\n\n“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<\/a> that it was ending its historic and coercive one-child policy, allowing all married couples to have up to two children. That was how dire China\u2019s demographic future had become.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The one-child policy had helped lead to the mother of all demographic dividends, as China\u2019s working-age population grew from 594 million in 1980 to a little over 1 billion in 2015<\/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 More young workers who had fewer young or old dependents to care for was the fuel in China\u2019s economic rocket engine<\/a>. But no fuel burns forever, and over the past decade, hundreds of millions<\/a> of Chinese have hit retirement age<\/a>, with a plummeting number of young people to replace them. So the slogans went<\/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 …<\/p>\n\n\n\n “If population decline can come for the first country to reach 1 billion people, it can come for anyone. And while China\u2019s demography was skewed by the one-child policy, dozens of countries without a similarly coercive program have seen near equally drastic dropoffs in fertility, much older demographics, and population decline, either now or soon. The most recent numbers forJapan: 1.3<\/a> births per woman, and a population shrinking by 0.5 percent<\/a>. ForItaly: 1.2<\/a> births, and population shrinking by 0.6 percent<\/a>. ForPortugal: 1.4<\/a> and 0 percent<\/a> growth. ForRussia: 1.5<\/a> and shrinking by0.4 percent<\/a>.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n