Births fell by 3.5% last year on mainland

Births fell by some 3.5 percent last year on the Chinese mainland, from 17.86 million in 2016 to 17.23 million last year, the National Bureau of Statistics said on Thursday.

The decline was attributed to such factors as the drop in the number of women of fertile age and people delaying marriage and pregnancy, the National Health and Family Planning Commission, China's top health authority, said in a statement on Thursday.

The statistics bureau said the birth numbers were calculated from sample surveys. China loosened family planning policies, adopting a universal second-child policy at the beginning of 2016.