The last time China is believed to have recorded a population decline was during the Great Leap Forward launched at the end of the 1950s, under then-leader Mao Zedong's disastrous drive for collective farming and industrialization that produced a massive famine killing tens of millions of people.
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The National Bureau of Statistics reported Tuesday that the country had 850,000 fewer people at the end of 2022 than the previous year. The tally includes only the population of mainland China, excluding Hong Kong and Macao as well as foreign residents.
That left a total of 1.41 billion people, with 9.56 million births against 10.41 million deaths, the bureau said at a briefing on Tuesday.
