China faces a health care crisis in caring for its rapidly ageing population, with 30 million dementia cases predicted by 2050, according to Alzheimer’s Disease International.

An estimated nine million people in China have dementia, but that number may be artificially low as many in rural areas are never diagnosed, the group told the South China Morning Post.

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Eight million more caregivers would be needed in the country by 2050 to provide care for age-related illnesses, said David Gray, a British expert in health care issues.

The population of workers aged between 16 and 60 shrank to 915 million in 2014, a decrease of 3.7 million from the previous year, according to the National Bureau of Statistics.

People over 60, meanwhile, accounted for 15.5 per cent of the overall population in 2014, according to the bureau.

The trend of a large ageing population will persist until at least 2050 given longer life expectancies, Yuan Xin, a professor with the Institute of Population and Development at Nankai University told the Global Times newspaper.

High birth rates in China following the end of World War II and the civil war were followed by the introduction of the one-child policy in 1979, to help control the country’s rapidly growing population.

In addition to an imbalance between the young and ageing segments of the population, China continues to suffer a gender imbalance, with about 700 million men to 667 million women, according to the National Bureau of Statistics.