News Snapshot:
China’s population has fallen for the first time in 60 years, according to government data that has alarmed policymakers and cast doubt on the country’s economic prospects. Beijing yesterday reported that the country was home to 1.41 billion people last year, an annual drop of 850,000. Kang Yi, the head of China’s National Statistics Bureau, said that it was “mainly a result of people’s [decreasing] willingness to have babies, the delay in marriage and pregnancy, as well as a fall in women of child-bearing age”. It marks the first decline since the early 1960s when Chairman Mao Tse-tung’s disastrous policies...
