Child mortality in China 1850-2020

The child mortality rate in China, for children under the age of five, was 417 deaths per thousand births in 1850. This means that for all children born in 1850, almost 42 percent did not make it to their fifth birthday. Over the course of the next 170 years, this number has dropped drastically, and the rate has dropped to its lowest point ever in 2020 where it is just twelve deaths per thousand births. The sharpest decrease came between 1950 and 1955, as the Chinese Civil War ended, and the country began to recover from the Second World War. The decline then stopped between 1955 and 1965, due to famines caused by Chairman Mao Zedong's attempted Great Leap Forward, which was a failed attempt to industrialize China in the late twentieth century.