Mubasher: Birth rate in China dropped last year to the lowest level since the founding of the People’s Republic of China 70 years ago.

The birth rate was at 10.94 per thousand in 2018, the lowest since 1949, compared with 12.43 per thousand in 2017, the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) said on Monday.

The tally of babies born fell by two million to 15.23 million last year, as looser two-child policy failed to reverse the slowing birth rate.

The rate of natural increase in population, excluding the number of deaths, also declined to the lowest since the famine in the early 1960s which came as a result of China’s aggressive push to develop industrial power during Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward.

Worried about a decline in birth rate and rapidly swelling aging population, Chinese government permitted parents to have as many as two children in 2016, relaxing a one-child policy in place since 1979.