China's population drops for a second straight year
Global News Podcast
BBC
4.3 • 8.3K Ratings
🗓️ 17 January 2024
⏱️ 28 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
China, which once tried to control population growth with a one-child policy, is concerned the decline could seriously harm the world’s second largest economy. Also: Crowds clash with riot police in Russia over a jailed activist, and the drug offering a less invasive treatment for children with blood cancer.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | World of Secrets, Season 2, investigates allegations surrounding one of the most powerful religious figures of the 21st century, TB Joshua. |
| 0:10.0 | Search for World of Secrets wherever you get your BBC Podcasts. |
| 0:15.0 | This is the Global News Podcasts from the BBC World Service. |
| 0:20.0 | I'm Janet Jalil and at 14 hours GMT on Wednesday the 17th of January these are our |
| 0:24.7 | main stories. China's birth rate has dropped to another record low with official |
| 0:30.3 | figures showing its population has continued to fall. |
| 0:34.0 | Medicines for hostages seized by Hamas have arrived in Egypt ahead of their transfer to Gaza. |
| 0:40.0 | Russian police clashed with protesters angered by the jailing of an ethnic rights activist. |
| 0:47.0 | Also in this podcast... |
| 0:50.0 | I could go around not attached to a machine. You could walk around so freely, I could go outside. |
| 0:58.0 | The drug making life a little easier for young blood cancer patients. |
| 1:04.0 | It wasn't that long ago that China barred couples from having more than one child |
| 1:12.0 | because of fears that its population was growing |
| 1:14.2 | too quickly. Now it's dealing with the opposite problem, a shrinking population. It's |
| 1:20.0 | fallen for the second year in a row. The decline of 2 million is more than |
| 1:24.9 | double that of the previous year and last year China lost the title of the |
| 1:29.2 | world's most populated nation to India. These Beijing residents shared their thoughts. |
| 1:37.0 | I think that population decline for us is actually an historical inevitability |
| 1:42.0 | because as our country's economy grew so did our |
| 1:45.9 | GDP so any country's decline in population follows a boost in GDP growth and as people's living standards improve, this will result in people's |
| 1:56.2 | unwillingness to have more children. Also, we are now facing a growing aging population. Nowadays childhood is completely occupied |
| 2:07.8 | by studies and academics and kids get burnt out very easily so a lot of children don't ever experience the sort of joy of childhood. |
... |
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