OREANDA-NEWS. The National Bureau of Statistics of China reported that by the end of 2019, the country’s population was 1.4 billion people excluding residents of Hong Kong, Macau and overseas territories. This is 4.67 million more than in 2018.

At the same time, in 2019, 14.65 million births were registered in China, which became the minimum figure since 1961. The birth rate was 10.48 per 1,000 people, it is the minimum since 1949, when the People’s Republic of China was founded.

Local media note that low birth rates were expected by many experts. For many years, they called on the authorities to abandon the demographic policy of “one-child” introduced in the 1970s for artificial and forcible (according to a number of human rights defenders) birth control. The authorities refused this policy only in 2016 against the backdrop of the rapid aging of the population and a reduction in the number of citizens capable of working.