China’s population, estimated at 1. 41 billion, will fall to 330 million by the end of the century, predicts Yi Fuxian of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. This unexpected conclusion is included in an article to be published in the Winter 2024 issue of Contemporary China Review. He is the only one worried. “China has embarked on a demographic trajectory of no return,” writes Wang Feng of the University of California, Irvine. Yi puts it this way: “If left unchecked, China’s demographic trap could simply precipitate the collapse of civilization. »
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. Yi’s staggering 330 million figure means that China will be able to stabilize its overall fertility rate – sometimes the average number of children born to a woman over her lifetime – at 0. 8. China’s TFR in 2023 was 1. 0, and it decreases over time. A country sometimes wants a TFR of 2. 1 for a solid population.
Yi estimates that China’s TFR could even fall to 0. 7, and that China could have even fewer people until 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 more people through 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. Yi’s prediction, while excessive today, will likely be closer to the truth when the clock strikes 9:00 p. m.
China today is 4 times more populous than the United States. At the turn of the century, it could conceivably have roughly the same number of people as America.
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 failures, and a developing pessimism enveloping the country. Young Chinese now present themselves as China’s “last generation. “
These anti-natal attitudes are partly the result of the regime’s relentless indoctrination enforcing the One-Child Policy. Deng Xiaoping, Mao Zedong’s successor, instituted the policy in 1979 as one of his first initiatives after assuming power. During the existence of the coercive program, “probably the largest social experiment in human history,” China’s fertility declined, falling from 2.9 births per female 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 ever succeeded in scaling up government fertility policies. “
Wang believes that 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 Chinese export products. 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, Xi Jinping might see things differently. Their primary form of international relations in recent years has been intimidation. You can intimidate others if your China dominates or even will rule the world; You can’t do it if others see your country shrinking rapidly. Given Xi’s goals (he defends the imperial-era concept that China deserves to rule tianxia, or “All 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 did Xi ever get the idea he could impose his will on all humanity in the first place? “By teaming up to dress up an old, sick cat as a ferocious lion, Chinese and American scholars have fueled the political ambitions of China’s leaders and misdirected U.S.-China relations down the dangerous path of a furious battle between a dynamic tiger and an aggressive lion,” Yi Fuxian points out. “Strategic miscalculation based on incorrect demographic data is costly and dangerous.”
“More people means more power,” wrote “Fang Feng” in the People’s Daily’s Country Stronghold Forum, as China’s population grew. “That’s the truth. “
The world has to be concerned that China’s leader both believes the opposite is also true and realizes he must move 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 views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.