The graph shows the life expectancy of women in China from 1960 to 2022 with forecasts until 2050. In 2022, the average life expectancy of women at birth in China was about 81.3 years.

The graph shows the life expectancy of men in China from 1960 to 2022 with forecasts until 2050. In 2022, the average life expectancy of men at birth in China was around 76 years.

Life expectancy at birth, female (years) in China was reported at 80.93 years in 2023, according to the World Bank collection of development indicators, compiled from officially recognized sources. China - Life expectancy at birth, female (years) - actual values, historical data, forecasts and projections were sourced from the World Bank on May of 2025.

Life expectancy in China was just 32 in the year 1850, and over the course of the next 170 years, it is expected to more than double to 76.6 years in 2020. Between 1850 and 1950, finding reliable data proved difficult for anthropologists, however some events, such as the Taiping Rebellion and Dungan Revolt in the nineteenth century did reduce life expectancy by a few years, and also the Chinese Civil War and Second World War in the first half of the twentieth century. In the second half of the 1900s, Chinese life expectancy increased greatly, as the country became more industrialized and the standard of living increased.

School life expectancy, primary, gender parity index (GPI) in China was reported at 1.0117 GPI in 2019, according to the World Bank collection of development indicators, compiled from officially recognized sources. China - School life expectancy, primary, gender parity index - actual values, historical data, forecasts and projections were sourced from the World Bank on June of 2025.

By 2050, women aged 65 in China would have a further life expectancy of 21 years. Comparatively, men of the same age in China would have a further life expectancy of 18.6 years in 2050. Further life expectancy for women was estimated to be longer than for men by 2050 in all selected Asian countries.

Over the last two observations, the life expectancy has significantly increased in all gender groups Comparing the two different gender groups for the year 2023, the 'life expectancy of women at birth' leads the ranking with 88.09 years. Contrastingly, 'life expectancy of men at birth' is ranked last, with 82.54 years. Their difference, compared to life expectancy of women at birth, lies at 5.55 years. Life expectancy at birth refers to the number of years the average newborn is expected to live, providing that mortality patterns at the time of birth do not change thereafter.Find further similar statistics for other countries or regions like Iraq and Azerbaijan.

In 2023, the average life expectancy of the world was 70 years for men and 75 years for women. The lowest life expectancies were found in Africa, while Oceania and Europe had the highest.

What is life expectancy?

Life expectancy is defined as a statistical measure of how long a person may live, based on demographic factors such as gender, current age, and most importantly the year of their birth. The most commonly used measure of life expectancy is life expectancy at birth or at age zero. The calculation is based on the assumption that mortality rates at each age were to remain constant in the future.

Life expectancy has changed drastically over time, especially during the past 200 years. In the early 20th century, the average life expectancy at birth in the developed world stood at 31 years. It has grown to an average of 70 and 75 years for males and females respectively, and is expected to keep on growing with advances in medical treatment and living standard continuing.

Highest and lowest life expectancy worldwide

Life expectancy still varies greatly between different regions and countries of the world. The biggest impact on life expectancy is the quality of public health, medical care, and diet. As of 2021, the countries with the highest life expectancy were Japan, Liechtenstein, Switzerland, and South Korea, all at 84 years. Most of the countries with the lowest life expectancy are mostly African countries. The ranking was led by the Chad, Nigeria, and Lesotho with 53 years.

Explore gender statistics data focusing on academic staff, employment, fertility rates, GDP, poverty, and more in the GCC region. Access comprehensive information on key indicators for Bahrain, China, India, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia.

academic staff, Access to anti-retroviral drugs, Adjusted net enrollment rate, Administration and Law programmes, Age at first marriage, Age dependency ratio, Cause of death, Children out of school, Completeness of birth registration, consumer prices, Cost of business start-up procedures, Employers, Employment in agriculture, Employment in industry, Employment in services, employment or training, Engineering and Mathematics programmes, Female headed households, Female migrants, Fertility planning status: mistimed pregnancy, Fertility planning status: planned pregnancy, Fertility rate, Firms with female participation in ownership, Fisheries and Veterinary programmes, Forestry, GDP, GDP growth, GDP per capita, gender parity index, Gini index, GNI, GNI per capita, Government expenditure on education, Government expenditure per student, Gross graduation ratio, Households with water on the premises, Inflation, Informal employment, Labor force, Labor force with advanced education, Labor force with basic education, Labor force with intermediate education, Learning poverty, Length of paid maternity leave, Life expectancy at birth, Mandatory retirement age, Manufacturing and Construction programmes, Mathematics and Statistics programmes, Number of under-five deaths, Part time employment, Population, Poverty headcount ratio at national poverty lines, PPP, Primary completion rate, Retirement age with full benefits, Retirement age with partial benefits, Rural population, Sex ratio at birth, Unemployment, Unemployment with advanced education, Urban population

Bahrain, China, India, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia

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In 2024, the sex ratio of the total population in China ranged at approximately 104.3 males to 100 females. Like most other sexual species, the sex ratio in humans tends to be one to one. But due to factors like sex selective abortions and different life expectancy between men and women, the sex ratio varies in different age groups. Gender imbalance in China China belongs to the countries with a very imbalanced sex ratio at birth. In 2023, the sex ratio in the population aging from 0 to 4 years old ranged at around 109 males to 100 females. The high gender inequality can be attributed to the traditional preference for male children in the Chinese society. Although gender identification before birth is not legally allowed in China, selective abortions due to gender preference still exist in many regions of China. The importance of gender equality Gender imbalance can lead to many social problems, like the difficulty of finding a partner. Additionally, a country might also get economic benefits from its gender equality. According to the Global Gender Gap Report which was conducted by the World Economic Forum in 2017, there could be a 2.5 trillion U.S. dollar increase in China’s GDP if the gender gap could be closed. As China’s one-child-policy was officially ended in 2015, the problem of selective abortion due to gender preference is also expected to be alleviated.

Monaco had the highest life expectancy among both men and women worldwide as of 2024. That year, life expectancy for men and women was 84 and 89 years, respectively. The East Asian countries and regions Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea, and Macao followed. Many of the countries on the list are struggling with aging populations and a declining workforce as more people enter retirement age compared to people entering employment.

According to a survey on young people's sex life in China in 2021, nearly 45 percent of female respondents found 15 to 30 minutes to be the optimal duration for sexual intercourse. In comparison, around 40 percent of male respondents said to find sexual intercourse with a duration from 30 minutes to one hour ideal.

This is a hybrid gridded dataset of demographic data for China from 1979 to 2100, given as 21 five-year age groups of population divided by gender every year at a 0.5-degree grid resolution.

The historical period (1979-2020) part of this dataset combines the NASA SEDAC Gridded Population of the World version 4 (GPWv4, UN WPP-Adjusted Population Count) with gridded population from the Inter-Sectoral Impact Model Intercomparison Project (ISIMIP, Histsoc gridded population data).

The projection (2010-2100) part of this dataset is resampled directly from Chen et al.’s data published in Scientific Data.

This dataset includes 31 provincial administrative districts of China, including 22 provinces, 5 autonomous regions, and 4 municipalities directly under the control of the central government (Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macao were excluded due to missing data).

Method - demographic fractions by age and gender in 1979-2020

Age- and gender-specific demographic data by grid cell for each province in China are derived by combining historical demographic data in 1979-2020 with the national population census data provided by the National Statistics Bureau of China.

To combine the national population census data with the historical demographics, we constructed the provincial fractions of demographic in each age groups and each gender according to the fourth, fifth and sixth national population census, which cover the year of 1979-1990, 1991-2000 and 2001-2020, respectively. The provincial fractions can be computed as:

\(\begin{align*} \begin{split} f_{year,province,age,gender}= \left \{ \begin{array}{lr} POP_{1990,province,age,gender}^{4^{th}census}/POP_{1990,province}^{4^{th}census} & 1979\le\mathrm{year}\le1990\\ POP_{2000,province,age,gender}^{5^{th}census}/POP_{2000,province}^{5^{th}census} & 1991\le\mathrm{year}\le2000\\ POP_{2010,province,age,gender}^{6^{th}census}/POP_{2010,province}^{6^{th}census}, & 2001\le\mathrm{year}\le2020 \end{array} \right. \end{split} \end{align*}\)

Where:

- \( f_{\mathrm{year,province,age,gender}}\)is the fraction of population for a given age, a given gender in each province from the national census from 1979-2020.

- \(\mathrm{PO}\mathrm{P}_{\mathrm{year,province,age,gender}}^{X^{\mathrm{th}}\mathrm{census} }\) is the total population for a given age, a given gender in each province from the X^th national census.

- \(\mathrm{PO}\mathrm{P}_{\mathrm{year,province}}^{X^{\mathrm{th}}\mathrm{census} }\) is the total population for all ages and both genders in each province from the X^th national census.

Method - demographic totals by age and gender in 1979-2020

The yearly grid population for 1979-1999 are from ISIMIP Histsoc gridded population data, and for 2000-2020 are from the GPWv4 demographic data adjusted by the UN WPP (UN WPP-Adjusted Population Count, v4.11, https://beta.sedac.ciesin.columbia.edu/data/set/gpw-v4-population-count-adjusted-to-2015-unwpp-country-totals-rev11), which combines the spatial distribution of demographics from GPWv4 with the temporal trends from the UN WPP to improve accuracy. These two gridded time series are simply joined at the cut-over date to give a single dataset - historical demographic data covering 1979-2020.

Next, historical demographic data are mapped onto the grid scale to obtain provincial data by using gridded provincial code lookup data and name lookup table. The age- and gender-specific fraction were multiplied by the historical demographic data at the provincial level to obtain the total population by age and gender for per grid cell for china in 1979-2020.

Method - demographic totals and fractions by age and gender in 2010-2100

The grid population count data in 2010-2100 under different shared socioeconomic pathway (SSP) scenarios are drawn from Chen et al. published in Scientific Data with a resolution of 1km (~ 0.008333 degree). We resampled the data to 0.5 degree by aggregating the population count together to obtain the future population data per cell.

This previously published dataset also provided age- and gender-specific population of each provinces, so we calculated the fraction of each age and gender group at provincial level. Then, we multiply the fractions with grid population count to get the total population per age group per cell for each gender.

Note that the projected population data from Chen’s dataset covers 2010-2020, while the historical population in our dataset also covers 2010-2020. The two datasets of that same period may vary because the original population data come from different sources and are calculated based on different methods.

Disclaimer

This dataset is a hybrid of different datasets with independent methodologies. Spatial or temporal consistency across dataset boundaries cannot be guaranteed.

Over the last two observations, the life expectancy has significantly increased in all gender groups Comparing the two different gender groups for the year 2023, the 'life expectancy of women at birth' leads the ranking with 84.5 years. Contrastingly, 'life expectancy of men at birth' is ranked last, with 81.3 years. Their difference, compared to life expectancy of women at birth, lies at 3.2 years. Life expectancy at birth refers to the number of years that the average newborn can expect to live, providing that mortality patterns at the time of their birth do not change thereafter.Find further similar statistics for other countries or regions like Hong Kong SAR China and The Bahamas.

As of 2023, the bulk of the Chinese population was aged between 25 and 59 years, amounting to around half of the population. A breakdown of the population by broad age groups reveals that around 61.3 percent of the total population was in working age between 16 and 59 years in 2023. Age cohorts below 25 years were considerably smaller, although there was a slight growth trend in recent years. Population development in China Population development in China over the past decades has been strongly influenced by political and economic factors. After a time of high fertility rates during the Maoist regime, China introduced birth-control measures in the 1970s, including the so-called one-child policy. The fertility rate dropped accordingly from around six children per woman in the 1960s to below two at the end of the 20th century. At the same time, life expectancy increased consistently. In the face of a rapidly aging society, the government gradually lifted the one-child policy after 2012, finally arriving at a three-child policy in 2021. However, like in most other developed countries nowadays, people in China are reluctant to have more than one or two children due to high costs of living and education, as well as changed social norms and private values. China’s top-heavy age pyramid The above-mentioned developments are clearly reflected in the Chinese age pyramid. The age cohorts between 30 and 39 years are the last two larger age cohorts. The cohorts between 15 and 24, which now enter childbearing age, are decisively smaller, which will have a negative effect on the number of births in the coming decade. When looking at a gender distribution of the population pyramid, a considerable gender gap among the younger age cohorts becomes visible, leaving even less room for growth in birth figures.

Over the last two observations, the life expectancy has significantly increased in all gender groups As part of the positive trend, the life expectancy reaches the maximum value for the different genders at the end of the comparison period. Particularly noteworthy is the life expectancy of women at birth, which has the highest value of 84.9 years. Life expectancy at birth refers to the number of years that the average newborn can expect to live, providing that mortality patterns at the time of their birth do not change thereafter.Find further similar statistics for other countries or regions like Hong Kong SAR China and The Bahamas.

A global phenomenon, known as the demographic transition, has seen life expectancy from birth increase rapidly over the past two centuries. In pre-industrial societies, the average life expectancy was around 24 years, and it is believed that this was the case throughout most of history, and in all regions. The demographic transition then began in the industrial societies of Europe, North America, and the West Pacific around the turn of the 19th century, and life expectancy rose accordingly. Latin America was the next region to follow, before Africa and most Asian populations saw their life expectancy rise throughout the 20th century.

Life expectancy in India was 25.4 in the year 1800, and over the course of the next 220 years, it has increased to almost 70. Between 1800 and 1920, life expectancy in India remained in the mid to low twenties, with the largest declines coming in the 1870s and 1910s; this was because of the Great Famine of 1876-1878, and the Spanish Flu Pandemic of 1918-1919, both of which were responsible for the deaths of up to six and seventeen million Indians respectively; as well as the presence of other endemic diseases in the region, such as smallpox. From 1920 onwards, India's life expectancy has consistently increased, but it is still below the global average.

This statistic depicts the age distribution of India from 2013 to 2023. In 2023, about 25.06 percent of the Indian population fell into the 0-14 year category, 68.02 percent into the 15-64 age group and 6.92 percent were over 65 years of age. Age distribution in India India is one of the largest countries in the world and its population is constantly increasing. India’s society is categorized into a hierarchically organized caste system, encompassing certain rights and values for each caste. Indians are born into a caste, and those belonging to a lower echelon often face discrimination and hardship. The median age (which means that one half of the population is younger and the other one is older) of India’s population has been increasing constantly after a slump in the 1970s, and is expected to increase further over the next few years. However, in international comparison, it is fairly low; in other countries the average inhabitant is about 20 years older. But India seems to be on the rise, not only is it a member of the BRIC states – an association of emerging economies, the other members being Brazil, Russia and China –, life expectancy of Indians has also increased significantly over the past decade, which is an indicator of access to better health care and nutrition. Gender equality is still non-existant in India, even though most Indians believe that the quality of life is about equal for men and women in their country. India is patriarchal and women still often face forced marriages, domestic violence, dowry killings or rape. As of late, India has come to be considered one of the least safe places for women worldwide. Additionally, infanticide and selective abortion of female fetuses attribute to the inequality of women in India. It is believed that this has led to the fact that the vast majority of Indian children aged 0 to 6 years are male.