New Census Finds China’s Population Growth Has Slowed

BEIJING — China’s population grew more urbanized, educated and older as the growth of the world’s most populous nation slowed to a pace half that of the previous decade, results of the 2010 census released on Thursday indicated.

The census also documented a vast internal migration, concluding that more than 261 million citizens — nearly one in five — were living in places other than where China’s household registration process had indicated that they did. Most of those are probably migrant laborers who have swelled big cities in search of higher-paying jobs so as to send money back to families that remain in rural areas.

The government said China’s population was 1.34 billion, an increase of 73.9 million, or 5.8 percent, from the last tally in 2000. That was below the 1.4 billion that United Nations demographers were predicting when the head count was conducted last November, and the slowest rate of growth in nearly half a century, demographers said.

The average household size shrank by 10 percent, to 3.1 people, and the urban population surged by more than 45 percent, leaving urban and rural Chinese nearly equal in number, the census indicated.

Wang Feng, head of the Center for Public Policy at Tsinghua University in Beijing, said the data show that China “has completely turned a page in its demographic history.”

“It is now a post-transitional population, with very low fertility, quite low mortality, and is being increasingly urbanized,” he said in an e-mail on Thursday. “Such a highly mobile society produces a tremendous dynamism for the Chinese economy and society, and at the same time poses great challenges for the government’s political control.”

Mr. Wang also said that documentation of a rapidly aging society raised new questions about China’s population-control policies, which since 1980 have limited many families to a single child. But President Hu Jintao struck a cautious note in a speech on Tuesday, the state news service Xinhua reported, telling a bureau of the Communist Party’s Central Committee that China should “stick to and improve its current family planning policy and maintain a low birthrate.”

For a country dead set on joining the ranks of the globe’s most advanced nations, the huge count yielded both promising and disturbing results.

The share of Chinese who were educated rose sharply. University graduates are now about 8.9 out of 100 citizens, an increase of about 2.5 times, and rates of those who have graduated from high school and vocational schools also rose, though not as much.

Yu Xie, a professor of sociology, statistics and population studies at the University of Michigan, said the increase in the number of college-educated Chinese would “place China in a better position in international competition for economic growth.”

“Future economic growth will not only come from manufacturing but from services and high technology,” he said, which will require better-educated workers. “China is already prepared for a post-industrial transition.”

But the figures also revealed less promising trends. They confirmed a yawning gender gap, with 118 male newborns for every 100 females, a disparity researchers blame partly on family planning policies that they say have encouraged abortions of female fetuses.

The population aged markedly: the share of Chinese under age 15 dropped 6.3 percent, while that of those over 60 rose by 2.93 percent. That presages a shrinking labor market, which economists predict will increase pressure for higher wages and divert a gusher of government money into pensions, medical care and other services for the elderly.

The growing proportion of older people can be explained partly by China’s low fertility rate in recent decades, with fewer births to offset the aged. Cai Yong, a demographer at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, said the number of children under 15 was even lower than expected, pointing to a fertility rate of about 1.4 children per woman.

That is significantly below the government’s estimated fertility rate of 1.8, and should put pressure on China’s leaders to loosen family planning policies, he said.

Ma Jianting, the director of China’s National Bureau of Statistics, said at a news conference on Thursday that the slowed rate of population growth showed that the one-child policy had “eased the pressure on resources and the environment and laid a relatively good foundation for steady and rapid economic and social development.”

But he suggested that the population’s rapid aging was a matter of potential concern. “We also need to pay close attention to the new changes of our population structure, adhering to the family planning policy while cautiously and gradually improving the policy to promote more balanced population growth in the country,” the state-run Xinhua news agency quoted him as saying.