The population of China fell last year for the first time since the devastating famine in the era of Mao Zedong caused then by the disastrous industrial policy of the Great Leap Forward. And this is a clear sign that the Asian giant is facing an imminent demographic crisis compounded by decades of coercive policies limiting births.
China’s National Bureau of Statistics announced in January a decrease of 850,000 people and the birth rate hit its lowest level on record, at 6.77 per 1,000 people, down one point from 7.52 in 2021: Xi Jinping’s government’s efforts to reverse the declining birth rate began in 2016, when the rule of one child per family was ended, expanding instead to two children. But neither that revision, nor a 2021 adjustment to allow for three children, have stopped the downward trend.
So China faces a dwindling labor supply, and will struggle to support a rapidly aging population: there is consensus that India will take over as the world’s most populous nation this year, according to United Nations projections. “This decline is an extremely important historical turning point, not only for China but also for the world,” said Yi Fuxian, a University of Wisconsin academic who has long been critical of the Beijing’s failure to accept the extent of its demographic crisis.
“Chinese society that gets old quickly it will undermine Beijing’s view of itself as a rising power poised to overtake the United States. A loss of economic dynamism will throw the country’s current cheap and labor-dependent development model into crisis, while the lack of a robust social safety net and pension system threatens to turn the case into a humanitarian catastrophe.” Yi argues.
The danger for the Chinese leader Xi Jinping is that its quest for “national rejuvenation” ends in an economic stagnation similar to the one that has plagued Japan since the 1990s. The East Asian nation, once considered a rival in the making to the United States, is now the most old world, with a 29 percent of the population older than 65 years.
Brake
Beginning in the 1970s, fears by communist leaders that an expanding population would outgrow the food supply led to a campaign telling couples to marry later, delay childbearing and limit offspring. Since then, the birth rate dropped dramatically.
But the Chinese leadership remained terrified of too large a population. His solution was draconian one child policyimplemented in 1980. The policy resulted in mass forced abortions, sterilizations, and insertion of intrauterine devices.
Among the many unintended consequences of the policy has been a stark gender imbalance: pregnant women had sex-selective abortions, and that resulted in China having a ratio of 104.69 men for every 100 women as of 2022.
A society built around the one-child household has also reset Chinese culture, and today many young people point to the rising costs of a large family as the main reason for not having more children. This is especially true for those who live in big cities, many of whom hold radically different beliefs about marriage and parenting than their parents’ generation: they don’t want children.
Local governments have taken some support measures to ease financial burdens (Shenzhen gives $1,500 to those with a third child), and Shanghai added an extra 60 days of maternity leave.
But many believe it is not enough. Economist Ren Zeping called for immediate policies to encourage childbirth, such as childbirth subsidies, inclusion of fertility treatment in social security and better job guarantees for women: “Population is the most important and overlooked future problem that China faces,” he said.
Economy
Chinese growth halted it also puts a roof on the country’s young professionals, who face increasingly less attractive job prospects. This is evidenced by the fact that, over the last year, China’s gross domestic product grew by only 3 percent, marked by regular lockdowns of “zero covid” policies, which affected consumption and a fall in the real estate sector that is contracted.
The expansion was drastically less than the 5.5% targeted by the Xi Jinping government budget. And the unemployment among young people between the ages of 16 and 24 remained high, in 16.7 percent in the yearafter reaching almost 20 percent in July.
Amid government crackdown on tech industries and excessive wealth, working as a civil servant has suddenly become more attractive, because it is perceived as a stable career. And the weight of the State grows while the private sphere slows down, a drama that Argentina knows well.
Yun Zhou, a professor of sociology at the University of Michigan, explains: “Many of the Chinese population projections relied heavily on doomsday writings about the population explosion, and thought that limiting births to one child per married heterosexual couple would be helpful. But they did not foresee that the effect of economic growth. When a country gets richer and people’s lives change and become urbanized, people tend to have fewer children anyway.”
“Xi Jinping and the Chinese labor market have to deal with this dramatic change in the composition of the population, and he has to understand that with this change it will affect older people and empower women workers. One has to reset the imagination of what it means to be Chinese today,” Zhou adds. An enormous internal shock for China, but also a crisis on the horizon for the world that enjoyed surpluses fueled by Chinese growth.
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