Africa Business Radio

National Bureau of Statistics data showed that Mainland China’s birth rate dropped to a record low of 7.52 per 1,000 people in 2021 accelerating a downward trend that led Beijing last year to begin allowing couples to have up to three children. China scrapped its decades-old one-child policy in 2016, replacing it with a two-child limit to try and counter a rapidly ageing population, but many couples do not want to have more children because of the high cost of urban living. The birth rate was the lowest since 1949 when the statistics bureau began collating the data. The natural growth rate of China’s population, which excludes migration, was only 0.034 per cent for 2021, the lowest since 1960.