population fall last year by first time in 60 years.

The population of India will reach 1,425,775,850 inhabitants before May, which will certify its position as the most populous country, said Monday the Department of Economic and Social Affairs of the UN, which confirmed the progress made last week by the Fund for Population of the same body, which predicted that the Indian population will surpass the Chinese this year by 2.9 million.

decline in 2022

In 2022, China experienced an official decrease of 850,000 inhabitants and closed the year with 1,411.75 million, in contrast to the 1,412.6 million registered at the end of 2021.

The last time China suffered a population contraction was in 1961, when it lost some 7 million inhabitants in the context of the famine caused by the failed industrialization campaign known as the Great Leap Forward.

The negative growth had already been predicted in 2022 by the authorities, who expected it “before 2025″, although, already in 2021, almost half of Chinese provincial-level administrations registered more deaths than births.

“The important thing is talent”

The Chinese Foreign Ministry recently downplayed Indian overtaking and assured that, when judging the “demographic dividend” of a country, it is necessary to observe “not just population size“, but “also its quality”.

Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin stated that “Size Matters” but that the key is in “talent resources”, while pointing out that “nearly 900 million of the 1.4 billion Chinese are of working age and have received an average of 10.9 years of education”.

debate in networks

The low profile maintained by the authorities and by the official media contrasts with the attention the issue received on Chinese social networks, where many netizens expressed their relief at ceding the title to their neighbor: “It is a position that no country wants”, declared a user of the Weibo network, where many equated a large population with poverty and excessive competition for resources.

“Let’s congratulate India and worry about our own problems”, settled a Weibo commentator.

However, Liu Zongyi, an expert from the Shanghai Institute of International Studies, told local media that India is “beneficiary” of the geopolitical context and of the “adjustments of industrial supply chains“, what I could “accelerate their economic development”, although he warned that New Delhi needs more jobs to prevent its “demographic dividend turns into a demographic disaster”.

years of low fertility

The demographic trends of the two powers have followed different trajectories in recent decades: despite the fact that in 1971 both countries had a similar fertility rate (between 5 and 6 children per woman), China lowered it to 3 children per woman in only seven years, something that took India three and a half decades.

Similarly, China’s fertility rate fell below the replacement level of 2.1 children per woman in 1992, at the height of the one-child policy and nearly 20 years before India’s fell below that threshold.

Despite the fact that China, where fertility fell to 1.3 in 2020, has allowed having a third child since that same year, the economic burden that it entails and the priority that many women give to their careers mean that many continue to be reluctant to reproduce and that continue to postpone the age of marriage, a trend that will intensify soon, the National Health Commission recently predicted.

support policies

At the 20th Congress of the Chinese Communist Party, held in 2022, the ruling party stressed that the country needs a system that “increase birth rates and reduce the costs of pregnancy, childbirth, schooling and parenting”.

National and local authorities have implemented initiatives such as the opening of singles databases to match young people, the removal of obstacles for single women to have children or the inclusion of assisted fertility services in health insurance.

Beijing is also preparing for an aging society given the increasing proportion that those over 60 will represent in the population -more than 30% in 2035-, for which it has recently announced measures such as the opening of a university for the elderly for “promote permanent training”.

Source: EFE