No negative population growth yet

CHINA ALLOWED all couples to have two children in 2016 to cushion the effect of its fast aging society. But the number of newborns has remained markedly lower than expected over the past two years. Beijing News comments:

According to a sample survey of 1 percent of the national population in 2015, the National Bureau of Statistics says China's fertility rate - the average number of children each woman of child-bearing age has - remains at 1.04, lower than in some developed countries.

Based on the low fertility rate, some argue that China's population entered an almost irreversible negative growth phase last year, as the number of newborns plummet to a new low below 10 million last year, less than the number of deaths. They claim that the number of births in China last year has been the smallest since the middle of the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911), even if the population base is more than four times that of the Qing Dynasty.