A senior family planning official said Saturday that due to the introduction of the two-child policy, China's population is predicted to peak at about 1.45 billion by the end of 2028, three years later than expected.
China will have an estimated over 17.5 million newborns in 2016, roughly equal to the number in 2000 and coinciding with predictions made after the introduction of two-child policy in January, Wang Peian, deputy head of the National Health and Family Planning Commission (NHFPC), told a conference on population and development, chinanews.com reported.
"According to the predictions, if China kept the previous strict family planning policy, the population would peak at 1.415 billion in 2025," said Zhai Zhenwu, a demographer and president of the School of Sociology and Population Studies under Renmin University of China.
But the two-child policy will delay the peak until 2028 and it will reach the larger size of 1.45 billion.
The two-child policy, on one hand, will make China's population peak higher, but on the other hand the policy will postpone the population inflection point and slow down the speed at which the population shrinks, according to Zhai.
Wang said China will experience a demographic dividend until 2030.
"China's labor force seems sufficient with more than 1 billion people who are between 15 to 64 years old," Wang said.
China had a population of 1.37 billion at the end of 2015, up 6.8 million from the end of 2014, according to data released by the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS).
The country will continue adhering to the family planning policy as a basic State policy, and fully carry out the two-child policy, said the draft outline of the 13th Five-Year Plan (2016-20), according to the report of the Xinhua News Agency in March.
