China’s Looming Demographic Catastrophe Will Challenge Xi Jinping’s Ambitions for Greatness.
China's population is expected to drop by half by the end of the century to 730 million.
While China is facing an unprecedented wave of COVID-19 in the country, the figures for the last two years are known: the birth rate there has liquefied by 30%. This is the most dramatic drop in China since the terrible period of the great famine of the late 50s and early 60s.
In the world's most populous country, only 10.6 million babies were born in 2021, the most since the communists took power in 1949, and this with several marriages that have logically decreased by about 12% since 2019.
A long-standing anti-natalist policy
China is of course suffering the consequences of its one-child policy introduced in 1980. This policy has had devastating consequences on several levels. Indeed, it is not only the indispensable rate of population renewal that has been interrupted. This civilizational measure has also left a deep imprint on the Chinese people, who have largely integrated, almost in their genes, the idea of having only one child per family.
The soaring national real estate market and the high cost of access to a good education have subsequently completed the work. The result is that the family structure in China is now described as “4-2-1”, consisting of four grandparents supported by two spouses with one child. It is therefore not surprising that Chinese society has adapted to this constraint and to the financial burden of supporting grandparents, with the direct consequence that it is impossible to support more than one child.
Finally, the labor market is still very backward, as potential employers systematically question young women applying for a job about their desire to have a child and even about their relationship status, i.e. whether they share their life with a partner. This formal discrimination in the labor market against young Chinese women undermines their career prospects, as they are accused of not being able to juggle their work and family responsibilities.
The heavy consequences of the “Zero-COVID” policy which turns out to be a total error
The extreme fragility of the Chinese demography is not due to the sanitary crisis, but to the historical propensity of the leaders of this country to control their population... which is still attested by the drastic and aberrant measures of almost generalized confinement currently in force in the cities of the country.
This Zero-COVID policy exacerbates Chinese infertility, as it discourages marriage in a context where confinements are announced unilaterally as soon as a single case appears in a neighborhood or even in a building. This policy decided by the CCP can therefore be qualified as totally counter-productive.
However, the Chinese regime is far too committed to this policy to recognize that it is counterproductive, and not only for demography. The CCP is thus at a dead end and will not be able to turn back without losing face.
How, indeed, would President Xi Jinping now renounce, without disavowing himself, the Zero-COVID dogma which he has made one of the pillars of his policy, and while he was preparing to celebrate its triumph in November 2022 at the 20th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party?
Whatever happens, it now seems certain that China will face a real demographic disaster in the future, with a population that is expected to collapse by almost half by the end of this century. The respected British medical journal, “The Lancet”, predicts that the number of Chinese will collapse to 730 million, from 1.4 billion today.
This should be a major obstacle, if not an insurmountable one, to Xi Jinping's goal of making China the world's leading economic superpower by 2030 or 2040.