Population Decline Could Impact China's Global Status

Is China set to dethrone the United States as the new colossus of the international system or will its rapidly aging and shrinking population one day consign it to a secondary-status in the hierarchy of nations?

There is no shortage of observers who offer opinions running the gamut about China's future prospects — which are dependent in large part on its demographic fortunes and its relentless four-decade effort to curb its population growth.

Many predictions about China's future begin with its 1.4 billion citizens and the fact that its population actually shrank by 850,000 people in 2022. This was the first drop in absolute numbers in decades and could signal the beginning of an enormous decline in the country's population as tens of millions of its citizens pass through that delightful part of life known as "old age."

However, there are fewer and fewer younger people available to pick up the slack. As a result, the traditional population pyramid (which shows more young people on the bottom and fewer older people on the top) is becoming increasingly inverted.

Indeed, the United Nations has projected that China's population could shrink by more than 500 million people by the year 2100 while other organizations have offered even more dire predictions. These demographic projections have caused many commentators to wonder whether China's falling population could endanger its status as a rising superpower.

Understanding the current situation, however, requires that we consider China's past. China has endured many famines that have cost tens of millions of lives. A severe famine in 1876, for example, killed as many as 13 million people. Another famine in 1927 killed as many as 6 million people.

However, these disasters paled in comparison to the Great Famine of 1958 that resulted in the deaths of between 30 to 45 million people over a 3-year period. 

Needless to say, the history of China has been inextricably intertwined with the specter of mass starvation. The regularity with which hundreds of thousands or even millions of people perished due to the lack of food underscores the unprecedented suffering borne by the Chinese people for centuries.

It also explains why its leaders have offered various birth control planning programs since the early-1970s to deal with what they feared would be an apocalyptic famine if the nation's population was permitted to continue growing unabated. However, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) did not establish an absolute cap on the number of children a family could have until the creation of the one-child policy in 1980.

The one-child policy imposed significant penalties on violators: Those families having more than one child were subject to fines and being fired from their jobs. Because of the historical preference for boys, many infant girls were abandoned or, in some cases, killed.

The widespread availability of sex-selective abortions also contributed to the shortfall of baby girls. Indeed, abortion has been a widely-used and officially-encouraged form of family planning in China for decades with more than 400,000,000 abortions having been performed there since 1956. 

Over time, a chronic imbalance in the births of boys and girls developed so that there are  currently 112 male births to every 100 female births in China. 

However, the plummeting birthrate that ensued coupled with its long-term implications for China's economic viability caused the CCP in 2021 to lift all limits on the number of children per family. Even so, the average number of births per woman of childbearing age continued a general downward trend that, according to Pew Research Center, is equal to 1.14 children — well below the replacement rate of 2.1 children. 

Various reasons have been offered for this continuing trend including greater numbers of women entering the workforce, the sheer expense of raising children in an increasingly-expensive China and the fact that women are choosing to have children later in life.

The biggest threat to China's economy, however, is not its decreasing population but the fact that the elderly population is growing far more quickly than that of the workers who actually build things. Indeed, the one-child policy could ultimately result in China's elderly citizens outnumbering its workers by the end of the century.

The possible halving of China's population by the year 2100 has been presented as an existential peril. However, a smaller population could lead to a more sustainable society with less pressure on an environment that has been severely damaged over the past several decades by China's ceaseless efforts to become a global manufacturing power.

The transition would not be an easy one because the demand for pretty much everything (e.g., housing, automobiles, clothing) would steadily decline over time due to an increasingly acute shortage of younger people. Yet a less-populated China might be freed of its age-old concerns with food shortages. 

This is not to say that a China of 700 million people would be a cuddly democracy or abandon its aggressive "lone wolf" behavior in the international arena. China will likely continue to be an adversary of the United States for the foreseeable future even though its status as the world's second-largest economy could slip over the next few decades. 

Jefferson Hane Weaver is a transactional lawyer residing in Florida. He received his undergraduate degree in Economics and Political Science from the University of North Carolina and his J.D. and Ph.D. in International Relations from Columbia University. Dr. Weaver is the author of numerous books on varied compelling subjects. Read more of his reports — Here.