At the end of 2024, 134,856 people were born in Taiwan, which was a record low, Taiwan Central News Agency (CNA) reports, citing the island’s Department of Internal Affairs.
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“There were 134,856 births in 2024, down 715 from 2023 and lower than the 138,000 births in 2022,” the agency said, adding that the birth rate had reached a “record low.”
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At the end of the year, Taiwan’s population was 23,402,200 people, which is 20,222 people less than in 2023.
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Moreover, as the agency writes, the proportion of island residents aged 65 years and older amounted to 19.18% of the total population of Taiwan. Thus, the island is “one step away” from becoming a “super-aging society” (a society where the proportion of people over 65 years of age exceeds 20%).
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Mainland China is also facing serious demographic problems today. The total fertility rate in China, according to UN data, was 1.01 for 2024, which is one of the lowest in the world.
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The Ministry of Civil Administration of the People’s Republic of China previously reported that in 2022, a record low number of marriages was registered in China, with only about 6.8 million couples formalizing their relationships, which was the lowest number in the country in 37 years.
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Earlier, Wang Zaibang, a senior researcher at the Chinese think tank Taihe, said that China’s population decline will be a protracted process, due to past mistakes in birth control policies and the current reluctance of the younger generation to marry and have children, while following the modernization of China’s industrial structure, a gradual population decline will not have a major impact on long-term sustainable economic development.
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Official relations between the central government of the PRC and its island province were interrupted in 1949 after the Kuomintang forces led by Chiang Kai-shek, defeated in the civil war with the Communist Party of China, moved to Taiwan. Business and informal contacts between the island and mainland China resumed in the late 1980s. Since the early 1990s, the parties began to contact through non-governmental organizations – the Beijing Association for the Development of Relations across the Taiwan Strait and the Taipei Cross-Strait Exchange Foundation.
