Please have more children. This is China's message to couples after decades of restricting most families to just one child. Why this shift? The reason is that births have now declined for seven consecutive years, resulting in population declines in the past two years. Even before the overall historic decline, the working-age population has been shrinking for years, and projections are that 30% of the population will be 60 or older by 2034. This threatens economic growth, which has been supported in part by the massive labor supply. – Not to mention, there may not be enough healthy people to care for all these elderly people.
China has already lost its position as the world's most populous country to India in 2023, and the result is that the Chinese economy may struggle to overtake the United States in size, especially with the US population expected to continue growing.
