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Chinese population is ageing rapidly, says top health official
The Chinese government is grappling with both a falling and ageing population, having reversed its decades-old one-child policy to a three-child one last year to arrest the fall in birthrates and avoid a looming demographic crisis.
China will become a “moderately ageing” country with over 300 million people above 60 years by 2025 and a “severely ageing” one by 2035 when 400 million of its citizens will be 60 and above, accounting for 30% of its total population, a top health official said on Tuesday.
By the end of 2021, the number of the elderly citizens aged 60 and above was over 267 million, accounting for 18.9% of the population, Wang Haidong, director of the department of ageing at the national health commission (NHC), said at a press conference on Tuesday.
At 300 million by 2025, the number will be around 20% of the population.
The number will peak by 2050, Wang said.
“The number of elderly people in my country is large, and the population is ageing rapidly,” Wang was quoted, citing the numbers at a press conference, by the news website, The Paper.
China’s population stood at 1.4 billion people in 2021, census data showed.
The Chinese government is grappling with both a falling and ageing population, having reversed its decades-old one-child policy to a three-child one last year to arrest the fall in birthrates and avoid a looming demographic crisis.
Given China’s average life expectancy is now 78.2 years, as per NHC latest data released in July, the number of elderly citizens is increasing.
Experts have said the rise in the number of elderly, and a fall in the working-age population, will severely impact the economy in the coming years.
Wang said as China’s elderly population continues to rise, and the degree of population ageing continues to deepen, it will challenge “the supply of public services and the sustainable development of the social security system”.
National medical expenses and loss in productivity are also set to rise with the incidence of degenerative diseases among the elderly.
Wang said Alzheimer’s disease has become the most common type of dementia detected among the elderly in China.
“There are about 15 million dementia patients in the country (among) aged 60 and above, of which 10 million are Alzheimer’s disease patients,” Wang said.
Wang added that the elderly population in rural regions is more than in urban clusters.
Citing 2020 data collected from 10 provincial-level regions in the northeast and southwest of China, Wang said more than 20% of its population were above 60 years.
Earlier this month, an official report said Beijing too had entered the stage of a “moderately ageing society since 2021”.
“By the end of last year, Beijing saw over 4.4 million people of its permanent resident population aged 60 or above, accounting for more than one-fifth of the total,” said a report jointly compiled by the office of the Beijing government’s municipal working committee on ageing and the Beijing Association on Ageing.
The population aged 65 or above was around 3.12 million, accounting for 14.24 % of the total, an increase of 204,000 compared with 2020, the report added.
