Prof Zhang Jun

Opinion | Could China’s population crisis be reaching a point of no return?

China’s rapidly declining fertility reflects the legacy of family planning policies, which had caused the birth rate to plummet well below replacement level by the 1990s

If it is to sustain its economic dynamism, it must expand its labour force by raising the retirement age and encouraging families to have more children

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A child wearing a face mask runs along a path in a park in Beijing on February 19. Today, there are more elderly people in China than there are children. Photo: AP

Prof Zhang Jun

Published: 6:45am, 25 Mar 2021Updated: 6:46am, 25 Mar 2021

Historically, demographics has been a slow-moving variable. But the East Asian economies – especially China, Japan and South Korea – have flipped so fast from rapid population growth to decline that they practically have whiplash.

As a planned economy, China was once obsessed with expanding its population. But, in 1957, the economist Ma Yinchu published The New Theory of Population and cautioned that this trend would soon begin to undermine China’s economic development. Though the government initially criticised his theory, unfairly, Chinese leaders eventually took his warnings to heart, encouraging family planning as a way to promote economic growth.

In 1973, China went a step further, with the national wan, xi, shao (“late marriage, longer spacing, and fewer children”) campaign, which encouraged couples to have no more than two children. Six years later, this escalated into the infamous one-child policy. To ensure its long-term impact, family planning was finally written into the Chinese constitution in 1982.

The fertility rate plummeted. By the mid-1980s, it hovered above the so-called substitution level of 2.1, compared to 6.0 in the 1960s. In the 1990s, the fertility rate fell to just 1.2-1.3 – a level that promised to hasten the country’s demographic ageing significantly. The government nonetheless continued to enforce the one-child policy until 2016, when, finally, it shifted to a two-child policy.

With that, China’s fertility rate bounced back somewhat, reaching 1.58 in 2017, according to the National Bureau of Statistics. But it is now again on a downward slide, falling from 1.49 in 2018 to 1.47 in 2019. According to the population economist James Liang, it may be set to return to 1990s levels.

As Liang noted, in 2017, the total fertility rate of 1.58 reflected a fertility rate of 0.67 for one-child families, 0.81 for two-child families, and 0.11 for three-child families. The fact that the fertility rate of two-child families is higher than that of one-child families reflects the two-child “accumulation effect” – that is, one-child families who had previously wanted to have a second child finally being able to have one.

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