Trend will accelerate after 2020 as China's 1960s baby boomers grow old
China's aging population has expanded in the past five years, the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) said Wednesday, while analysts warned that the aging trend will increase even more rapidly beginning in 2020.
China's population has increased by 2.52 percent since 2010 to 1.37 billion. The figure has been forecast to peak at about 1.45 billion by 2030, while India was previously expected to replace China as the most populous country around 2028, the Xinhua News Agency reported.
Compared with the sixth national population census in 2010, the proportion of the population aged 60 and above in the general population increased by 2.89 percentage points, according to the NBS statistics.
Although observers said that the current figures show that population aging is already expanding rapidly, the actual rate of increase did not exceed demographers' expectations.
The aging of China's population will not advance too rapidly over the next five years due to the relatively lower number of people born in 1958-60, who will enter the over-60 cohort during the 13th Five-Year Plan (2016-20), Du Peng, director of the Center for Aging Studies at the Renmin University of China, told the Global Times on Wednesday.
However, the rapid growth stage of the population aging problem will start in 2020, Du noted, adding that China should make use of the intervening five years to prepare for the effects of the country's 1960s baby boom.
Du also pointed out that more efforts should be made to improve China's social security system and medical insurance system.
The demographic figures also reflect the acceleration of the country's urbanization process. The urban population has grown by some 102 million, increasing its proportion of the total population by 6.2 percentage points, while the rural population dropped by nearly 68 million.
China has vowed to continue its urbanization drive in the 13th Five-Year Plan period.
"It's good to see that the urban population grew in line with the country's national strategy to promote urbanization," Peng Xizhe, dean of the School of Social Development and Public Policy at Shanghai-based Fudan University, told the Global Times on Wednesday.
However, Peng noted that most of the population growth was in China's major cities, rather than in small- and middle-sized cities as expected.
"The increase in the urban population was largely created by those who migrated from rural areas to cities," Peng said.
Those moving from rural areas also contributed to the increase in the number of migrants in cities, he added.
The number of people living in a place where they are not registered as residents and who have not lived in their hometowns for more than six months reached 292.5 million, an increase of 31 million or 11.89 percent compared with the 2010 census, according to the NBS.
