China state media slams Western hype of its population decline

HONG KONG – Western media reports on China’s population being overtaken by India’s deliberately ignore the country’s development, using the topic to “bad-mouth” it and advocate decoupling, state broadcaster CCTV said on Thursday.

CCTV’s sharply worded commentary said the subtext from Western media in recent years was that China’s development was in “big trouble” and that when its demographic dividend disappears, it would decline and the global economy would also suffer.

“They slandered all the way and China has developed all the way, creating a miracle of sustainable and stable economic development with a huge population.”

India is set to overtake China as the world’s most populous nation

and will have almost three million more people by the middle of 2023, United Nations data released on Wednesday showed.

“The United States is stepping up efforts to contain China’s development and advocate further decoupling and found new hype points from the United Nations report,” CCTV said, adding that the West simply equated population size with development achievements.

“Such hype lacks a basic understanding of the law of population development.

“With the development of human society today, the decrease in birth rate and decline in willingness to bear children are common problems faced by the whole world,” CCTV added, pointing out that developed Western countries generally faced problems such as labour shortages.

In 2022,

China’s population fell for the first time in six decades,

a historic turn expected to usher in a long period of decline in citizen numbers, with profound implications for its economy and the world.

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin said population dividends did not depend only on quantity but also on quality. “Population is important but talents are also important... China has taken active measures to respond to population ageing,” he said on Wednesday.

In Beijing’s Guomao business district, Mr Liu, a 40-year-old who works in finance, said it was an “inevitable phenomenon” that India’s population has exceeded China’s but that his country’s economic strength would dominate.

“Our economic strength will still exceed,” he said, adding that India’s population growth “does not have any major impact on us”. REUTERS