A few days ago, the Chinese government announced that for 2022 total birth per 1,000 women was 6.7. The population replacement level of birth should be around 21 per 1,000. It was long thought that the birth rate in the main Chinese cities collapsed during Covid, but this is the first time that it is announced by state media that the birth rate across the entire country has fallen by such a large percentage (in 2019 the World Bank reported 12 birth per 1,000 women).
China may have many faults but they are well aware of the problem. There is no easy fix, the Chinese government has taken a page out of the Swedish model and now provides benefits and incentives for women to have children (instead of penalizing them), but it may all be too late. Demographic tensions are such that by 2048 there will be one worker for every citizen over the age of 65. By far the largest population segment by 2030 will be those over the age of 85. To give a sense of the size of China's population, in 2022, the Chinese workforce shrank by 40 million.
In 2022, according to official statistics, China's population declined by slightly more than 800,000, for the first time since 1961. Again, with a population of about 1,2 billion a reduction of 800,000 is insignificant, except that the trend is known. The 2040 cohort of 20-year-old has already been born. The only thing that China can do, is to extend the working age beyond 65.
Immigration is not the solution for China, simply because to make a difference the numbers would have to be significant, and in the context of China's own population objectives it is simply impossible, not to be too crude but the Chinese government has done all it can to reduce birthrate in non-Han Chinese population, immigration would go against that official strategy.
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