China Going Bust Long Term

For John, BLUF:  Demographics is destiny.  Right now China is the world's most populous nation, with India in a close second.  However, 43 years ago China did something about its population growth.  Now they are seeing the consequences.  Nothing to see here; just move along.

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The Coming Demographic Collapse of China

Here is the sub-headline:

China this century is on track to experience history’s most dramatic demographic collapse in the absence of war or disease.

From The National Interest, by Analyst adn Author Gordon G. Chang, March 23, 2021.

Here is the lede plus three:

China this century is on track to experience history’s most dramatic demographic collapse in the absence of war or disease.

Today, the country has a population more than four times larger than America’s. By 2100, the U.S. will probably have more people than China.

China’s National Bureau of Statistics typically releases population data for the preceding year in early March. This year, NBS delayed its announcement because the central government is scheduled next month to announce preliminary results of the 7th national census, conducted in November and December.

The image of Chinese economic and geopolitical dominance will be severely dented when Beijing releases census data. Xi Jinping may believe “the East is rising and the West is declining”—the money line from one of his speeches late last year—but that view will be exceedingly hard to maintain.

It appears that China is continuing to suffer from it's "one child" policy of 1978.  It appears that when a nation changes a social policy unintended consequences follow and reversal of the change is not easy.  It is possible that the head of the Chinese Communist Party, General Secretary Xi Jinping, is whistling through the graveyard.

in order to understand the underlying structure you have to deal in TFR, or Total
Fertility rate.  That is how many children a woman produces in a lifetime, on average.  The usual number is 2.1.  Nine out ten women have two and the tenth has three.  This allows for child deaths at birth or in childhood.  Mr Gordon Chang goes on:

Beijing has not announced births for last year, but early numbers indicate they plummeted from 2019.  Births in the household registration—hukou—system plunged 14.9% to 10,035,000 last year.  Because births so registered constitute about 80% of total births, He Yafu, a demographer, estimates total births for the country last year came in at 12,540,000.

Yi [Yi Fuxian of the University of Wisconsin-Madison] told me that the number of births for the country was in reality about 8 million and could not have exceeded 10 million.

Again, Yi looks correct.  Provinces and other governmental units have reported data ahead of the census, and births were down more than 30% in some locations.

The big issue is China’s trajectory.  Official media is cagey about a critical figure, the country’s total fertility rate, generally the number of children per female reaching child-bearing age.  The official China Daily reports that Lu Jiehua of Peking University believes the country’s TFR, as the rate is known, “has fallen below 1.7.”

In any event, China’s population will shrink fast. The Chinese Academy of Social Sciences projects China’s population will halve by 2100 if the TFR drops from 1.6 to 1.3.

China’s TFR, however, is far lower than 1.3.  If its TFR stabilizes at 1.2—1.2 [it] would represent a big increase—China will have a population of only 480 million by the end of the century.

In the US we are handling this with immigration.  A map shows Massachusetts at 1.7, below replacement level.  Since I moved here in 1994 we have gone from ten US Representatives to nine.  That is because we lost population compared with the rest of the nation.  The same thing will be happening to China, slowly at first and then in a rush.  The way Author Ernest Hemingway described Bankruptcy in The Sun Also Rises, "Gradually and Then Suddenly."

Hat tip to the InstaPundit.

Regards  —  Cliff