China's population implosion

 Vox:

More than 60 years ago, something rare happened in China: More people died than were born.

That estimated one-year drop in population was due to the Great Famine, perhaps the worst human-made catastrophe in history, resulting in the deaths of as many as 45 million people. Combined with a short but drastic drop in the birthrate, China shrank by roughly 700,000 people between 1960 and 1961. Once Chinese leader Mao abandoned the forced industrialization policies that led to the Great Famine, however, China’s fertility rate quickly rebounded and deaths fell, and today more than twice as many Chinese are alive as were in 1961.

But now, for the first time since that year, China’s population is again shrinking. And this time, it’s not likely to rebound — not soon, and perhaps not ever. On Tuesday, the Chinese government reported that 9.56 million people were born in China last year, while 10.41 million people had died. You don’t have to be a demographer to know what that means — all you need to do is subtract.

China may have already lost its position as the world’s most populous country to a still-surging India. While Covid played some role in those numbers — though how much is hard to say, given Beijing’s lack of transparency around the full toll of the pandemic — this isn’t like the early 1960s. China’s population drop isn’t the result of a single, acute crisis, but years of policy decisions and cultural and economic shifts that have led this nation of 1.4 billion people to where it is today: facing an aging and shrinking population for the foreseeable future.

This doesn’t mean that China as a country or as a world power is locked into irreversible decline. What’s happening in China is happening at varying speeds in most countries, as the world — with the exception of still-young regions like sub-Saharan Africa — completes the transition from high fertility to low, with two-thirds of the planet living in nations that do not have enough children to replace their population through reproduction alone.

Many of these demographic forces are positive, the result of economic growth that has given people, especially women, the freedom to live the life they want, including one with fewer or even no children. But it does mean — as Wang Feng, a sociologist at the University of California Irvine who specializes in Chinese demographics, told the New York Times — “in the long run, we are going to see a China the world has never seen.”

As much as China’s aging and eventual shrinking was a demographic inevitability as it became richer and more modern, the particular speed at which that transition is occurring, and the particular challenges that pace will present, are Beijing’s own doing.
Demographic regrets

In 2015, the Chinese government did something it almost never does: It admitted it made a mistake, at least implicitly.

The ruling Communist Party announced that it was ending its historic and coercive one-child policy, allowing all married couples to have up to two children.
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Having more young workers who had fewer young or old dependents to care for was the fuel in China’s economic rocket engine. But no fuel burns forever, and over the past decade, hundreds of millions of Chinese have hit retirement age, with a plummeting number of young people to replace them. So the slogans went from “Having only one child is good” to “One is too few, while two are just right.”

How did the Chinese people react? Not by having more children. By 2021, China’s total fertility rate (that is, the number of expected births per woman over the course of their reproductive lifetime) had fallen to just 1.15, nearly a full child below the replacement rate of 2.1. (That’s two to replace each parent, plus a slight extra to make up for children who might die before they reach adulthood — demographics is a dismal science.) For the people of China, if not the government, it seems two was not just right.

Total births in China have now fallen for six straight years, and the United Nations’ middle-of-the-road projections find that by the end of the century, the country’s total population will have fallen below 800 million people, a level it hasn’t been since the late 1960s. Unlike then, when the median Chinese was in their highly productive early 20s, that smaller China will be far older.
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The US population has mainly grown in recent years from migration as parents are having fewer children and there is more birth control.  China's one-child policy would have had the effect of reducing its population by half in each succeeding generation if it had been continued.  It is the kind of bad idea that happens sometimes in a totalitarian-ruled country.