China has stopped growing and risks losing its position as the most populous country in the world

China has stopped growing and risks losing its position as the most populous country in the world. Pending the data of the new census – which should have already been published weeks ago – the Dragon is preparing to record a demographic decline that has not been seen since the late 1950s, when the disaster of the Great Leap Forward wanted by Mao Zedong caused the great famine that cost the lives of tens of millions of people.

“The results of the census will have a huge impact on how the Chinese see their country and how the various government departments work,” Huang Wenzheng, of the Center for China and Globalization, a Beijing think tank, told the Financial Times. handled very carefully “. The government was supposed to release the census data in early April but the calendar has suffered several delays since then. If confirmed, the decline in population would indicate that China’s population expansion has peaked sooner than expected and now the country is in danger of being overtaken by India whose population is estimated at 1.38 billion.

The impact for the second-largest economy in the world could be very heavy, both in terms of lower consumption growth and the balance of public finances, taking into account the progressive aging of the population and the higher expenses necessary for assistance to the elderly.

Chinese birth rates continued to decline even after 2015, when couples were allowed to have two children instead of one. During the years of the one-child rule, introduced in 1979, the population had continued to grow thanks to the improvement in life expectancy and the expansion of the economy following the end of the Cultural Revolution and the advent of Deng Xiaoping at the helm of the Country.

An alarm bell had been sounded last week by the Central Bank of China, according to which the actual fertility rate of Chinese women was 1.5 children per woman, and not 1.8 as calculated by the government. The error in the estimates, a Chinese official told the Financial Times, is linked to the tendency of local governments to inflate data on their own population in order to obtain more transfers from the central government.