In July, on the 35th anniversary of World Population Day, the United Nations released a new report that reduced the world’s peak population prediction by 100 million – from 10.4 billion to 10.3 billion – and predicted that the Earth will reach that peak in 2084, two years earlier than previously thought. This is not the first time the U.N. has adjusted its forecast downward. In 2019, the organization projected a peak world population close to 11 billion, with growth extending into the 2100s.
A significant reason for the downsizing is China, which was not long ago the world’s most populous country. Two years ago, when China first reported that its population was beginning to decline, the U.N. projected that the country’s population could shrink by 45% by the year 2100, from today’s 1.4 billion to 771 million. Now the U.N. has cut its prediction for 2100 to 633 million. That difference of 138 million people is almost the size of Russia’s current population (144 million) and is larger than the current population of Japan (125 million).
The reduction can be attributed to the U.N.’s assumptions about the rate at which women in China are having children. For more than three decades now, China’s fertility rate has been below the replacement level of about two children per woman. When Beijing lifted its one-child policy in 2016, in place since 1980, the government hoped that fertility levels would rebound; instead, they have continued to decline. The government’s new pronatalist policy, which includes calling for couples to have three children, has had no discernable effect on birth rates. Instead, the fertility level has dipped to an ultralow rate of barely one child per woman. As a consequence, China now faces the daunting challenges that come with rapid population aging, such as a smaller young labor force and a growing elderly population. At the moment, about 15% of the Chinese population is 65 and older. That’s three times the size it was in 1990. In the next 25 years, this share is expected to double to 30%.
Hard choices
A smaller and older population will weigh on Chinese leaders as the challenges associated with such demographic shifts become increasingly pressing. How Beijing addresses these challenges will have far-reaching global geopolitical implications.
As Chinese health care and pension expenses rise alongside a rapidly swelling elderly population, the country’s leaders will have to make hard decisions – decisions they have mostly talked about in the past but avoided implementing. One example is China’s long delay in raising its official retirement ages (currently 60 for men and 55 for women), which were set half a century ago. As its population continues to age, the Chinese government will have no choice but to resort to raising taxes, curtailing benefits, or both. Leaders will also have to choose between funding pensions and medical expenses or increasing military and security spending. Over the past decade, spending on the former has increased faster.
These are hard constraints and hard choices. Failing to address them will threaten social stability and the government’s political legitimacy. When the government enforced a one-child policy, it implicitly promised to help with elderly support when the time came. That time has now arrived.
Read the rest of this piece at The Bush Center.
A Guggenheim Fellow 2024, Wang Feng is a professor of sociology at the University of California, Irvine, and a leading expert on global demographic change. He is also the author of China’s Age of Abundance: Origins, Ascendance, and Aftermath.
Photo: Yichang via Wikimedia under CC 4.0 License.
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