Recently, Western media, international organizations, Chinese academia and political circles have coincidentally published articles about the same Chinese socio-political phenomenon: China will fall into a negative population growth trap in the next few years. This may become a super black swan for China’s rise.
The World Bank estimates that China will begin to experience negative population growth in 2029. Studies by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences show that the population will start to contract from 2027, and in a few decades, the number of people will drop to 700 to 800 million. The UN’s forecast scenario is even more pessimistic, suggesting that China’s population will fall below 1 billion to 613 million by the end of the century. Other experts say that negative population growth could occur as early as 2025, or even sooner. Regardless of the accuracy of these projections, it is an indisputable fact that China’s population problem poses a serious crisis.
The Chinese government finally decided to open up the second child in 2015, after enforcing a one-child policy for more than 30 years. Population experts at the Time predicted that the number of births would reach 35.4 million, 49.95 million, 40.25 million, and 35.4 million in the next four years (2016-2019). However, these predictions proved to be seriously wrong. the number of births in 2016 only reached 17.86 million and then continued to go down. Using 2017 as a benchmark, the number dropped by 2 million in 2018 alone; it dropped by another 580,000 in 2019 to just 14.65 million, a birth rate of just 10.48 per 1,000; and it is expected that by 2030, the number of births will drop again to below 11 million.
Since the full opening of the second child in 2016, China has not only failed to bring about a fertility peak, but the number of births has been declining year by year. This is embarrassing for those Chinese health Planning Commission officials and population experts who beat their chests with guarantees! They say, “China is not short of population, and it won’t be for the next hundred years. They sneered that the claims of an avalanche of population decline in China were a big joke. But now they can’t laugh anymore. They are too busy shifting their positions and offering explanations for their past assurances that supposedly fit historical changes. Among these shifting or already shifting views and positions, a few changes are of particular interest.
First, in a rare move, officials have never admitted in the past that China’s demographic dividend has disappeared. Miao Wei, former Chinese Minister of Industry and Information Technology and now deputy director of the National Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference’s Economic Committee, admitted on Nov. 14 last year that China has come out of the “demographic dividend period. The “demographic dividend period” refers to the 1970s and 1980s, when the working-age population between the ages of 15 and 64 accounted for about 65 percent of the total population, creating a “productive” labor structure with a small population of spenders and a large population of earners. This wave of demographic dividend coincided with the reform and opening up, which drove China’s rapid economic growth. But 40 years later, the “dividend” has turned into a “liability”. Originally, China’s “demographic dividend” has declined or even disappeared in the scholars, the media and the public discussion, but Chinese officials have been reluctant to publicly admit. Miao Wei, on the contrary, has become a rare Chinese senior official who admits that the demographic dividend has disappeared.
Another noteworthy change is that prominent conservative scholars in demography have abandoned their conservative stance on population control and advocated full autonomy in childbirth. The representative figure is Zhai Zhenwu, president of the Chinese Population Society, who, as an authority on demography in China, used to go to Zhongnanhai to explain the population situation to Politburo members and whose views often echoed those of the national Family planning department, and was once considered the “official roadmap” for population policy or the conservative wing of population policy reform. But in December last year, Zhai Zhenwu’s position changed dramatically, from opposing the two-child policy in 2013 to advocating full autonomy in 2020 during the 14th Five-Year Plan, causing surprise and debate. Liang Jianzhang, who often challenges Zhai Zhenwu, wrote a direct article asking, “Now even Zhai Zhenwu supports the full liberalization of childbirth?”
The question here is why senior Chinese officials have finally had to admit that China’s demographic dividend has disappeared? Why have conservative demographers finally abandoned their 30- or 40-year stance on population control? Their policy and position shifts clearly point to the exceptionally grim fact that China’s population problem is indeed in serious crisis, and that this crisis has not been alleviated in the slightest by the promotion of the two-child policy.
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