\n\n“China\u2019s population drop isn\u2019t the result of a single, acute crisis, but years of policy decisions and cultural and economic shifts that have led this nation of 1.4 billion people to where it is today: facing an aging and shrinking population for the foreseeable future.”
…
“As much as China\u2019s aging and eventual shrinking was a demographic inevitability as it became richer and more modern, the particular speed at which that transition is occurring, and the particular challenges that pace will present, are Beijing\u2019s own doing.”
…
“In 2015, the Chinese government did something it almost never does: It admitted it made a mistake, at least implicitly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The ruling Communist Party announced<\/strong><\/a> that it was ending its historic and coercive one-child policy, allowing all married couples to have up to two children.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The one-child policy had helped lead to the mother of all demographic dividends, the term for the economist boost created when a country\u2019s birth and death rates both decline<\/a>. Between 1980 and 2015, China\u2019s working-age population grew from 594 million to a little over 1 billion<\/strong><\/a>. China\u2019s dependency ratio \u2014 the total young and elderly population relative to the working-age population \u2014 fell from over 68 percent in 1980 to less than 38 percent in 2015,which meant more workers for every non-working person.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n …<\/p>\n\n\n\n “But no fuel burns forever, and over the past decade, hundreds of millions<\/strong><\/a> of Chinese have hit retirement age<\/strong><\/a>, with a plummeting number of young people to replace them. So the slogans went<\/strong><\/a> from \u201cHaving only one child is good\u201d to \u201cOne is too few, while two are just right.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n How did the Chinese people react? Not by having more children. By 2021, China\u2019s total fertility rate (that is, the number of expected births per woman over the course of their reproductive lifetime) had fallen to just 1.15<\/strong><\/a>, nearly a full child below the replacement rate of 2.1. (That\u2019s two to replace each parent, plus a slight extra to make up for children who might die before they reach adulthood”<\/p>\n\n\n\n …<\/p>\n\n\n\n “For all its power and aggregate wealth \u2014 it is by most accounts the world\u2019s second-largest economy<\/a> \u2014 on a per capita basis, it\u2019s still a middle-income country at best<\/a>. To reach anything like a per capita parity with a country like the UK, let alone the US, would require years more of high-powered economic growth that will be increasingly difficult to pull off in an aging nation. In the end, China could get old before it gets rich<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And if China can\u2019t grow faster, the elderly will bear the brunt of the cost. A 2013 study estimated that nearly a quarter of China\u2019s seniors live below the poverty line<\/a>, and the country \u2014 like many others in East Asia, including richer nations like Japan and South Korea \u2014 has little in the way of old-age support<\/a>. That was less of a problem when older adults could count on being taken care of by their children, but decades of the one-child policy has left an inverted pyramid known as \u201c4-2-1,\u201d<\/a> with four grandparents and two parents depending on one child.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As more and more young Chinese choose to go without children altogether<\/a> \u2014 pursuing the \u201cdouble income, no kids\u201d lifestyle \u2014 more and more elderly Chinese will have no familial support whatsoever, with one survey projecting<\/a> 79 million childless older adults in China by 2050. And those trends will reinforce each other \u2014 younger Chinese are already citing<\/a> the burden of caring for elderly parents as one reason to have fewer or no children.” <\/p>\n\n\n\n …<\/p>\n\n\n\n “Beyond ending the one-child policy, the Chinese government has begun offering financial inducements to couples to have more children, following in the footsteps<\/a> of other countries that have faced demographic deficits.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Shanghai\u00a0will give<\/a>\u00a0mothers 60 days of additional parental leave, while Shenzhen has joined other Chinese cities in giving subsidies \u2014 $1,476 in its case \u2014 to couples who have a third child. But don\u2019t expect these movesto make a major difference in birth rates. While such financial incentives might prompt couples to have a child earlier than they had planned, there\u2019s\u00a0little evidence<\/a>\u00a0the programs can convince a childless couple to have a kid, or lastingly increase birthrates.”\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n