China's 60 Years of Change: Managing population growth
30 September 2009
By Jiang Yujuan, Xinhua Economic News Service (China)
China's population has taken on healthy growth pattern since 1991, instead of the previous fast expansion. The nation has the largest population in the world. Its population reached 1.328 billion by the end of 2008, accounting for 20 percent of the total population in the world.
From fast expansion to moderate growth
During the past 60 years, China's population growth can be divided into two phases; first was the fast expansion before the implementation of family-planning policy in the late 1970s; the second phase has been the moderate, steady growth of the population after the implementation of the policy.
From 1949 to 1957, China's population expanded at a fast pace. During those eight years, China witnessed its population increase by 105 million.
From 1958 to 1961, China's population growth slowed due to massive disasters. In 1962 to 1970, the nation's population again grew rapidly, increasing by 157 million.
From 1971 to 1980, China began to introduce the family-planning policy and during this period the population rose by 135 million; from 1981 to 1990, the population continued to expand rapidly, adding 143 million.
Since 1991, China's population has grown steadily. The fertility rate dropped to 12.1? in 2008 from the 19.7 ? in 1991. From 2000 to the present, the annual population growth has been less than 10 million.
An ageing society
When China took its first and second nationwide censuses in 1953 and 1964, China still had a young population. However, by the fourth census in 1990, the adult population had become large proportion of the total. By the fifth census in 2000, the population aged over 65 reached 88.11 million, accounting for 6.96 percent of the total.
In 2008, the percentage of population aged over 65 rose to 8.3 percent, 1.3 percentage points higher than that in 2000, indicating that China has began to see an aging population. Table 1: Change in China's age structure of population Year Percent of population aged 0 to 14 (%) Percent of population aged over 65 (%) Percentage of old against young people (%) Median age 1953 36.3 4.4 12.2 22.7 1964 40.7 3.6 8.8 20.2 1982 33.6 4.9 14.6 22.9 1990 27.7 5.6 20.1 25.3 2000 22.9 7 30.4 30.8
The population aged over 65 increased to 110 million in 2008, accounting for 23 percent of the world's total elderly population.
The aging population is growing at a fast speed. An elderly population is defined as one in which more than 7 percent of the population is over 65. The nation only took 18 years to change its population profile from characteristically adult to elderly. China's elderly population will accounted for 11.92 percent of the nation's total population in 2020. The problem of an aging population emerged early, as it was a big challenge for China to support such huge number of elderly people.
Family planning
China began to adopt a family-planning policy in the late 1970s to rein in China's burgeoning population by encouraging late marriages and late childbearing and limiting most urban couples to one child and most rural couples to two children.
The one-child policy was essential to ensure economic development, people's livelihoods and social stability. It enabled China to reduce the population growth by 400 million and helped the nation to enjoy 40 golden years to develop its economy, when the dependency ratio would be at a relatively low level.
Challenges for China's population development
The huge population is still a primary long-term issue for China. The nation's total population is expected to be 1.43 billion by 2020, and reach a peak of 1.47 billion around 2032.
A rapidly aging population and growing population mobility are also big challenges for China; the population aged 15 to 64 will continue to grow, which poses huge employment pressure; and the relatively high boy-to-girl sex ratio at birth also would pose threats to social stability. The ratio reached 121 in 2008, much higher than the normal range of 103 to 107.
