Baby bust: what happens when China's population shrinks?
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China\\u2019s population is ageing. It\\u2019s estimated that a quarter of Chinese people will be elderly within three decades. The relaxing of its one child policy \\u2013 first to two children in 2016 and then to three last year \\u2013 hasn\\u2019t stimulated fertility rate, which is still stagnant at 1.7 births per woman. In November last year, nappy producers supposedly pivoted their marketing towards elderly clients over parents of babies.
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Demographers and economists warn about the problems that an ageing \\u2013 and eventually shrinking \\u2013 population will cause, in China and elsewhere. On this episode, I speak to the demographer Wang Feng, Professor of Sociology at University of California, Irvine, about what awaits China. For Professor Wang, care of the elderly will soon become an issue, with more than 365 million over 65s expected by 2050. The Chinese welfare state is minimal (ironic given its socialist pretensions), something of a \\u2018postcode lottery\\u2019, I put to Professor Wang. He says that \\u2018China has already missed the time window for establishing an equitable national social security system\\u2019 \\u2013 it has already become too expensive, too fast.\\xa0
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We also discuss the one child policy at length \\u2013 its logic at the time, whether Communist leaders foresaw the problems it would cause for their successors and, fascinatingly, whether there was any opposition within the Chinese Communist Party to the policy (the answer is yes \\xad\\u2013 and if you caught my episode on the legacy of Deng Xiaoping, you will not be surprised to learn that the resistance was led by Hu Yaobang and Zhao Ziyang). Professor Wang points out that one of the reasons why the policy took so long to go even as China liberalised relatively in the 1990s and 2000s, under the helm of Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao:
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\\u2018They were people who grew up, like myself, at the end of the Cultural Revolution. Their knowledge of population was all learned from the time when China implemented the one child policy, when there was so much propaganda about how population would be the root of all problems for China. I think that generation of leaders were deeply intoxicated by these teachings\\u2019
In a way, there\\u2019s poetic justice for a government who thought that, in Professor Wang\\u2019s words, \\u2018you can just plan [births] and constrain them as you would grow trees or wheat\\u2019. Today\\u2019s China, regardless of the loosening of the one child policy (to two in 2016; and three last year, which I wrote about at the time), is just not having babies. For the Professor, there\\u2019s a fundamental truth: \\u2018The ageing society is not something that China, or any other country, can reverse\\u2019. The crux lies in how to adapt society to be better prepared \\u2013 fixing the welfare state, the healthcare system, and maturing the financial system so the ageing population can invest for retirement.
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