The number of working people in China has dropped by more than 41 million in the past three years, data from the country's statistics bureau showed. According to official data, 733.5 million Chinese people were working in 2022, down from 774.7 million in 2019. The fall was attributed to the coronavirus pandemic's toll on the economy and a decline in the working age population. Demographic change was the “driving factor” in 2022’s employment drop, said Lu Feng, a labour economist at Peking University. The number of people in China aged between 16 and 59 has been gradually declining since 2012. Over the last three years, the number in that group dropped 38 million to 857.6 million — a much more rapid fall than in previous years, according to a Bloomberg report.