China’a demographic dilemma

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: Coming up next on The World and Everything in It: falling birth rates in China.

NICK EICHER, HOST: Right, the United States isn’t the only country with a population problem. Last year, China recorded 7.5 births for every 1,000 people. That was the lowest level on record. And it was the fifth straight year that the country’s birth rate has dropped.

The Chinese government, of course, largely has itself to blame. For years it imposed strict birth limits to avoid rapid population growth and conserve resources.

But that policy is backfiring. And some say China is now facing a “demographic time bomb.”

BROWN: Well, Dean Cheng joins us now. He has studied China's defense-industrial complex for the U.S. government at the Office of Technology Assessment. He also worked in the China Studies division of the Center for Naval Analyses. He’s now at the Heritage Foundation.

Dean, good morning!

DEAN CHENG, GUEST: Good morning.

BROWN: Well, government controls are certainly a big part of the reason for the falling birth rates in China, but it’s also a cultural issue, right?

CHENG: The Chinese government has used a variety of tools to try and push people to have only one child when there was a one child policy. Those policies included restricting access to education, access to medical care, there was a lot of pressure on parents—you were unpatriotic, you are not a good person, if you and your family had more than one child. All of that added up to a lot of pressure not to have children.

Now, on top of that, there were other cultural aspects that weren't so much an issue of the one child policy per se, but certainly influenced the result. For example, the Chinese culture heavily emphasizes male children. If you could only have one child, the tendency was to favor boys. What did that mean? That meant sex-based, gender-based abortion policies. It also meant giving up baby girls for adoption or simply abandoning them. And the result is in China, the combination of Chinese culture and the one child policy led to the major imbalance in today's China where you have millions of young men who will never marry simply because there aren't enough girls.

BROWN: What else is China trying to do—and what can it do—to reverse the falling birth rate?

CHENG: There are some things you can do—and the Chinese are doing this. They have legalized second children. They have now legalized third children. They are engaging in propaganda, saying it's good to have more children. But there are several problems here. The first is that—again, going back to the gender imbalance—you're simply going to have literally tens of millions of young men who are never going to find a wife.

On top of that, in the case of China, you have the reality that actually children are very expensive. I mean, they're expensive everywhere. But in China, because of multiple generations of only children, what has happened in Chinese society is massive expenditures and investments in that one child. In particular, education. One of the things that the Chinese Communist Party has cracked down on this year is private tutoring firms. So, if you have a second child and you want to give that second child all of the additional education, additional benefits, etcetera that you typically gave your only child, that is extraordinarily expensive for even a dual income family. So, what we have seen is that despite allowing second and even third children, the Chinese birth rate has dropped.

The official Chinese figures say that they kept just ahead of the death rate, so just ahead of replacement, so that the Chinese emphasize that they will stay above 1.4 billion people. But there is some reason to think that perhaps the Chinese have fiddled with their numbers, in which case we're actually already starting to see a decline in the Chinese population, simply because there aren't as many babies being born to offset the people who are dying from a variety of natural causes plus COVID.

BROWN: As we’ve just heard, China is not alone with the declining birth rate issue, but why is this a problem for China in particular?

CHENG: So why is this a problem for China? Several things. One, China's economic status, the ability to develop as much as it has, has been partly due to cheap labor. And if China's population is aging, then you have a real issue here of who is going to be making all the bobblehead dolls and all the PCs and all the washing machines.

Another aspect of this is that China, despite being the number two economy, when you look at GDP per capita, when you look at how wealthy is China, it is not that wealthy, because every dollar of increased productivity nonetheless has to be split among 1.4 billion people. China is already growing old before it can grow rich. That is going to have implications for societal and political stability. What happens when the population gets older in a system that doesn't have a social security safety net? What happens when the economy begins to slow down because you don't have as many new workers coming online? Militarily speaking, who is going to be the infantry man, the sailor, the airman in 2029? In 2039? This aging population has distinct implications for, therefore, national security, for political stability, for economic growth and for technological and other innovation.

BROWN: Well, again, birth rates have also been falling in the United States. But one major difference is that America can attract workers from all over the world, including highly skilled workers. How does China’s more closed society factor into all of this?

CHENG: As you said, the United States has the benefit of being an immigrant society, a melting pot society. We are multicultural in the best sense of that. Other people come here. They flee their homelands, in some cases, and risk everything in order to come to the United States because it is still a land of opportunity, a land where people believe that, you know, with a bit of luck, but a lot of hard work, that they will live better. And as important, their children will live better. And they can live next to an Irish family, or a Pakistani family, or a Nigerian family and all get along. The Chinese system is very different. China is, frankly, xenophobic. It is not a society that is going to say, hey, Filipinos, hey, Japanese, hey, Russians, emigrate to China. There's also the additional problems that, again, 1.4 billion people in a country the size of China, you would think, well, they could all fit there. But much of China is desert, especially in the Northwest. Or extraordinarily mountainous with the Himalayas and the Ching Hai plateau. So all of this adds up to a really major dilemma that confronts Chinese leaders in a way that is very different from those confronting, say, American leaders.

BROWN: Okay, Dean Cheng has been our guest today. Dean, thanks so much!

CHENG: Thank you for having me.

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