For the primary time in over six a long time, China reported a inhabitants decline. The information has raised the chance that India, which was expected to surpass China because the world’s most populous nation later this 12 months, has already finished so.

The National Bureau of Statistics of China announced Tuesday that the variety of recorded deaths, 10.41 million, outweighed the variety of births, 9.56 million, ensuing within the inhabitants declining in 2022 by 850,000 to succeed in 1.41175 billion. The final time China reported a decline was when the Great Leap Forward—a failed financial plan led by Mao Zedong’s Chinese Communist Party—led to famine that led to thousands and thousands of deaths.

According to Reuters, U.N. specialists had predicted final 12 months that India’s inhabitants would attain 1.412 billion. But there may be uncertainty round how India carries out inhabitants information assortment strategies, which occur each decade, and the 2021 census was delayed by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Yi Fuxian, a senior scientist on the University of Wisconsin-Madison and outstanding critic of China’s birth policy, describes China’s inhabitants decline as “much bleaker than expected.”

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“China’s population began to decline 9-10 years earlier than Chinese officials and U.N. projections, meaning that China’s real demographic crisis is beyond imagination and that all of China’s past economic, social, defense, and foreign policies were based on faulty demographic data,” he writes in a press release to TIME.

Fuxian says that China’s declining inhabitants has been led to by surging residing and welfare prices that daunts additional development and fewer infants because of the “later, longer, fewer” marketing campaign and a decades-long one-child policy.

Read More: Here’s How China’s One-Child Policy Started in the First Place

China ended its one-child coverage in 2016 and eliminated all restrictions on household measurement in 2021 in a bid to advertise inhabitants development. The authorities has additionally rolled out incentives to encourage copy, comparable to tax deductions, longer maternity depart entitlement, and housing help, with President Xi Jinping suggesting in October that additional beneficial policies would quickly observe.

But these measures have to this point been unsuccessful. China’s delivery charge fell from 7.52 births per 1,000 folks in 2021 to six.77 births, and China has among the lowest in the world. Professor Steve Tsang, Director of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies’ (SOAS) China Institute tells TIME, “the few incentives the Chinese state puts in place are unlikely to be sufficient to change the attitude of people. The demographic shift in China looks structural and it will take a lot more than some government incentives to reverse.”

Like China, India additionally beforehand explored unsuccessful makes an attempt to curb its inhabitants development. But in contrast to China, India’s inhabitants is barely anticipated to develop additional, reaching 1.52 billion by 2036, in accordance with a July 2020 projection by the nation’s National Commission on Population.

Write to Armani Syed at armani.syed@time.com.