China’s population decline accelerated in 2023 as its economy grew at one of the lowest rates in decades, pointing to persistent challenges for the world’s second-largest economy from a property slowdown, deflation and demographic pressures.
Gross domestic product expanded 5.2 per cent last year, outpacing growth of just 3 per cent in 2022, when the economy was constrained by Beijing’s draconian zero-Covid restrictions, and exceeding the government’s official target of around 5 per cent, already the lowest benchmark in decades.
But the population dropped by a second year in a row as deaths rose and births fell. Wang Feng, an expert on Chinese demographics at the University of California, Irvine, said the decline of 2mn people revealed the “footprint of Covid-19”, which spread through the country in early 2023 after authorities hastily lifted the anti-pandemic measures.