Births in China are dangerously close to being overtaken by deaths

China’s economy recovered substantially from the coronavirus pandemic in 2021, but its seemingly buoyant growth rate is overshadowed by a challenge that will be hard to fix with monetary or fiscal policy—a rapidly plunging birth rate. China’s Statistics Bureau announced today (Jan. 17) that GDP expanded by 8.1% in 2021 from a year earlier, beating Beijing’s 6% target. This is partly thanks to its strong exports and the low base in 2020, when China had its first quarterly contraction in GDP in decades due to the pandemic.