Rethinking The Population Crisis

A crisis is developing among the nearly 100 million households throughout China, one that has been building gradually and will affect the country greatly in the near future. This crisis involves the imminent risk of negative population growth (NPG).

It's hard to imagine that China, for years concerned about a population explosion, could be worried about too little growth. The country has a population of 1.32 billion people, and though that total is still going up, the increases are getting smaller and smaller. So even though China's population has increased since 2000, when compared with the previous generation in terms of the actual number of children born, the birthrate has declined 40 percent.

According to demographic researchers, Chinese couples have an average of only 1.5 children, which is well below the replacement rate of 2.1.  That means the population will inevitably begin declining in the near future. The impact will be huge, all but unavoidable and may take a century to reverse.

In terms of the country's policy on population control, 2010 will be a crucial year   because of three key factors. First, the consistently low birth rate since the 1990s will cause a noticeable contraction in newly available labor. The section of the population between 20 and 24 years of age will decrease sharply from 125 million in 2010 to just 68 million in 2020, a 50 percent decline in only 10 years.

Second, the government will soon initiate a new nationwide census. This survey will once again confirm that China's birth rate is extremely low and the population is gradually getting older. (One reason: Chinese life expectancy is getting longer, increasing 16 percent from 62 years in 1970 to 73 in 2007.)

Third, 2010 is the 30th anniversary of the first significant implementation of the One Child Policy. Calls for change will become more intense, and policymakers will face more and more pressure to reform population policies. 

China is not alone among low birth-rate countries facing such attendant social problems as aging labor forces and rising social security burdens. Unlike the latter half of the 20th century when the world witnessed a rapid increase in population, in the 21st century many countries, including Japan, Russia and South Korea, have already entered an unprecedented period of low birth rates and even what experts call "extremely low birth rates."

Unlike other countries, however, China still enforces strict population control. China's family planning policies appeared over 30 years ago and are now primarily characterized by the One Child Policy introduced in 1979 and implemented in the 1980s. Since then, the policy has been slightly adjusted on several occasions for both the urban and rural populations. But currently, over 63 percent of couples in China are permitted to have only one child.

Largely because of the restrictions of the One Child Policy, China has produced 104 million "single children." These youngsters account for approximately one third of the makeup of the total households in the country. Not only are they the country's future taxpayers, these sibling-less children will also bear the burden of supporting their parents as they get older. This pressure and subsequent risk to family cohesiveness will greatly surpass that of any previous generation in China.

An even more serious problem is that as long as the current family planning policies remain in place, thousands upon thousands of single children will continue to be born and the risk of labor shortages and lack of care for the elderly will only intensify. In addition, societal problems related to China's gender imbalance – according to one study, China has 119 male births for every 100 girls, compared with 107 to 100 in industrialized countries -- will become increasingly severe.

The unfortunate reality is that policymakers in the last century were unable to predict the negative consequences of the population programs and do not now see any urgency to reform them. Even though academics have already reached a common understanding on the necessity to institute policy changes, no real reforms have been able to get off the ground. This lack of progress can be explained by examining four long-standing and commonly held misconceptions.

The first misconception relates to the idea of "population determinism," which was propagated widely over 30 years ago in order to control the population growth rate. The easiest example of this oversimplified theory involves thinking of economic output as a "cake" that is largely unrelated to the total population. The fundamental theory behind the idea is that "the fewer people there are to eat the cake, the bigger the individual slices will be."

This seemingly reasonable argument has had a hard time standing up to scientific examination. When this so-called population denominator theory started losing ground in academic and leadership circles, the idea was transplanted into the arenas of natural resources and the environment. The logic was that because natural resources are finite, as the total population increased, per capita possession of each resource would subsequently decrease.

But this is simply not the case. Statistics show that from 1990 to 2007, oil consumption in China increased 189 percent, natural gas consumption increased 375 percent, and electricity consumption has increased 424 percent. Yet during the same period China's total population increased by a mere 15.6 percent. Clearly, China's rapid increase in energy consumption is largely the result of the country's economic growth and not simply due to an increase in population.

On a similar note, population growth alone cannot be used to explain increases in environmental pollution. From 1994 to 2004, China's total carbon dioxide emissions rose from 4.06 billion tons to 6.11 billion tons, an increase of 50.49 percent over ten years, which is an average increase of 4.87 percent per year. For the same period the average annual rate of population growth was only 0.812 percent, not even one-fifth of the average annual rate of carbon dioxide emissions increases.

Despite a continuous growth in population, technological advancements can still help reduce environmental pollution and resource consumption. From 2000 to 2004, exhaust emissions from Chinese industry rose 72 percent while sulfur dioxide emissions rose 13 percent. Yet during the same period, the proportion of sulfur dioxide emissions caused by individuals actually decreased from 19 percent in 2000 to 16 percent in 2004.

The second common misconception relates to those who equate normal birth control measures with the One Child Policy. In the early 1970s, high birth rates combined with slowing mortality rates to produce a rapid population increase. In response, the central authorities began implementing family planning policies, including the promotion of contraceptive measures and the popularization of new birth control technology. The response was not only timely, it was also deeply welcomed by a vast number of Chinese women of child-bearing age.

In fact, even before the government actively promoted the policies of "getting married later, practicing birth intervals, and having fewer children" in the early 1970s, many couples had already taken the initiative to seek out and use contraceptives. The biggest decrease in China's birth rate did not occur after the implementation of the One Child Policy in the 1980s, but a decade earlier. This period became known as China's "golden era for family planning."

The fact that China's most successful measures to control population growth occurred well before the One Child Policy points to the limited and short-term effectiveness of such artificial control measures. A more useful course would be for the government to continue developing the economy, promoting education and popularizing birth control technology and awareness. The majority of appeals for reforming China's family planning policies currently call for the immediate abolishment of the One Child Policy, and not for getting rid of the overall programs for population control and family planning.

The third misconception relates to those who believe there is no harm in waiting until China reaches zero population growth before instituting policy reforms. This notion reflects a lack of basic knowledge in demographics. One of the most basic laws of demographic change states that existing birth rates and mortality rates not only influence a country's current population growth, but they also determine future population growth as well as age distribution. China's current population growth is largely due to the fact that current age distribution – almost 50 percent of the population is of childbearing age -- has lead to a birth rate slightly higher than the mortality rate. It is not because couples are having too many children.

When China's central authorities first began implementing the One Child Policy, many were already aware that it was a rather rash course of action that had few alternatives. The government appealed to the masses to make sacrifices, at the same time stating unequivocally that the policy would be permanent. At the time the government's overall rationale for implementing the One Child Policy included controlling the rapid rise in China's population, reducing consumption and improving the accumulation of capital. Since that time these issues have been largely resolved, so why do we still have to force 100 million families to make senseless sacrifices? Thirty years ago, the right to make financial decisions was returned to households and individuals. When will the fundamental right to choose how many children to have finally be returned to families?

Full Article in Chinese: http://magazine.caing.com/chargeFullNews.jsp?id=100108424&time=2010-01-15&cl=115