The United Nations Population Fund on Wednesday released its 2023 World Population Report, predicting that India will overtake China to become the world’s most populous country by the middle of this year. It is the result of population development dynamics, but has a different meaning in some Western media reports. Western media reported that “the world’s center of gravity” will shift, “the world order will change”, and “China will face difficulties in achieving the goal of national awakening due to negative population factors”, etc. Western media have released a series of reports indicating that development China is waiting for big difficulties.

In fact, it is not surprising that the Western media talks about the Chinese population. In recent years, he has focused on fertility policy, increasing the elderly population, decreasing the number of newborns and other topics to create the logic that China has lost its population advantage, therefore is facing a depression, which will inevitably affect the world economy. But what do the results show? Despite their pessimistic attitude, China continues to develop and work miracles in realizing stable and sustainable economic growth with a large population.

Such reports from Western countries lack a basic awareness of the rules of population development. In today’s development of human society, declining birth rates and declining fertility are common problems in the world. It is closely related to the stage of economic development, people’s conceptual awareness and other socio-economic factors. For example, developed Western countries generally face problems such as labor shortages. In that case, why doesn’t the Western media say that population misfortune is hindering their economic growth? Again, this is a matter of “double standards?”

China is a country in the world with a large population. Since the introduction of reform and opening up to the world, especially after joining the World Trade Organization (WTO), the “advantages of a large population” have been fully realized: the country has experienced rapid development that has brought opportunities to the world. China has now entered the high-quality development stage, and innovation has become the key to future development. In the long term, China will move away from labor-intensive industries and transform into medium and high-level global supply chains and industries. This is an unavoidable trend.

Assessing China’s development perspective should not focus on just one population indicator, but on the quality of economic growth. In the first quarter of this year, China’s economy grew by 4.5 percent, beating external expectations and explaining the situation.

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