The number of babies born in Chinese hospitals in 2016 reached 18.46 million, an increase of 11.5 percent on 2015, China's top health authorities said Sunday.
The number of non-first children accounted for more than 45 percent of total newborns in 2016, and the number of newborns in 2016 was the highest since 2000, said Yang Wenzhuang, head of the Department of Community Family Planning with the National Health and Family Planning Commission (NHFPC), during a press conference in Beijing on Sunday.
Yang attributed the growth in 2016 to the country's relaxation in family planning rules.
China's family planning policy, introduced in the 1970s, limited most urban couples to one child. China's top legislature eased the one-child policy at the end of 2013 by allowing couples to have a second child if one of the parents was an only child. Since January 1, 2016, the policy has been further relaxed by allowing all married couples to have two children.
According to Yang, China's fertility rate is expected to fluctuate around 1.8 in the 13th Five-Year Plan period (2016-20), which will reveal the effect of the loosened family planning policy.
However, according to data released by the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) on Friday, the number of China's newborns in 2016 was 17.86 million, 1.31 million more than that of last year.
The NBS data is based on a sampling survey, and the NHFPC gathered the information directly from hospitals, Yang explained when asked why there is a 0.6 million difference between the figures, noting that even so, statistics support the same upward trend in the number of newborns after the policy was eased.
"The data given by the NHFPC, based on birth certificates released last year, is closer to the country's actual birth situation," Yuan Xin, a professor at Nankai University and expert on family planning policy, told the Global Times.
The full effect of the policy easing will show in the following two to three years, with around 18 million newborns annually, Yuan predicted.
According to the NBS, the population of the Chinese mainland reached 1.38 billion at the end of 2016, up 8.09 million year-on-year.
The male population is more than 708 million, whereas there are upward of 675 million women in the mainland.
The working-age population, citizens aged between 16 to 60 years old, is 907 million, about 65.6 percent of the total population.
