For as long as many can remember, China has been known for being the nation with the most citizens. In fact, since the United Nations began keeping global population records in the 1950s, China has always led the rankings. Over the decades, the rate of population growth was so high that it even inspired a widely-criticised one-child policy between 1980 and 2016, as the Chinese government tried to regain control over its population.
Just a few years ago, in 2019, the United Nations predicted that China’s population would continue its unstoppable growth, hitting its peak in 2031 and 2032. But at the start of this year, China revealed that it had entered a period of negative population growth.
And now, for the first time since records began, India has overtaken China as the world’s most populous country with 1,425,775,850 citizens (at the time of writing).
Experts believe that it is the after-effect of the one-child policy, which fined families who had more than one child, forced women to have abortions, and sterilised Chinese citizens. While it appeared to give the country control over its booming birth rate, now the nation is starting to face an ageing population.
India, on the other hand, has seen its population grow by more than a billion since records began in 1950. The United Nations expects India to hit its population peak of 1.7 billion by 2064. Compared to China's 49,400 births per day, 86,000 babies are reported to be born in India every day.
Did you hear about China reopening its borders to tourists for the first time since the pandemic began?
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