Mortality rate in China 2000-2019

In 2019, the mortality rate in China increased to 7.14 deaths per 1,000 inhabitants. The mortality rate presented a slowly growing trend over the past twenty years. The growing mortality rate can not only be attributed to the rising number of mortalities, but also to the slower growth of the whole population.

Population in China

China is the most populous country in the world. Due to several mechanisms put into place by the Chinese government as well as changing circumstances in the working and social environment of the Chinese people, population growth has subsided over the past decades. The major factor for a slower population growth was a set of policies introduced by the Chinese government in 1979, including the so-called one-child policy, which was intended to improve people’s living standards by limiting the population growth. However, with the decreasing birth rate and slower population growth, China nowadays is facing the problems of a rapidly aging population.

Birth control in China

According to the one-child policy, a married couple was only allowed to have one child. Only under certain circumstances were parents allowed to have a second child. As the performance of family control had long been related to the assessment of local government’s achievements, violations of the rule were severely punished. The birth control in China led to a decreasing birth rate and a more skewed gender ratio of new births due to a widely preference for male children in the Chinese society. Nowadays, since China’s population is aging rapidly, the one-child policy has been re-considered as an obstacle for the country’s further economic development. Since 2014, the one-child policy has been gradually relaxed and fully eliminated at the end of 2015. However, many young Chinese people today are not willing to have more children due to high costs of raising a child, especially in urban areas.