Recently, Du Peng, vice president of the Chinese Population Association and vice president of Renmin University of China, accepted an exclusive interview with China News Agency "China Focus Face to Face".

On the eve of this year's Spring Festival, a group of statistical data about China's population sparked heated public opinion: By the end of 2022, China's population has decreased by 850,000 compared with the end of the previous year. This is the first negative population growth in China in the past 61 years.

　　Population is a key variable affecting economic and social development, and an important factor affecting comprehensive national strength and national security.

When the world's most populous country ushered in negative population growth for the first time, is China's demographic dividend disappearing?

Du Peng said that our demographic dividend still exists, because the demographic dividend is still an economic concept. It not only depends on our population structure, but more importantly, whether we can make full use of the population window of opportunity.

　　Du Peng said, why do we say that our demographic dividend still exists?

Based on three aspects, first, our labor force is still very large.

The population aged 16 to 59, we still had 876 million last year.

Second, we are shifting from a big country of human resources to a big country of human capital.

Among our more than 800 million labor force, such well-educated people account for the vast majority.

The average number of years of schooling for people over the age of 15 has grown to nearly 11 years.

Last year's university graduates totaled 10.76 million.

The third is the further improvement of the system and mechanism in our new development stage, especially in the continuous promotion of a better match between the supply of labor and the demand for employment, and in the process of promoting our urbanization, making some agricultural surplus The labor force is further transferred to cities and towns to achieve more effective allocation, so the demographic dividend still exists.

(Xie Longfei)

Responsible editor: [Li Ji]