[NationalInterest] China this century is on track to experience history’s most dramatic demographic collapse in the absence of war or disease.
Today, the country has a population more than four times larger than America’s. By 2100, the U.S. will probably have more people than China.
True, Beijing scrapped the notorious one-child policy, perhaps history’s most ambitious social-engineering project, as of the beginning of 2016 and there was a spurt of births that year, but since then births have fallen every year.
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Beijing has not announced births for last year, but early numbers indicate they plummeted from 2019. Births in the household registration—hukou—system plunged 14.9% to 10,035,000 last year. Because births so registered constitute about 80% of total births, He Yafu, a demographer, estimates total births for the country last year came in at 12,540,000.
Yi told me that the number of births for the country was in reality about 8 million and could not have exceeded 10 million.
Again, Yi looks correct. Provinces and other governmental units have reported data ahead of the census, and births were down more than 30% in some locations.
The big issue is China’s trajectory. Official media is cagey about a critical figure, the country’s total fertility rate, generally the number of children per female reaching child-bearing age. The official China Daily reports that Lu Jiehua of Peking University believes the country’s TFR, as the rate is known, “has fallen below 1.7.”
Lu is certainly right about that. The University of Wisconsin’s Yi told TNI that China’s TFR last year was 0.90 and could not have exceeded 1.1. Yi’s estimate is on the low end but is consistent with China Daily’s reporting of 1.05 in 2015.
China now has a crisis. “Once it slips below 1.5, a country falls into the trap of low fertility and is unlikely to recover,” said He Yafu to the Communist Party’s Global Times. China is already well below that figure.
Beijing does not believe China’s population will begin to decline until 2028. Some believe it in fact began contracting in 2018, something evident by falling births.
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