It seems appropriate that China’s animal totem is the panda: an animal that projects a cuddly image that belies its vicious bite. At the same time, it consigns itself to eventual oblivion, largely as a consequence of its own stupid dietary choices and its own reluctance to breed.
The latter particularly is a looming millstone around the neck of China’s ambitions to superpowerdom. As Mark Steyn pointed out in 2006, China’s population will get old before it gets rich. More than a decade later, the China-besotted left-media are finally noticing. Don’t ever accuse them of being slow on the uptake.
Now that China has published its first national census in a decade, what’s its destiny to be? It’s a bit awkward, actually, for President Xi Jinping’s vaunted “China Dream”. Because he has promised “the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation” when the official statistics show it is on the way to becoming one of the fastest ageing countries on earth.
China and its Western fangirls like to brag that its communist dictatorship “gets things done” without all that pesky democracy. But the reality is that China’s looming demographic tsunami is the result of a chain of distastrous, top-down diktats from the Politburo.
We already knew that China was heading for a population collapse. That’s why Xi dumped the One Child Policy in 2015. The advent of the Two Child Policy did have the desired effect. The number of births surged. But only for one year.
The number of babies born in China then went into steep decline. Last year, there were only 12 million newborns. That’s the fewest recorded in any year since the shocking famine of the so-called Great Leap Forward of 1958-1962.
Of course, the Baby Boom demographic wave is looming to break over countries around the world. But China is going to get swamped worse than anyone else.
“Zero and even negative population growth is coming closer and closer,” noted Beijing’s statistics bureau.
And it revealed what Peking University Professor of Economics Liang Jianzhang calls “the shocking statistic” of China’s new fertility rate. To keep the population stable, a country needs to hit the replacement rate – the number of babies that the average woman gives birth to in her lifetime – of 2.1. But China’s fertility rate is now just 1.3 according to the census. That’s below even’s Japan’s rate of 1.4, meaning that China’s ageing will be even faster. The implications are stunning.
A sociology professor at the University of California, Irvine, Wang Feng, says that he expects China’s population to begin to fall within five years. And it will be “a decline that sees no end”, he tells The Wall Street Journal.
Sydney Morning Herald
By the end of the next century, China’s population will, without dramatic change, halve.
China’s problems are even worse, though, because of the very different causes of its population decline. In democratic nations, slowing population growth is a consequence of wealth and freedom: rich people with freedom to do so, generally choose to have fewer children. That’s not the case in China. Despite its surging economy, China is far from a wealthy nation, per capita – and that massive cohort of geriatrics are going to drain its economy even further.
Even worse for China’s current economic model is that its pool of cheap labour will hobble off to retirement, crippling its biggest advantage.
China will get old, very old, before it gets rich.
Western countries are able to stave off at least some of the economic impact of declining population via immigration. Australia’s population, for instance, is only growing because of immigration. Can China do the same?
Not without massive social dislocation. China is, as it has been for centuries, an incredibly insular society. Outside the major cities, the mere fact of not being Chinese can be seen, as one travel writer put it, “as something akin to witch-craft”. And that’s for pale-skinned Westerners. Chinese are notoriously averse to black Africans.
That’s even assuming that the Chinese Communist Party has the stomach for mass immigration. Given the CCP’s brutal intolerance of difference even in its internal population, the option of importing the massive excess population of sub-Saharan Africa is almost certainly off the table. Even its Asian neighbours, rapidly getting rich and democratised, and many with a historical enmity to the Middle Kingdom, are unlikely to up stakes and move to China.
Even more importantly, China is getting increasingly male, thanks to a combination of the One Child policy and the cultural pressure for sex-selective abortions. The already-notable gender imbalance in the population is only going to get worse.
So, as Steyn said so long ago, unless China plans on being the first gay superpower since Sparta, it’s in very, very big trouble.
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