China’s “Daily Economic News” reported on the 1st that Guangdong, as the largest province in the mainland’s economy, has always had an advantage in agglomerating population, but compared with the level of natural growth, its population growth has been significantly weak in the past two years. Experts pointed out that in the context of industrial transfer, “people follow the money”, and more importantly, there has always been a war of “stealing people”, both visible and invisible. Although there are certain errors in the sampling data, the trend is still worthy of vigilance. A situation for comparison is that in the past three years, among the four major economic provinces along the coast, the permanent population growth of Zhejiang, Jiangsu, and Shandong reached 1,869,000, 693,800, and 444,900, respectively, while that of Guangdong was minus 16,500 .
After being deprived of “the province with the largest population growth” by Zhejiang in 2021, Guangdong’s permanent resident population will experience negative growth in 2022, which is the first time in the past 40 years.
On March 31, Guangdong’s 2022 Statistical Bulletin was released. Among the 28 provinces that have been announced (Jilin, Ningxia, and Tibet have not yet been announced), Guangdong continues to be the “most populous province” with 126.568 million people, but in terms of permanent resident population variables, its annual decrease 272,000, ranking third from the bottom, the situation is only better than Liaoning (-324,000) and Hebei (-280,000).
In the past 40 years (from 1982 to 2022), the annual growth rate of the permanent resident population in Guangdong was less than 1 million people only 7 times, and the first 5 times were all above 800,000 people. In 2022, it will enter the negative growth range for the first time.
The data shows that in 2022, 11 provinces in the mainland will have a net outflow of permanent residents, including Xinjiang, Beijing, Shandong, Tianjin, Henan, Shanghai, Hunan, Heilongjiang, Guangdong, Hebei and Liaoning.
Here, Guangdong’s “joining” is somewhat surprising.
In 2021, Guangdong will have a net increase of 600,000 people. Although it lost to Zhejiang (720,000 people) and lost the title of “Population Increment Champion” for the first time, it still ranks second in the mainland in terms of population increase; by 2022 , Zhejiang has a net increase of 370,000 people, with a high probability of winning the championship for the second time, but Guangdong has “turned from positive to negative”, with a net outflow of 272,000 people, temporarily ranking third from the bottom.
What happened to Guangdong? From the composition of population increment, we can see that, unlike the sluggish natural population growth of most provinces, the more important contradiction that Guangdong has faced in the past two years is actually in terms of mechanical growth-population migration.
On the one hand, looking at the mainland, Guangdong has always been considered relatively “viable”. In the past 40 years, only from 2000 to 2006, there was a situation where the number of consecutive births was less than 1.1 million (the lowest value was 1.0394 million in 2002).
Although the birth population in 2022 is 131,100 fewer than the previous year, Guangdong is still the only province with a birth population of more than 1 million (1.052 million).
At the same time, Guangdong’s natural growth population reached 422,000, ranking first in the mainland, much higher than Guizhou (143,000) and Guangxi (72,000) behind them. It should be emphasized that among the 28 provinces that have released data, only 9 provinces still maintain positive natural growth.
On the other hand, Guangdong’s mechanical growth is not optimistic. Following the mechanical growth of only 28,100 people in 2021, which stood at the threshold of “zero growth”, it will directly turn negative in 2022, with a net outflow of 694,000 people-this is the first time since the reform and opening up.
As we all know, Guangdong is a province with a large inflow of foreign population, and its population growth has always been highly dependent on the import of migrant workers from other provinces.
From the data point of view, the resident population in Guangdong has been higher than the registered population for a long time. By 2018, the difference between the two was as high as 28.4588 million. Since then, although it has narrowed due to various factors, there will still be 27.3705 million migrants in 2021.
In this regard, some analysts believe that the slowdown in Guangdong’s population growth in recent years is directly related to the epidemic. Taking Hubei as an example, the population will increase to 601,000 in 2021. Ye Qing, then deputy director of the Hubei Bureau of Statistics, analyzed that because the local prevention and control work is relatively effective, and other provinces have corresponding restrictive measures, this will promote population return.