China’s population time bomb is about to explode
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In his 2024 New Year message, Xi Jinping stated that the post-Covid Chinese economy had “sustained the momentum of recovery” and that all Chinese people, including in Taiwan, should share in the “glory of the rejuvenation of the Chinese nation”.
Both these leaden phrases are fantasy. However confident Xi may feel in his autocratic grip on the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), he seemingly lacks both the vision and means to reverse China’s slide into a classic middle-income trap. The CCP’s expected economic bounce-back after the pandemic has not materialised; IMF forecasts are bleak. For 60 years, the Chinese population grew; we now learn it is beginning to contract. The death rate last year was the highest since 1974, when China was wracked by the chaos of Mao’s Cultural Revolution. But even more alarming, the 2023 birth rate fell by 5.7%, the lowest recorded in CCP history.
China’s workforce is shrinking and its population aging. There are now 280 million CCP citizens aged 60 or over. Rather than Xi’s vaunted glorious rejuvenation, a massive demographic time bomb in China is ticking.
How did this develop, and will Xi be able to defuse it? Around 1980, the CCP decided that the rate of population growth was harmful and launched mandatory birth planning measures known as the ‘One Child Policy’. Negative incentives and coercive force were then used to drive down birth rates for more than 30 years. By degrees it became clear that things had gone very wrong. Traditional patriarchal bias resulted in widespread selective female abortion, infanticide and abandonment. In China there are now 110 males for every 100 females, amounting to some 34 million ‘excess’ males. The productive labour and taxes of one young worker now have to boost the state pensions of 4 retired relatives. The number of retired CCP citizens will increase more than 30% in the next decade. The current pension system simply cannot handle this.
In response, the CCP has recently adopted policies intended to encourage the young generation to have more children. However it’s proving much more difficult to achieve this than it was to bully people to have less. A measure of Xi’s desperation is his de facto order last May that China’s 2 million military personnel must take part. The rest of the population are unimpressed by the various material incentives to increased fertility.
Like it or not, following Xi’s prolonged, ineffective Zero Covid lockdown the young people of China are increasingly inclined to passive resistance to the Party’s transactional interference in their private lives. Since the pandemic hit, Chinese social media have been full of nihilistic, disaffected exchanges between young people about the gap behind Xi’s fabricated ‘China Dream’ and their own hopeless existence. No amount of state censorship has stifled this.
The realities are stark. Last year, 11.6 bn Chinese graduates tried to enter the workforce. One in five is likely to remain unemployed. Others who did find work are victims to an obsolete ethic of unrewarded hard work and sacrifice. They prefer to do the bare minimum and abandon vain hopes of career advancement, an approach known as “lying flat”. Xi has singled this idea out for strong criticism but has nothing to offer in return. Worse still, in one speech he told the young five times to toughen up and learn to “eat bitterness”. They are not the least impressed by his exhortation to ‘seek self-inflicted hardships’ in the new economic normal.
Increasingly, Chinese people realise that their leaders have abandoned all pretence of a reliable social contract in justification for single-party rule. Neither they, nor the free citizens of Taiwan, have the least faith in talk of China’s “glorious rejuvenation”. Both sides of the Straits can see that the emperor in Beijing now has no clothes.
Matthew Henderson is an associate fellow at the Council on Geostrategy
