China’s population increased in 2020, the nation’s statistics bureau said in a brief statement on Thursday, reported the Wall Street Journal.
The National Bureau of Statistics didn’t elaborate, saying only that detailed data would be released in its coming census report, according to the one-sentence statement published on its website.
The release of the once-in-a-decade census results has been delayed for several weeks. The Financial Times reported on Wednesday that Beijing’s census would show the country’s first population decline in five decades. If anything, says Zhang Zhiwei, a Shenzhen-based economist at Pinpoint Asset Management, “It is possible that China’s population is still growing but that the growth rate was overestimated in the period from 2011 to 2019