China’s population continues to grow, straining China’s infrastructure and natural resources. But that growth is stalling, fertility levels are at record lows, the population is aging fast, and families are shrinking. Will China manage to find a balance?
 | A girl plays in a water fountain outside of the National Stadium during the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games. With fewer girls than boys born, China is heading for a severe gender imbalance in the future (Photo: Reuters) |
Population growth
Every year, China adds about seven million people to its population, the equivalent of a city the size of London. This rate of growth should continue for the next 5 to 10 years. China will be 100 million people stronger by 2030, according to the United Nations. Much of that growth is in underdeveloped rural areas, where work is harder to find.
In the 1930s, Chinese demographer Hu Huanyong drew a line from Aihui in the northeast to Tengchong in the southwest. Not surprisingly, he found that the vast majority of Chinese lived southeast of the Aihui-Tengchong line.
Deng Xiaoping’s economic reforms of the late 1970s strengthened these regional differences by propelling a traditional agrarian economy towards mechanization and industrialization. Today, the Aihui-Tengchong line divides economic boomtowns and poor rural areas. This adds to the “floating population” of workers migrating to China’s growing cities and places enormous strain on China’s infrastructure, most notably its water supplies.
More than 400 cities lack sufficient water, and the World Bank has warned of “catastrophic consequences for future generations” because of the plundering of China’s water resources. Despite all this, population growth is actually slowing. In 2005, annual growth was about 0.65 percent, half the world average. The UN expects China’s population to start shrinking from about 2030.
Reduced fertility, increased aging
China’s slowing population growth is largely explained by China’s reduced birth rate from 21 births per 1,000 people in 1980 to just 14 in 2005, two-thirds the world average. Fertility has plummeted to a record low of 1.7 children per woman.
With fertility rates well below replacement level since the mid-1990s, it follows that much of the current population growth can be explained by increased longevity. Life expectancy has doubled since 1949. The average Chinese person now lives to 73.
 | Aihui-Tengchong LineThe Aihui-Tengchong Line marks China's demographic division between the sparsely populated West and the crowded East (Graphic: China Data Center, University of Michigan) |
China is growing old. There are approximately 145 million people aged over 60 in China, 11 percent of the country's total population. That proportion is increasing. Furthermore, many of the elderly are poorly educated agricultural laborers who rely on their families to support them in retirement.
Smaller families
China’s population control programs have led to smaller families. One-child households are increasingly the norm. In Beijing and Shanghai, over half of people 30 years old or younger are only children. Chinese cities will be the first in the world where the majority grows up without brothers and sisters. There are an estimated 90 million only children in China today.
According to U.S. analyst Nicholas Eberstadt, by 2025, one out of three Chinese women of retirement age will have no living son. This will create a huge hole in China’s social safety net. Fragmented, increasingly expensive healthcare and social security systems are poorly placed to fill the gap.
Most Chinese, however, seem to be content with smaller families. Roughly three-in-four approve of the one-child policy, according to a Pew research poll in July 2008. In rural Jiangsu province, a survey of 4,000 people who qualified to have two children found that only 10 percent had or were planning to have a second child. The reason is the cost of children, particularly their increasingly expensive education.
Fewer girls
The most ominous impact of the shift towards smaller families is the high numbers of boys born compared to girls. For children under 10, the ratio is about 121 boys to every 100 girls. The natural ratio is 105 boys to 100 girls. The ratio is skewed by the combination of a traditional preference for sons and the restrictions placed on parents by the government’s population control policies.
Experts think the reasons for this sex imbalance are concealed births to thwart the authorities, the abortion of female fetuses, and even the abandonment of small girls. Reacting to the problem, China has made gender-based abortions illegal and outlawed the use of sonograms to determine a fetus’ sex.
But the effects are beginning to be felt as large cohorts of young men struggle to find spouses. Many of these women are increasingly well-educated with career ambitions that do not include early marriage. In 2005, singles accounted for two thirds of Chinese aged 15 to 29, a 15 percent rise since 1995.
Unmarried men, so-called “bare branches,” are predicted to number 30 million by 2020. China’s government worries aloud that they could cause “social problems.” Bare branches, after all, do not make for healthy trees.
editor: James Tulloch
publishing date: August 20, 2008
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