In an effort to encourage individuals to have more children in the face of a dropping birth rate and the first population decline in more than 60 years, China will start surveying 1.4 billion people on Wednesday.
The survey, which was unexpectedly released on October 10, will concentrate on both rural and urban regions nationwide. China’s National Bureau of Statistics stated that the poll, which would be based on a sample of 500,000 homes, will run for around two weeks, ending on November 15. It said that it would serve as a foundation for the government and Communist Party to create national economic, social development, and demographic-related policies as well as to track China’s population trends over time.
China increased at the slowest rate since the first modern population survey in the 1950s, according to the results of the country’s once-a-decade census, which was completed in November 2020. In official media, population growth has often been associated with the nation’s strength and “rejuvenation” despite a falling birth rate and pervasive public worries about the challenges of childrearing.
Many women are choosing not to have children at all, or to have fewer due to high daycare expenses and the need to quit their jobs. Traditional assumptions of women taking care of the children and gender inequality are still pervasive throughout the nation.
Although paternity leave is still scarce in the majority of provinces, authorities have recently raised their rhetoric about sharing the responsibility of raising children. With a population of 1.41175 billion, the nation saw a decrease of around 850,000 people in 2022—the first since 1961, the year of China’s Great Famine.