Data indicate pessimism over birth rate unfounded

There has been growing worry in recent years that China's population may have started to decrease, leading to a rapidly aging society. However, figures released by the National Bureau of Statistics on Monday suggest that is a pessimistic view, as there were 15.23 million new births last year, meaning the population grew by 3.81 percent to 1.395 billion.

And among the new births many are a second child, which indicates that the change to the country's family planning policy in 2016 to allow all couples to have a second child has proved effective in encouraging more births.

Also that the workforce - those aged 16 to 59 - stands at around 900 million, or nearly 65 percent of China's total population, suggests there are still years to come before the country ceases to reap its demographic dividend, which has often been described as one of the major factors behind China's miraculous economic growth over the past four decades and was one of the reasons for the prescient change in policy.