China’s Coming Population Crash By James Reed
China is facing a further year of record low birth-rates dropping by 2.75 million – or 0.2% – to 1.409 billion in 2023, according to China's National Bureau of Statistics, last week. This decrease was greater than the 2022 fall of 850,000. Chinese women don't want to have babies, and all policies to get them to change their minds have failed. According to a report in The Wall Street Journal:
"Births in China dropped by more than 500,000 last year to just over 9 million in total, accelerating the decline in the country's population as women shrugged off the government's exhortations to reproduce.
The number of newborns has gone into free fall over the past several years. Official figures released Wednesday showed that China had fewer than half the number of births in 2023 than the country did in 2016, after China abolished the one-child policy. The latest number points to a fertility rate—the number of children a woman has over her lifetime—that is close to 1.0, a level considered by demographers as "ultralow."
The issue here is if this is a solid trend, China faces a demographic collapse in he long term, and severe economic problems in the short term. There will not be enough people to fund services such as pensions, which may have to be abandoned, causing social hostility. As well, China's push for world supremacy would be threatened. This all suggests that things like the invasion of Taiwan, and war against the United States will be sooner rather than later.
"China's population decline has accelerated, with a second year of record-low birthrates.
The total number of people in China dropped by 2.75 million – or 0.2% – to 1.409 billion in 2023, the National Bureau of Statistics said on Tuesday. The drop surpassed that recorded in 2022, of about 850,000 – the first time the recorded population had declined since the mass deaths of the Mao-era famines.
In 2023, total deaths rose 6.6% to 11.1 million, with the death rate reaching the highest level since the chaos of the cultural revolution in 1974. At the same time, new births fell 5.7% to 9.02 million. The birthrate was the lowest ever recorded at 6.39 births per 1,000 people, down from a rate of 6.77 births in 2022.
China has for years been battling trends that have led to an ageing population, which were driven by past policies of population control –including the one-child policy – and a growing reluctance among young adults to have children. In 2023 it was overtaken by India as the world's most populous nation, according to UN estimates.
Chinese officials fear the impact that this "demographic timebomb" could have on the economy, with the rising costs of aged care and financial support in danger of not being met by a shrinking population of working taxpayers. The state-run Chinese Academy of Sciences has predicted the pension system in its current form will run out of money by 2035. By then the number of people in China above 60 years old – the national retirement age – will have increased from about 280 million to 400 million.
A raft of policies have failed to encourage people to have more children, or have not been properly implemented by local governments, which are suffering budget shortfalls after years of running the resource-intensive zero-Covid system.
People frequently cite the high costs of living in China – particularly in larger cities – as well as poor support for women in jobs, as reasons for not having children. Traditional gender roles and familial expectations have also contributed.
"Though cities have released a slew of … policies to support child-bearing women to give birth, the public's expectation is still not being met," He Dan, director of China Population and Development Research Center, told state media outlet the Global Times.
On Tuesday, demographers proposed further reforms of fertility support policies, the Global Times reported. Some also drew hope from suggestions that there may be more babies born in 2024 in a post-pandemic baby boom, or because people wished to have children born in the Chinese zodiac year of the dragon, which starts in February.
Online, some Chinese Weibo users said they had anecdotally noticed many more pregnancies around them which they linked to the zodiac year.
Others were more sceptical, saying a single year baby boom would make life difficult for those children who would later sit for China's highly competitive college entrance exam.
Several discussions suggested new policies or auspicious years would do little to change their minds. "It's because I love myself more, and I know that if I was born in a family that is not capable of raising and educating a child, I would suffer more, and I would not be able to experience the joy of life, so let's cut off the suffering from my generation," said one commentator."
"With a growing demographic collapse, the biggest threat to China is…ChinaChina is a serious threat to America's dominance in the world, and when America's dominance collapses, so does America's lovely standard of living. Nothing happening within the U.S., especially on Biden's watch, will change that. However, China is at very profound risk from its internal problems. The latest one to catch the headlines is China's continuing and, indeed, accelerating demographic collapse.
China famously instituted its one-child policy in 1979 when it was afraid that its population growth was out of control. Not only did the policy have the effect of lowering the birth rate, but it also decimated the number of female babies being born.
Normally, the ratio of male-to-female births is roughly 101 males to 100 females. However, across China, especially in rural districts, families wanted boys, so female babies were aborted in utero or became victims of infanticide. That skewed the ratio to a peak of 117 males to 100 females. The problem, of course, is that females can't produce as many babies as males can. One woman and 100 men will have a much lower birth rate than 1 man and 100 women.
By the 1980s, recognizing the disastrous problem of the missing women and realizing that its population was about to hit a decline from which it could not recover, the Chinese government began to back off from the one-child policy. In the 1980s, it said that, if you were a rural family and your first child was a girl, you could try for a second child in order to have a boy. By 2015, the government set a new two-child limit. In Spring 2021, it went for a three-child limit only to abandon that months later, removing all limits entirely. Now, it offers financial incentives to have children.
But even with changed laws and financial incentives, China is running into a problem: Chinese women. They don't want babies. According to a report in The Wall Street Journal:
Births in China dropped by more than 500,000 last year to just over 9 million in total, accelerating the decline in the country's population as women shrugged off the government's exhortations to reproduce.
The number of newborns has gone into free fall over the past several years. Official figures released Wednesday showed that China had fewer than half the number of births in 2023 than the country did in 2016, after China abolished the one-child policy. The latest number points to a fertility rate—the number of children a woman has over her lifetime—that is close to 1.0, a level considered by demographers as "ultralow."
Currently, India, not China, is the world's most populous nation, something that is sure to make old games of Trivial Pursuit instantly obsolete. Nor will that change soon.
For a country to maintain its population, it must have a replacement rate of 2.1 babies per woman. Japan, considered a dying nation because of its low replacement rate, still comes in at 1.66 babies per woman, while Italy, another dying nation, has an even lower replacement rate of 1.25 babies per woman. America, incidentally, is also failing the replacement rate algorithm, with only 1.78 births per woman. Israel is one of the few developed nations with a high replacement rate, boasting a rate of 3.11 children per woman.
So, while the developed world's birthrate is generally trending downward, something is very wrong in China. The Wall Street Journal offers some theories: women want careers, not children; economic uncertainty; and COVID policies. Those are guesses. The sure thing is that the Chinese population is aging rapidly, without youthful replacements. There's also the intangible of hope. The declining birth rate means that people don't see a good future for their children.
China has other problems as well. Its much-vaunted Belt and Road Initiative is flagging somewhat (although it's still a powerful force), and its economy is struggling. A serious problem for China is that its manufacturing sector, which has driven its growth for decades, is shrinking.
Why? Several reasons: Surrounding Asian nations are growing their manufacturing sectors; China's COVID responsibility and response took the bloom off the rose; and, I'd like to think, people in America are (a) sick of shoddy Chinese-made goods and (b) worried about not having any domestic manufacturing.
All in all, China is not doing well despite Xi's military parades and projection of strength around the world. Don't kid yourself, though, that this makes China less of a threat to America and the East Asian region, whether economically or militarily. Instead, it probably makes it more of a threat, at least militarily. The likelihood that China will quietly shrink away is small; the likelihood that it will act hard and fast in 2024 while the weakling Biden is still in the White House is very big."
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