- Hubert Walas
800,000,000 less Chinese by 2100.
According to a study by the Chinese think tank Centre of Policy Studies at the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, China's population had started to decline in 2022. Slowly at first, but over time, it will turn into an uncontrollable drop. According to the researchers, at the current trend, China's population in the year 2100 will stand at 587 million. This is a decline of more than 800 million from the current 1 billion 400 million. China's demographic problems threaten domestic stability, as well as China's plan to challenge US world domination.
Demographic catastrophe
Monitoring population levels, especially of the world's largest country, is a daunting task. It is an even more breakneck task to forecast how it will evolve many decades ahead. Nevertheless, the consensus among demographers is that China's population is reaching its peak at this point if it hasn't already. Beijing is now at the top of the roller coaster, moments before the rapid descent downwards.
Forecasts vary, but all agree on one thing: the rapidity of China's population decline. The UN is the most optimistic about Beijing and predicts that by 2100 China's population will have fallen by around 45% to 780 million and this will include some 600 million citizens. Yi Fuxian, a long-time researcher of Chinese demography at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, sees a darker future, one where China in 2100 will be a country of 450 million - a staggering decline of almost one billion people.
In fact, Yi Fuxian argues that China's population has already been declining for several years, contrary to official statistics. The researcher backs up his opinion with hard data based on the distribution of mandatory vaccines. According to it, China's population started to shrink not in 2022, but in 2018. Moreover, using unconventional data sources, Yi Fuxian claims that China's population is not the official 1 billion 410 million, but 130 million fewer people, or 1 billion 280 million. Therefore, according to Yi's data it is India that has been the most populous country in the world for several years now.
Yi’s figures are followed by a number of others that show just how dire Chinese population numbers are. The number of marriages has shrunk by 40% in 10 years, from 12.5 million marriages in 2012 to a mere 7.5 million in 2021, the lowest measured since the 1980s. A simulation by Australia's Victoria University shows that if Beijing makes no changes to the compulsory retirement age in 2100, pensions will cost the budget 20% of GDP. Today it is 4%. Note that women in China retire at 50 or 55, depending on where they work, and men at 60.
Systematized Slaughter
The reasons for China's dramatic demographic outlook are many. At the forefront, however, is the notorious, and abolished in 2016, one-child policy. The directive, in force in China for 40 years, has had an irreversible effect on Chinese society.
The Communist Party and Mao Zedong, who came to power in 1949, treated their own population as a formless mass that they believed could be molded at will. First, Mao urged large families, forbade abortion and contraception, and induced women to produce offspring so that it would fuel economic growth with a massive supply of human power. This led to unprecedented population growth, from the 1950s to the 1970s. Excluding the period of the Great Chinese Famine - which, let’s recall, had 42 million victims - the average Chinese woman gave birth to up to six children during this period. As a result, China's population doubled. In 1979, it was almost one billion people, compared to 540 million in 1949. It was then that the Communist authorities decided to turn the tide. In 1980, in order to stop the rapid population growth, the communist authorities introduced the one-child policy. The strategy by communist standards proved successful. Population growth slowed down. From then on, the supply of children became subject to targets and quotas set by the authorities, as if it were a resource like coal or a product such as steel.
Nevertheless, it is hard to quantify the scale of the suffering that the one-child policy has brought on those who have experienced it.
Chinese people were only allowed to have one child except in rural areas, where two children were allowed if the first child was a girl. Still, this fact meant that people often made a choice about the sex of the offspring they were expecting. This choice could only be made in one way. As a result, there are nearly 18 million more men than women in the Chinese population between the ages of 20 and 40. Also, two entire generations grew up without siblings, uncles, aunts, or cousins.
In 2007, in Bobai in Guangxi province, the authorities performed forced abortions and sterilizations on 17,000 women in response to protests against the one-child policy. In contrast, the documentary “The Hundred Childless Days,” produced in 2012, depicted the anti-childbirth campaign of 1991 in the city of Liaocheng in Shandong province. The local authorities, to improve their low birth rate statistics, sent pregnant women to abortion clinics, even if it was their first child allowed under the one-child policy. Later, Beijing officially banned extreme forms of anti-childbirth practices, but a trace of the trauma of this policy remains. In 1991 alone, the year of the 100-day campaign in Shandong, 14 million abortions were carried out in China. Their number remained at a similar level for many years. By comparison, 9 million abortions were performed in 2020. In total, according to Chinese official statistics, during the 40 years of the one-child policy, there were 336 million abortions and 196 million sterilizations in China. As British Chinese author Ma Jian points out, crimes of this nature committed by the regime could only be equated with a period of war, but the Chinese authorities committed this crime against humanity systematically on a massive scale for nearly four decades. The one-child policy can be fully qualified as one of the greatest crimes against humanity in all of history.
Imperfect Engineering
In 2016, just as in 1980, the lever was moved to the other side, but now the Chinese Communist Party had the goal of population growth, because severe demographic problems were staring Chinese policymakers in the eye. The solution seemed simple: abolish the one-child policy and everything would return to normal. However, Beijing's social engineering would eventually backfire.
The first decision was to allow people to have two children, but contrary to expectations, in which Chinese people were suddenly expected to reproduce en masse again, this had no effect. So Beijing and the local authorities started to introduce more facilities, extra benefits for pregnant women, longer maternity leave and even organizing dates for singles. In vitro clinics are springing up all over, yet… all to no avail.
In 2021, Beijing started allowing three children. However, China's fertility rate continues to plummet and now stands at 1.3, which is even lower than in Japan where it stands at 1.34.
In the beginning, the one-child policy was forced, even brutally. Thus today, at least two generations of Chinese have grown up with the one-child policy and this family model is now natural for Chinese people. After 40 years, the policy has become China's lifestyle, ideology, and family structure. It’s automatic and most people don’t question it. In an era of incredible competition among Chinese youth, to be able to provide the best possible education, many parents are coming to the conclusion that they simply cannot afford to have more children.
Young Chinese often do not feel financially prepared to have children or a larger family. Unemployment among the under-24s has reached 20%. This is compounded by draconian pandemic restrictions and the housing crisis, resulting in mass layoffs and social instability.
Even the Communist authorities acknowledge that the problem exists: "Low births and aging will become the norm," wrote the National Health Commission. Meanwhile, Xi Jinping called the nation's falling fertility rate a potential threat to national security. The Chinese have officially acknowledged that the one-child policy has been a terrible mistake…
…NO. Of course not.
Beijing does not recognize the one-child policy as the main reason for current problems, but rather the rising price of real estate and private schooling. And the CCP has a technocratic answer to this problem: regulation to make the problems disappear.
On a more serious note, China's entire rise to power has been built on the hard work of millions of Chinese workers, most of whom were born between 1950 and 1980. Thanks to this, the Middle Kingdom has taken a true leap forward and, in the process, lifted 800 million Chinese out of extreme poverty. This is a magnificent achievement. Whereas the country has gone from being a backward pariah to a powerhouse that challenges the United States on every level: innovation, military, technology, and even in space.
Now the foundations on which this success was built are shaking.
Problems in the real estate market and a restrictive lockdown are squeezing the Chinese economy. Beijing is chipping away at its original plan for this year of 5.5% GDP growth with experts pointing to a rate closer to 3%. For a country that has for decades recorded growth close to 10% or higher, such an outcome is certainly not satisfactory. This is not necessarily an exception, but the beginning of new standards. China's rapidly aging population and, at the same time, low fertility rate present a massive challenge to the economy which will have fewer hands to work each year and will soon have to pay for a more bloated pension system with each passing year. What’s more, the Chinese authorities are further burying their heads in the sand by ignoring necessary reforms to the retirement age, which in China, depending on gender and occupation, can be as early as 50. As a result, China's growth could stabilize at 2-3% of GDP in the coming years already.
Aside from the rationalization of the one-child policy, many demographers argue that Beijing is up to 20 years late in abolishing it. The first analysis of China's grim demographic prospects was presented before 2000.
Unsettled Dragon
The interference in the cycle of life and death by the Communist authorities was intended to serve the rise of China in the world, but may eventually crush it. This means that we may now be entering a dangerous period for global stability.
Howard W. French, author of the 2017 book, “Everything Under the Heavens: How the Past Helps Shape China's Push for Global Power,” believes that Chinese leaders know full well that China's period of maximum opportunities is now ending, after decades of rapid economic growth. It won't be long before bold expenditures such as naval expansion, projects such as the Belt and Road, and building China's dominant position will be replaced by much more mundane, but decidedly financially no less significant ones such as paying ever-increasing amounts for pensions, health insurance, or simply internal security. The latter may be especially important as the years of unbridled growth come to an end, which will create tensions in China's social contract.
It is also for this reason that Xi Jinping is trying to accumulate as much power as possible and this is making the present time very dangerous. The window of opportunity for China to challenge the global dominance of the United States may be closing as fast as it has opened.
The Americans have a number of advantages that make decision-makers in Washington much more confident about the future than those in Beijing. First and foremost, they are starting from a much higher level. The US economy is still nominally 30% larger than the Chinese and the average American, even taking purchasing power parity into account, is 4 times wealthier than the average Chinese. The American fertility rate, which is close to 1.8, may not be outstanding, but it is one of the highest in the developed world and significantly exceeds the Chinese. Moreover, Americans always have the option of immigration, which is natural to their state model and on which the entire history of the United States is based. For the Chinese model of society, such an option does not currently seem to exist. All of this makes the demographic outlook for the USA far better than for China.
This and Washington's many other advantages, such as energy independence, individual freedom, the (still) unchallenged status of the dollar, and the world’s shaken confidence vis-à-vis China, mean that perhaps all Washington needs to do with China is to… wait it out.
Has China gotten old before it got rich? There are many indications that this is the case, especially on the Chinese coast, which is driving national growth. Many developed countries have already found that economic prosperity is the most effective contraceptive for population growth. But, this modeled population decline is usually coupled with an increase in innovation and productivity.
As a counterpoint to Beijing's bleak outlook, it’s this aspect that Chinese commentators point out, arguing that innovation and productivity growth can mitigate demographic collapse. In other words, a smaller population will not necessarily lead to a collapse of the internal system as many jobs will be automated or handed over to machines. This is an accurate argument that can reassure many developed societies that are well below the replacement rate of 2.1. But China, by almost every definition, is not a developed country. Japan and South Korea experienced rapid economic growth along this pattern and achieved high-income status before their fertility rates plummeted. China, however, is not even close to the development ceiling of Japan or Korea at a time when its demographics are beginning to collapse. Unfortunately for China, each of these economic powers, despite trying, has yet to apply an effective solution to reverse the population decline. There is no precedent for reversing the demographic challenge.
Moreover, not every country is competing for global primacy. Therefore, while innovation and productivity growth is a potential recipe for domestic problems, it does not solve China's relative decline in power vis-à-vis the United States. It is hard to suppose that the Americans, hitherto dominant in the innovation sector, and furthermore with more capital available for its development, would suddenly start to diverge significantly from the Chinese in this niche.
Are we witnessing the beginning of the end of China's revival and the start of a period of stagnation that will set in motion a process of mass internal unrest? Obviously, a 50 or 100-year perspective is too distant to lay out confidently, but China's problems are big and 2022 shows that they begin here and now.
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