What if all the Chinese jumped at the same time? The answer to this old occurrence is that, in any case, something less serious than if those who jumped were Indians, more numerous today. While the cliché of overpopulation is changing its profile – Africa will soon take over – China's statistical institute has just revealed that the country will lose two million inhabitants by 2023, which confirms the change in trend registered a year earlier.
Exactly, the People's Republic lost 2.08 million inhabitants last year, with eleven million deaths against nine million births, roughly speaking. Immigration is almost token and is not taken into consideration.
The figure represents the second consecutive year of contraction, after the population fell by 850,000 in 2022, marking the first decline since the 1961 famine caused by the failure of the Great Leap Forward. The population, which reached its ceiling between 2020 and 2021, now stands at 1.409 million inhabitants.
Last summer, India surpassed the People's Republic of China in UN population estimates. There is no going back, not even with a hypothetical reinstatement of Taiwan, which has to deal with an even more serious birth crisis.
The phenomenon is extensible in South Korea and Japan, despite enormous budgets to encourage the birth rate, in societies that maintain considerable suspicion towards immigration. Chinese demographers attribute the reluctance of young people to have children to cultural changes and estimate that even an investment of 3% of GDP to encourage procreation would not substantively change the trend.
Chinese society faces an added difficulty, with female labor force participation double that of India and well above that of Japan or South Korea, but not offset by social policies. The high price of housing and, since the pandemic, the cooling of economic prospects have brought the fertility rate to new lows, around 1.1 children per woman.
It should be remembered that in 1980, Deng Xiaoping introduced the one-child policy, which was in force until 2016. Something that has made China today not only a country of one-child parents, but also of Grandparents of only one child. This last factor, added to the family values of Asian society, has allowed both spouses to work in most households, thanks to the practical support of grandparents. The healthcare network in China is not at the height of Western Europe, but the current debate is focused on extending it.
The Chinese government is aware of the aging of its society, which is not compensated by the waves of immigration that have rejuvenated Europe and North America. In China there are already more "dependent elderly people" than "dependent children" and those over 65 add up to more than 220 million Chinese.
Demographers agree that the end of the one-child policy – always one more for Tibetans, Uyghurs and other minorities – was overdue. Something confirmed by the almost desperate measure of authorizing three children per couple from 2021, when the effects of covid made the authorities exclaim. Not only because of mortality - not assessed in the present statistics -, but also because of the delay it caused in many paternity plans.
So much so that, when the agency did a macro survey of 31,000 Chinese couples, probing their willingness to have a third child, only 5% said it was part of their plans.
Immediate relief, according to the National Statistics Office itself, could come not from planning, but from superstition. February marks the start of the Year of the Dragon, according to the traditionally auspicious Chinese horoscope, as demonstrated by the population boom in 2012, when it was last celebrated. Another glimmer of hope is that in 2023, marriage links increased again, after the pandemic break. In China, as in the rest of the countries around it, babies born out of wedlock are relatively few.
The Asian giant recorded 9.02 million births last year, in contrast to 9.5 million in 2022. This is the seventh consecutive decline. Meanwhile, the death toll rose by 700,000. Likewise, it is estimated that by 2035 there will be more than 400 million people over the age of 60 in the Asian country, more than 30% of the Chinese population.
Either way, UN experts estimate that China's population could fall below 1.3 billion by 2050. Along the way, a smaller workforce and a larger share of retirees will lead to slower economic growth . A respite for the West, although this growth will continue to exceed that of advanced European societies. More China, with less Chinese.
