China: Population Bust

CHINA

Population Bust

Remarkably, the world’s most populous nation might suffer from a personnel shortage in the coming years.

As China struggles with an economic downturn and trade war with the United States, the East Asian superpower’s population shrank last year for the first time since the 1940s.

Experts said the decline signaled a “demographic crisis” that stemmed from the one-child policy that Chinese leaders implemented in 1979 in a bid to tame runaway population growth, reported Agence France-Presse.

Enforced with fines, loss of employment and sometimes brutal oppression, the policy was a classic case of communist social engineering.

“It’s been 26 years since Hong Guilian watched as a doctor drowned her newborn child. She begged him to stop, but her protests were futile,” wrote the Los Angeles Times. “Three years later it happened again. This time she was six months pregnant when they took her to the family planning clinic for a forced abortion.”

Chinese leaders ended the one-child policy in 2016. But the effects linger.

Today, the policy is to blame for an “aging population with 30 million fewer women than men,” wrote Bloomberg.

Unlucky Chinese bachelors in the so-called “lonely generation” of one-child families are called “leftover men,” hardly a term that instills self-confidence in guys looking for love.

“The women’s expectations are high. … They’re spoilt for choice,” lamented factory worker Wang Haibo in an interview with Channel News Asia. “Sometimes you take the initiative to contact them, but they’d tell you they’re not willing to go out with you (on a date).”

Now government campaigns are calling on couples to “have children for the country,” the BBC reported.

Their efforts might be too late. China faces a potentially unstoppable population decline, CNN wrote, saying the population will likely peak at 1.44 billion in 2029.

It’s a familiar pattern. As China grows more prosperous, its career-minded young people will put off starting families, like their counterparts in Japan and the West, NBC News explained. That, in turn, will slow economic growth as the population shrinks, but folks still need to pay for the care of their aging parents. A slower economy makes it harder to raise a family. And so the cycle goes.

As Time magazine reported, the US is hardly immune to the phenomenon. Its population is still growing, but at the slowest rate since the Great Depression, according to recent census figures.

Moreover, both countries’ populations are aging. In the US, people 65 and older are expected to account for nearly a quarter of the population by 2060.

But China is aging even faster. Its 65-and-older population will reach that mark by 2040, Bloomberg noted.

That’s an enormous burden on the young in a country where people are taught to revere their elders above all else.