Declining birth rates are not just a problem for China to deal with

I suspect Beijing is worried about what demographic changes will do to China’s place in the world – and they shouldn’t be the only ones, writes Hamish McRae

The birth rate has been declining in China since the 1960s (AFP via Getty)

China’s population is set to decline, and the authorities have become seriously worried about the consequences. But while an authoritarian society can force people to have fewer children, it may not be able to push them to have more.

That is the background to the decision this week by China’s leadership to allow couples to have up to three children. The one-child policy, introduced in the face of what seemed at the time to be an overly rapid increase in the Chinese population, may well have cut the birth rate – though in fact it was already falling swiftly from an average of more than six children per mother in the 1960s to fewer than three by the late 1970s. (Replacement rate is normally calculated as an average of 2.1 babies per woman.) But the easing of that policy to two children in 2015 does not seem to have increased family size. According to the World Bank, China’s fertility rate has been running at between 1.6 and 1.7 babies per mother since the mid-1990s.

So China has had a generation wherein births were below replacement rate. That would, without net inward migration, inevitably cut the size of the population, and this is projected to happen within the next few years. Actually, there is a further reason for the population to decline, which is the shortfall in the number of girls being born. According to the Scientific American, there are 119 boy babies for every 100 girls born in China today.

The most recent UN study on population dynamics expects the Chinese population to peak around 2030 and to decline thereafter. Its median estimate is for the current figure of about 1.45bn to decline to 1.075bn by the end of this century. However, there are huge uncertainties when looking that far forward, and last year an influential study published in The Lancet contained an estimate that the population might fall to around 750m by 2100.

This prospect raises two key questions: does it matter? And what can be done about it?

Well, it clearly matters to the Chinese leadership, or they would not be changing the policy. There will be a host of reasons why. One is the problem of running a society where the size of the working population is falling. They look at Japan, which is actually managing rather well at supporting its elderly people and has the longest life expectancy in the world. But while Japan is a successful society, it has a slow-growing economy, and has become more conservative and inward-looking. To take one measure of the extent to which Japan is becoming less interested in the rest of the world, there has been a sharp fall in the number of Japanese students studying abroad. It is a far cry from the 1980s, when the Japanese were triumphantly buying up US trophy assets and the US was worried about a Japanese global takeover.

I suspect Beijing is worried less about looking after the elderly and more about what its demography will do to China’s place in the world. It is on track to replace the US as the world’s largest economy some time around 2030, and will remain so for much of the rest of this century. But if its population declines as that Lancet study projects, it will not remain top dog. It is just an estimate, but the paper in question thought that by 2100 the US might have regained its pole position, in part as a result of the declining population of China, with China becoming number two again.

If your vision of China is that it is the rightful leader of the world, then the thought of its being pushed aside by the US is not easy to contemplate.

So what can China do? Many countries have sought to increase their population, either by encouraging immigration (Canada is a good example) or by increasing the birth rate (France has family-friendly policies). But a combination of higher living standards and women’s education seems to be holding down birth rates across the developed world. In Shanghai, China’s richest city, the fertility rate is the among the lowest in the world – below 1 – while in Beijing there was a 24 per cent fall in registered births last year.

The three-child policy is a start, but I would expect it to have only a marginal impact. What really needs to happen, surely, is a close look at the reasons so many people in China and elsewhere do not choose to have larger families. This is a huge issue for humankind that we should all be worrying about, not just China.