Go to Media BankPresident of the People's Republic of China (PRC) Xi Jinping. File photoBEIJING, Oct 16 It is necessary to actively respond to the country's population aging, General Secretary of the CPC Central Committee and President Xi Jinping said on Sunday at the opening of the 20th National Congress of the Communist Party of China in Beijing.» (We must) promote building a healthy China, prioritize people's health, establish a policy system to support childbearing, implement the government's strategy to actively respond to population aging,» Xi Jinping said.
Xi Jinping called for accelerating China's transformation into a leading powerWang Haidong, head of the Department of Population Aging of the State Committee for Health Affairs of the People's Republic of China, said that by around 2035, the number of elderly people in China aged 60 years and over will exceed 400 million people, which will be more than 30% of of the entire population of the country. Modern China is facing serious demographic problems, including gender imbalance and an aging population, led to them introduced in China in the late 1970s, the policy of «one family — one child», under which families in cities were allowed to have only one child, and in the villages — two, if the first child is a girl. In 2013, the authorities eased the restrictions in order to solve the problems that had arisen. The second child was allowed to have couples where at least one of the spouses is the only child in his family, and later — in 2016 — to all couples. However, these measures did not cause a boom in the birth rate, on the contrary, from year to year they began to give birth less and less. In the summer of 2021, the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress of China approved the adoption of amendments to the Law on Population and Planned Fertility, which at the legislative level allowed families to have a third child and canceled all previously provided fines and payments. In January 2022, the State Bureau of Statistics of the PRC published data, according to population of China at the end of 2021 amounted to 1 billion 412 million people (not including residents of Hong Kong, Macao, Taiwan, as well as foreigners), an increase compared to the end of 2020 amounted to 480 thousand people. According to official statistics, the number of births in some provinces of China in 2021 was the lowest in decades. For example, in Hunan province, located in the center of the country, for the first time in 60 years, less than 500 thousand children were born, in Henan province, for the first time since 1978, less than 800 thousand, and in the eastern province of Jiangxi, for the first time since the 1950s, the number of newborns fell below the mark 400 thousand. At the same time, more than a million children were born in only one province of Guangdong. According to some demographers, negative population growth in the coming years will remain the dominant trend for a long time to come. PDA. The congress will sum up the results of the CPC's five-year work, outline the goals that the party and the country will strive to achieve in the next five years, consider and approve amendments to the Party Rules, and elect a new composition of the CPC Central Committee and the CPC Central Commission for Discipline Inspection. After the congress closes the first plenum of the 20th CPC Central Committee is to be held, which will appoint the top leadership of the party — members of the Politburo and the Standing Committee of the Politburo. Observers believe that the current CCP Secretary General Xi Jinping will remain in office for a third term.
