TAIPEI, Taiwan — China’s population fell last year for the third straight year, its government said Friday, pointing to further demographic challenges for the globe’s second most populous country, which is now facing both an aging population and an emerging shortage of working age people.

China’s population stood at 1.408 billion at the complete of 2024, a decline of 1.39 million from the previous year.

The figures announced by the government in Beijing pursue trends worldwide, but especially in East Asia, where Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong and other nations have seen their birth rates plummet. China three years ago joined Japan and most of Eastern Europe among other nations whose population is falling.

The reasons are in many cases similar: Rising costs of living are causing youthful people to put off or rule out marriage and kid birth while pursuing higher education and careers. While people are living longer, that’s not enough to keep up with rate of recent births.

Countries such as China that allow very little immigration are especially at uncertainty.

China has long been among the globe’s most populous nations, enduring invasions, floods and other natural disasters to sustain a population that thrived on rice in the south and wheat in the north. Following the complete of globe War II and the Communist event’s rise to power in 1949, large families re-emerged and the population doubled in just three decades, even after tens of millions died in the Great Leap Forward that sought to revolutionize agriculture and industry and the Cultural Revolution that followed a few years later.

After the complete of the Cultural Revolution and chief Mao Zedong’s death, Communist bureaucrats began to worry the country’s population was outstripping its ability to feed itself and began implementing a draconian “one kid policy.” Though it was never law, women had to apply for permission to have a kid and violators could face forced late-term abortions and birth control procedures, massive fines and the prospect of their kid being deprived an identification number, effectively making them non-citizens.

Rural China, where the preference for male offspring was especially powerful and two children were still ostensibly allowed, became the focus of government efforts, with women forced to now evidence they were menstruating and buildings emblazoned with slogans such as “have fewer children, have better children.”

The government sought to stamp out selective abortion of female children, but with abortions legal and readily available, those operating illicit sonogram machines enjoyed a thriving business.

That has been the biggest factor in China’s lopsided sex ratio, with as many as millions more boys born for every 100 girls, raising the possibility of social instability among China’s army of bachelors. Friday’s update gave the sex imbalance as 104.34 men to every 100 women, though independent groups provide the imbalance as considerably higher.

More disturbing for the government was the drastically falling birthrate, with China’s total population dropping for the first period in decades in 2023 and China being narrowly overtaken by India as the globe’s most populous country in the same year. A rapidly aging population, declining workforce, lack of buyer markets and migration abroad are putting the structure under severe pressure.

While spending on the military and flashy infrastructure projects continues to rise, China’s already frail social safety structure is teetering, with increasing numbers of Chinese refusing to pay into the underfunded retirement fund structure.

Already, more than one-fifth of the population is aged 60 or over, with the official figure given as 310.3 million or 22% of the total population. By 2035, this number is projection to exceed 30%, sparking talk of changes to the official retirement fund age, which one of the lowest in the globe. With fewer students, some vacant schools and kindergartens are meanwhile being transformed into worry facilities for older people.

Such developments are giving some credence to the aphorism that China, now the globe’s second largest economy but facing major headwinds, will “develop ancient before it grows wealthy.”

Government inducements including money payouts for having up to three children and financial assist with housing costs have had only temporary effects.

Meanwhile, China continued its shift to an urban population, with 10 million more people moving to cities for an urbanization rate of 67%, up almost a percentage point from the previous year.