Negative population growth and population ageing in China

Abstract

The first characteristic of "Chinese Path to Modernization" is "the modernization of a huge population", which refers to that China's modernization is historically making 1.4 billion people live a prosperous and dignified life. Meanwhile, the demographic characteristics such as negative population growth, declining birth rate and population ageing will accompany Chinese modernization for a long time. In the face of long-term negative population growth expectations, how to deal with negative population growth and how to actively coping with population ageing has become the focus of research. Academic research has shifted from focusing on population quantity in the past to focusing on population quality and structure, hoping to give full play to the advantages of human resources, transform the demographic dividend into talents dividend, and promote high-quality population development. The launch of this special issue aims to explore how different countries respond to negative population growth and population ageing, and then hopes to find out how China can learn from the world. This editorial first introduces recent changes in China's population and current research priorities and then introduces the four research papers in this special issue. 2 Negative population growth, declining birth rate, and population ageing in China By the end of 2022, China's population has decreased by 850,000 compared with the end of the previous year (9.56 million births and 10.41 million deaths), and the natural population growth rate is-0.60‰, which is the first negative population growth