China’s population is growing at its slowest pace in decades,
with a plunge in births and a graying workforce presenting the Communist Party
with one of its gravest social and economic challenges.
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Figures from a census released Tuesday show that
China faces a
demographic crisis that could stunt growth in the country, the world’s
second-largest economy. China has long relied on an expanding and ambitious
workforce to run its factories and achieve
Beijing’s dreams of building a
global superpower and industrial giant. An aging, slow-growing population — one
that could even begin to shrink in the coming years — threatens that dynamic.
China’s aging-related challenges are similar to those of
developed countries like the United States. But its households live on much
lower incomes on average than in the
United States and elsewhere.
In other words, China is growing old without first having grown
rich.
“Aging has become a basic national condition of China for a
period of time to come,” Ning Jizhe, the head of China’s National Bureau of
Statistics, said at a news conference announcing the results of a once-a-decade
census.
While most developed countries in the West and Asia are also
getting older, China’s demographic problems are largely self-inflicted. China
imposed a one-child policy in 1980 to tamp down population growth. Local
officials enforced that policy with sometimes draconian measures. It may have
prevented 400 million births, according to the government, but it also shrank
the number of women of childbearing age.
China’s population has now reached 1.41 billion people,
according to the census, which was taken last year. Since the previous census,
in 2010, China’s population grew by 72 million people.
That increase is larger than the population of Britain or
France, but in percentage terms it is the smallest increase recorded since the
Chinese government conducted its first census, in 1953.
A dearth of new births suggests that the trend will continue.
Only 12 million babies were born in China last year, according to Ning, the
fourth year in a row that births have fallen in the country. That makes it the
lowest official number of births since 1961, after a widespread famine caused
by Communist Party policies killed millions of people, and only 11.8 million
babies were born.
China’s population dynamics could compel Xi Jinping, the country’s
top leader, to reckon with the failings of the ruling Communist Party’s family
planning policy, which for decades was one of the country’s biggest sources of
public discontent. If the trend continues unabated, it risks complicating Xi’s “Chinese
dream,” a pledge of long-term economic prosperity and national rejuvenation on
which he has staked his legacy.
Beijing is now under greater pressure to abandon its family
planning policies, which are among the world’s most intrusive; overhaul an
economic model that has long relied on a huge population and a growing pool of
workers; and plug yawning gaps in health care and pensions.
“China is facing a unique demographic challenge that is the most
urgent and severe in the world,” said Liang Jianzhang, a research professor of
applied economics at Peking University and a demography expert. “This is a
long-term time bomb.”
The new population figure puts the average annual growth rate at
0.53% over the past decade, down from 0.57 percent from 2000 to 2010. This puts
China on course to be surpassed by India as the world’s most populous nation in
the coming years.
Demographers say there are no easy fixes. A growing cohort of
educated Chinese women are delaying marriages, which have declined since 2014.
China is not willing to rely on immigration to boost its population. The
divorce rate has risen consistently since 2003. Many millennials are put off by
the cost of raising children.
The data released Tuesday pointed to the impact of such
concerns.
China’s total fertility rate — an estimate of the number of
children born over a woman’s lifetime — now stands at only 1.3, according to
Ning, well below the replacement rate of 2.1.
Ning said births last year were lower in part because of the
uncertainty caused by the pandemic. He acknowledged that government policies
affected fertility but said that improved living standards and changing social
attitudes were playing an increasingly important role, as they have elsewhere.
“Low fertility has become a common problem faced by most
developed countries, and it will also become a practical problem facing our
country,” Ning said.
The population is also aging rapidly. People older than 65 now
account for 13.5 percent of the population, the census showed, up from 8.9
percent in 2010.
When it was younger, that population was one of China’s greatest
strengths.
As the population gets older, it will also impose tremendous
pressure on the country’s overwhelmed hospitals and underfunded pension system.
China also continues to grapple with a huge surplus of single men that has
driven problems such as bride trafficking, an unintended consequence of its
family planning rules.
These trends are proving difficult to reverse. Three decades
after the one-child policy was introduced, attitudes about family sizes have
shifted, with many Chinese now preferring to have only one child.
In the decades to come, Beijing will face the difficult task of
maintaining strong economic growth — and staying globally competitive — as the
labor pool shrinks.
“China’s economy might not in the foreseeable future overtake
that of the US as the largest economy,” said Julian Evans-Pritchard, a senior
China economist at Capital Economics, a research firm. “And the key reason for
that is demographic differences.”
China is also maturing far more quickly than most countries, a
rate that is rapidly outpacing the government’s meager investments in health
care and social services catering to an older population. A central challenge
for Beijing is how to help the country’s younger generation care for the
swelling ranks of retirees. People younger than 14 made up 18 percent of the
population, up only slightly from 17 percent 10 years ago.
The government wants to raise the retirement age, among the
world’s lowest at 60 for men and 50 for most women, to ease pressure on the
underfunded pension system. China’s main state pension fund, which relies on
tax revenues from its workforce, risks running out of money by 2036 if policies
remain unchanged, according to research commissioned by the party.
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