BEIJING - China's urban dwellers swelled to 665.6 million last year, more than twice the population of the United States, and the number of older people surged, according to figures from the country's first census in a decade.
China had 1.34 billion people as of Nov. 1 last year, the Beijing-based National Bureau of Statistics said in a statement Thursday in releasing results of a census that is carried out once every 10 years, as in the United States. People over 60 years old account for 13.3 percent of the population, 2.9 percentage points higher than in 2000 and a trend that is "gradually accelerating," according to the statement.
The figures show that China's population is aging faster than organizations including the United Nations projected. The government risks having to support those retirees at per-capita wealth levels that are only a fraction of aging developed countries and needs high economic growth rates to avoid what Goldman Sachs said is the danger of growing old "before getting rich."
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"The aging population is a big headache for the government in coming years," said Zhuang Jian, senior economist with the Asian Development Bank in Beijing. "The authorities need to refine their population and industrial policy now in order not to be caught off guard."
The trillions of dollars China's hundreds of millions of workers will need in retirement savings may be a boon for global lenders and asset managers.
China is close to having more residents in cities and towns than in villages for the first time in its history. The urban population makes up 49.7 percent of the total, 13.5 percentage points higher than a decade ago, the NBS said. The rural population stands at 674.2 million.
China's one-child policy, which has led millions of women to abort female fetuses to have a prized male child, has resulted in men making up 51.3 percent of the population, with 34 million more men than women. Most countries have more women than men, including the U.S., where 50.3 percent of the population was female in 2010, according to U.S. census data.
The census figures show that "we still face some contradictions and challenges in population, economic and social development," including an ageing population and an "unbalanced gender ratio," Ma Jiantang, head of the National Statistics Bureau, told reporters in Beijing Thursday.
China's one-child policy, primarily focused in cities, was aimed at helping boost living standards. Annual population growth was 0.57 percent between 2000 and 2010, half a percentage point lower than the 1.07 percent annual growth between 1990 and 2000. Ma said the policy has helped bring China's population growth down and helped boost growth.
"Our national basic policy of family planning has been well implemented and the overly rapid population growth momentum is effectively under control," Ma said.
