China’s population, reported to be 1.41 billion, will drop to 330 million by the end of the century, predicts Yi Fuxian of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. This startling conclusion is included in a paper to be published in the Winter 2024 issue of the Contemporary China Review. He’s not the only one concerned. “China has embarked on a road of demographic no-return,” writes Wang Feng of the University of California, Irvine. Yi puts it this way: “Left unaddressed, China’s demographic trap could precipitate a civilizational collapse.”
Why do we care? Rapid demographic change can push an ambitious China to become even more militant and accelerate dangerous plans.
The crisis is obvious. A staggering 330 million Yi means China will be able to stabilize its overall fertility rate (normally the average number of children born to a woman over her lifetime) at 0. 8. China’s TFR in 2023 was 1. 0 and is declining over time. A country generally wants a TFR of 2. 1 for a robust population.
Yi believes that China’s TFR could even fall to 0.7, meaning China could have even fewer people by 2100.
How much will China’s population decline? The 2024 revision of the UN’s World Population Prospects shows a low estimate of 403. 8 million people by the end of the century. The U. N. figures largely follow those of China, which has overestimated the length of its population for two decades. The prediction, while excessive today, will likely be closer to the truth when the clock strikes 9:00 p. m.
China is now four times more populous than the United States. At the turn of the century, one might believe that it had about the same population as the United States.
China is in a complicated situation. No other society has ever faced such a large population decline without war, disease or famine. These unique events throughout history have caused disastrous demographic declines, but societies have almost recovered. China itself temporarily recovered from the Great Leap Forward famine of the late 1950s and early 1990s. Then the country’s population fell to at least 30 million people. Some estimates are double that figure.
Today, China’s population decline is due to profound adjustments in society, persistent economic failure, and developing pessimism engulfing the country. Young Chinese now present themselves as the “last generation” of China.
These anti-natal attitudes are in part the result of the regime’s incessant indoctrination in favor of the one-child policy. Deng Xiaoping, Mao Zedong’s successor, instituted this policy in 1979 as one of his first projects after coming to power. During the term of this coercive program, “probably the greatest social disaster in human history,” fertility in China declined from 2. 9 births per year to 1. 1 births in 2015.
China moved to a two-child policy in 2016 and, when that didn’t work, to a three-child policy in 2021. The successive relaxations of the policy were not enough. The country’s population peaked in 2021.
China could adopt a 27-child policy, but this would have no effect. “Notwithstanding the totalitarian conceit that population trends are something that government can ‘fine tune,’ the reality is that birth trends tend to comport very closely with the desired family size of real life parents,” Nicholas Eberstadt of the American Enterprise Institute told me. “It is possible to use bayonets and police power to force birth rates down against the will of a people; it is very much more difficult to use state force to push birth rates up.”
In fact, as Wang Feng points out, “no country has managed to expand government fertility policies. “
Wang believes demographic decline is prompting China to adopt comfortable foreign policies. As he writes: “Economic and political challenges, which will be magnified by demographic adjustments in the coming decades, force Chinese leaders to seek and maintain greater relations with the United States and Western Europe, with countries that have markets for export products Chinese. and the inventions and new technologies that China needs.
Wang perfectly sums up how the Chinese leader deserves to calculate the country’s interests. However, it is possible that Xi Jinping will see things differently. Their main form of international relations in recent years has been intimidation. You can intimidate others by telling them that your China will dominate or even rule the world; You can’t do it if others see that your country is shrinking rapidly. Given Xi’s goals (he espouses the imperial-era concept that China deserves to rule tianxia or “Everything Under Heaven”), he knows he doesn’t have much time.
Xi must know that old societies tend to be pacific and that China is getting old fast. If he wants the Chinese people to support his glorious visions of planetary rule, he surely understands the time to act is now. There is, he must know, a closing window of opportunity.
How can Xi have the idea that he can impose his will on all of humanity? led US-China relations down the damaging path of a raging war between a dynamic tiger and a competitive lion tiger,” said Yi Fuxian. A strategic miscalculation based on demographic knowledge is expensive and damaging. “
“More people means more power,” “Fang Feng” posted on People’s Daily’s Strong Country Forum, as China’s population grew. “It’s the truth”.
The world deserves to be involved because China’s leader believes otherwise and realizes he will have to act before it is too late.
Gordon G. Chang is the author of Plan Red: China’s Project to Destroy the United States and China’s Coming Collapse. Follow him on X @GordonGChange.
The reviews expressed in this article are those of the author.