China’s population decline accelerated in 2023, according to the Beijing statistics office. According to a statement from the statistics office on Wednesday, there were around 1.41 billion people living in the People’s Republic at the end of December, 2.08 million fewer than a year earlier. In 2022, China’s population had already shrunk for the first time in six decades. However, at around 850,000 people, the decline was smaller than in the previous year. As a sign of the difficult demographic development, the number of births continued to slow down. 9.02 million babies were born in China. In …