A nurse takes care of a newborn baby at a hospital in Zunyi, southwest China's Guizhou Province, May 12, 2021. China had more than 4.7 million registered nurses by the end of 2020, the National Health Commission said on International Nurses Day, which falls on Wednesday.(Photo: Xinhua)

With China announcing its mainland population recording negative growth for the first time in six decades, some media outlets said that India, while lacking solid data to support the claims, may have overtaken China to become the most populous country in the world based on previous estimates, prompting some overwrought voices to claim China's demographic dividend has come to an end while India is seeing growing advantages. 

However, Chinese experts pointed out that China's demographic dividend will continue to provide a strong driving force for the domestic economy and huge opportunities. 

The demographic dividend is the economic growth potential that can result from shifts in a population's age structure, mainly when the share of the working-age population (15 to 64) is larger than the non-working-age share of the population (14 and younger, and 65 and older), according to the UN. 

The impact of negative population growth on socio-economic and environmental resources is essentially neutral, Peng Xizhe, director of the Fudan University Center for Population and Development Policy Studies, told the Global Times on Wednesday. 

The overall population quality, especially in terms of education, is rapidly growing, so China can maintain a stable and sustainable economic development by improving the quality of labor and seizing the opportunity of technological revolution to increase productivity in spite of the overall decrease in labor resources, Peng stressed.

The comments came after the National Bureau of Statistics of China on Tuesday released data showing that by the end of 2022, the mainland population was 1.41175 billion, a decrease of 850,000 over that at the end of 2021, marking the first time the country's population has recorded negative growth since 1962.

Western media outlets such as Fortune were quick to pass comment, claiming that the Chinese data "increases the chance that another long-expected demographic shift may have already happened: India overtaking China as the world's most populous country."

Last year, the United Nations projected that India would take first position at some point before the middle of 2023, Fortune reported on Tuesday. 

The UN estimated that the two countries would have switched places by July 2023, as India's population grows to 1.429 billion and China holds steady at 1.426 billion. 

However, given that the 2022 population China reported showed a faster rate of decline than the UN expected, there is a possibility that India has already overtaken China, the report said. 

Dismissive accusing voices that China's demographic dividend has disappeared while that of India continues to grow, He Yafu, a Chinese demographer, told the Global Times on Wednesday that if India's population exceeds China's, it will have a size advantage over China and a younger age structure. However, other conditions in India are not as good as in China. For example, its land area is only about one-third of China's, its natural resources are not as abundant as China's, and its illiteracy rate is higher than China's. He believes India still needs to make great efforts to surpass China in its population structural advantages. 

Yuan Xin, a professor from the Institute of Population and Development at Nankai University's School of Economics, told the Global Times that while demographic changes in China bring specific challenges to the economic and social system, at the same time they provide new opportunities. 

The demographic dividend in China will continue to provide a strong driving force for domestic economy growth and lay a solid foundation for the realization of Chinese-style modernization, but also provide huge opportunities for the global economy, Yuan noted.

But Pang warned that the continued decline in births will inevitably lead to a decline in the working-age population 20 years from now, with a corresponding increase in the proportion of population who need to be supported, which means that the opportunity to reap the country's demographic dividend becomes less.

India has not conducted a population census since 2011, when it reported a population of 1.2 billion. A census was scheduled for 2021, but was postponed several times due to the COVID pandemic, according to media reports.