Experts said it was an expected crisis which needed to be fixed immediately.

Northeast China's Heilongjiang Province lost 460,000 permanent residents compared with the previous year, the most significant decline nationwide.

North China's Hebei and Shanxi and Northwest China's Gansu provinces each lost more than 100,000 people in the same period, reports Global Times.

China's population reached 1.41 billion as of the end of 2021, up by 480,000 from the previous year, according to the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS).

From a national perspective, the natural population growth rate in 2021 was 0.34 per thousand, which was declined by 1.11 per thousand than 2020, NBS data shows.

Behind the slowdown in population growth was the continued decline in births, as a result of a decline in the number of women of childbearing age as well as a decline in fertility levels, reports the newspaper.