The continued decline of newborns on the mainland has sparked concern from all walks of life.
The Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Television (CCTV) focused on the problem of mainland population living alone in its program on April 18, and before that the CPC Central Bank also wrote a rare article calling for opening up childbirth, and some mainland scholars also spoke out saying that the sooner they liberalize childbirth, the better, as the mainland’s population decline triggered worries among the CPC authorities.
CCTV Finance reported on April 18 that data from 2018 showed that the mainland’s single adult population was as high as 240 million, with more than 77 million adults living alone, and the number is expected to approach 100 million by 2021.
The increase in the single population has also sparked concern among demographers. Data show that from 2013 to 2020, the number of registered marriage pairs on the mainland has continued to decline from a record high of 13.47 million to 8.13 million. In contrast, the divorce rate continues to rise, with the number of registered divorces in China climbing from 580,000 to 3.73 million between 1987 and 2020. The combination of declining marriage rates and rising divorce rates has resulted in lower fertility rates year after year.
Liu Qian, president of the Economist Group Greater China, said too low a fertility rate is detrimental to an aging society and a long-term sustainable economy.
The Central Bank of the Communist Party of China (CBC) released a rare working paper on “Understanding and Responses to China’s Demographic Transition” on April 14. The CBC is the unit that manages monetary policy, and population issues are not under its jurisdiction, so the CBC’s paper came as a big surprise and sparked widespread concern.
The Central Bank’s paper analyzes the history, analysis of the population system of each country, high housing prices, pensions, health care and education, etc. It says: “The aging and childlessness of developed countries have caused serious economic and social problems. Compared with developed countries, our population transition is faster, the transition period is shorter, and aging and childlessness are more serious. This means that for a longer period of time in the future, it is highly likely that China will face more severe challenges than developed countries.” It also calls for full liberalization of childbirth (three children and above).
The central bank worries about the Chinese people not having children, while CCTV worries that there are too many single people on the mainland. Mainland economist Ren Zeping, an economist who has also crossed over to sociology to study the state of marriage in China, and his team have released a “China Marriage Report 2021”, which is laughingly called “the first Chinese marriage report” by other economists.
According to “Ren Zeping: China Marriage Report 2021” published on April 17 by Sina Finance, in recent years, under a variety of choices and helplessness, Chinese people are marrying less, marrying later and divorcing more, and in the late marriage, the phenomenon of late childbirth is also increasingly prominent, and data show that every month of delay in the age of first childbirth will affect the total fertility rate by about 8%.
Professor Dong Yucheng, a mainland population expert and director of the Guangdong Institute of Population Development, also said that according to the current trend, the annual number of births during the 14th Five-Year Plan could fall below the 10 million mark.
As a large country with a population of 1.4 billion, if the number of births in a year is less than 10 million, what is the ratio? Divided into 31 provinces, the number of each province only how many? If we follow this trend, it may not take more than a few years for our total population number to grow negatively.”
The Communist Party’s delay in releasing the mainland’s population data for 2020 has sparked speculation of a huge population decline on the mainland.
According to reports, 14.65 million people will be born on the mainland in 2019, which is only about 58 percent of the population born in 1987 (the peak year for population births in the past 40 years). As of now, no figures have been released for 2020, but several cities have released figures that show a decline of one to two percent.
In response to recent discussions on population issues on the mainland, which have even prompted official Communist Party departments and official media and economists to speak out, some commentators believe that low fertility rates and an aging population will be the biggest worries for China’s economy in the future. With labor shortages in recent years and difficulties in recruiting laborers even with wage increases, demographic issues are already having a negative impact on the economy.
According to Fuxian Yi, a researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the main body of the social economy is the population, and only with the population can there be a series of economic activities such as production, consumption and innovation. In a March 5 interview with the Voice of America, he said that if China continues with a fertility rate of 1.2, its population will decrease from the current 1.28 billion in 2050 to 1.07 billion in 2050 and to 480 million by 2100. China’s labor force began to decline around 2014, and the median age has surpassed that of the U.S. by 2018, now at 42 years old compared to 38. Aging is a gray rhino for China, and it will be an inescapable, long-term challenge for the country. An aging population leading to declining consumption, a declining economy, declining innovation, a declining workforce, and a declining manufacturing sector is the general direction of China’s future, and “the Chinese economy will never overtake the U.S.”
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