Next China: Incredibly Shrinking Population

China’s population shrank last year for the first time in six decades as more people died and families had fewer babies, an ominous trend for a country that has historically relied on a vast labor pool to power economic growth.

The country had 1.41 billion people at the end of 2022, 850,000 fewer than the end of 2021, according to data from the National Statistics Bureau. That’s the first drop since 1961, when China was in the tail end of the Great Famine under Mao Zedong.