At the end of December last year, the world's most populous country, China, had 1.411 billion people, 850,000 fewer than a year earlier. That was reported Tuesday, Jan. 17, by China's State Bureau of Statistics in Beijing. The country's population thus shrank in 2022 for the first time in six decades, dpa specified.

The birth rate was just 6.77 newborns per 1,000 people, the lowest in decades.

The number of births in 2022 (9.56 million) was lower than the number of deaths (10.41 million). Prior to that, the decline was recorded in 1960 and 1961 against a background of severe hunger after the disastrous effects of industrialization.

According to experts, China has long suffered from a sharp decline in the birth rate and an aging population. The cancellation of the controversial demographic policy in 2015 led to an increase in the figures - but only a small one and for a short period of time.

Experts believe that the reasons lie in the high cost of housing, education, and health care in China, as well as a decrease in the population's desire to marry. The pandemic appears to have exacerbated this negative trend.

In 2021 married Chinese couples were allowed to have up to three children. Tuition costs have been somewhat reduced. The provision of maternity and parental leave was eased.

At the same time, one in five Chinese citizens is over 60. The working-age population between the ages of 15 and 59 continues to shrink.

China's birth control campaign was launched in 1979. Its goal was to limit the number of inhabitants. In 2013, couples in which one of the spouses was an only child in the family, members of some ethnic minorities, as well as rural residents of some provinces were allowed to have a second child if the first child born in the family was a girl.

Meanwhile, amid the pandemic, Chinese hospitals have been overcrowded in recent months, with crematoriums unable to cope with the incineration of corpses. Official figures have long failed to reflect the real scale of the epidemic in China, dpa news agency noted. Experts estimate that hundreds of thousands of people have died from COVID-19 in China.