After the one-child policy, China’s population is heading toward demographic collapse
China has had a population decline for the second straight year. It’s a symptom of a much bigger issue. After seven years of a dropping birthrate and an increasing death rate, the nation is headed toward a demographic collapse, reports Reuters.
The National Bureau of Statistics said that the total number of people in China dropped by 2.08 million, to 1.4 billion, in 2023 and is likely to continue dropping to just around half a billion by 2100.
In 2023, there were nine million births in China, less than half of the total number of babies born in China in 2016, reports The Associated Press. Meanwhile, the death rate continues to rise, hitting 11.1 million in 2023, which is the highest level since the Cultural Revolution of 1974.
Additionally, the marriage rate fell by nearly half from 2013 to 2022 and the nation’s total fertility rate is 1.09, far below the 2.1 “replacement” birthrate needed to keep a population stable. The working-age population is falling, while the percentage of the population over age 60 is greater than 20%.
Communist Party lectures on “family values” are having little effect, reports The Wall Street Journal. President Xi Jinping told women last October that they must “start a new trend of family” but China’s young women aren’t buying it.
Financial incentives like cheaper housing, tax benefits and straight cash payments are not changing the minds of China’s women. There are other factors as well, including economic uncertainty, a youth unemployment rate of 21%, and ongoing discrimination against women.
The government is even going as far as calling and texting women to “encourage” them to have more children. One woman, who hid her second pregnancy a decade ago, and was fined $10,000 when officials found out, now gets text messages from government officials encouraging her to have more children. She deletes them in anger.
“I wish they would stop tossing us around and leave us ordinary people alone,” she told The Washington Post.
Related
The one-child policy
Concerned about “over-population,” China implemented a policy in 1979 that restricted families to just one child. The policy was softened in 2015, allowing families to have two children, and then in 2021, families could have three children.
China is now facing the fallout from that policy.
Male children were more highly valued than female children, leading to sex-selected abortions (hundreds of millions), and infanticide of baby girls born alive. The male preference also impacted girls post birth, resulting in neglect of health care and nutrition, “often ending in premature mortality,” found an academic study from 2011. Families were punished for having more than one child with fines, loss of jobs, beatings, imprisonment and torture of relatives, reported NPR in 2021.
Valerie Hudson, a Deseret News contributor, and University Distinguished Professor at Texas A&M, has been researching and writing about the results of China’s combined practices of preferring boy babies and the one-child policy for years, especially the impacts of skewed gender ratios.
In 2004, Hudson wrote in The Washington Post about “bare branches,” the young men on the family tree that will never “bear fruit” because there are no women for them to marry and have a family with. Hudson estimated that China might see 30 million more men than women by 2020.
In 2023, The New York Times reported there were 35 million more men than women in China.
Experts expect the population decline to continue for decades, even if the fertility rate rebounds, according to the AP. Yuan Xin, a professor at Nankai University and vice-president of the China Population Association, added that “the downward trend in China’s total population is bound to be long-term and become an inherent characteristic.”
Holly Richardson is the editor of Utah Policy.
