Philip Bowring
China’s leaders have known for some time that they have a demographics problem, with their concern growing at the threat to future prosperity and dynamism. The population decline is set to accelerate, with China’s male-female imbalance presenting limiting factors not faced by the rest of Asia.
The median age is already 40.2, nearly the same as older developed countries such as the UK (40.8) and higher than the United States at 38.5. China’s fertility rate appears to be about 1.1, or half the population replacement level.
Various programs in China, as in other countries such as South Korea with similar challenges, are focused on issues such as financial support for children, greater equality in the workplace, provision of nursery facilities, etc. Such incentives make sense but so far have had limited success in other countries. They may yet have an impact in China – though it is rather more difficult to force couples to have more children than it was to limit them to one child, as was the case with the One Child policy introduced in 1979 and only formally abandoned in 2015.
But compared with other countries facing the same birth collapse, China’s prospects for raising the fertility rate face a major additional obstacle, the imbalance between numbers of men and women of the childbearing age bracket. This is the indirect consequence of One Child – a deep-rooted patriarchal bias towards male children which led to widespread abortion of female foetuses. This is not just a product of the past. Although the imbalance of sexes at birth has narrowed, there is still a significant gap.
This year, according to UN World Population Prospects 2024, there are 44.4 million men in the 25-29 age group, which should be on the cusp of procreation, but only 38.4 million women. The gap in absolute terms diminishes with the subsequent cohorts but remains in double-digit percentages.