China’s baby bust is happening faster than many expected, raising fears of a demographic collapse. And coping with the fallout may now be complicated by miscalculations made more than 40 years ago.
The rapid shift under way today wasn’t projected by the architects of China’s one-child policy—one of the biggest social experiments in history, instituted in 1980. At the time, governments around the world feared overpopulation would hold back economic growth. A Moscow-trained missile scientist led the push for China’s policy, based on tables of calculations that applied mathematical models used to calculate rocket trajectories to population growth.
Four decades later, China is aging much earlier in its development than other major economies did. The shift to fewer births and more elderly citizens threatens to hold back economic growth. In a generation that grew up without siblings, young women are increasingly reluctant to have children—and there are fewer of them every year. Beijing is at a loss to change the mindset brought about by the policy.
Births in China fell by more than 500,000 last year, according to recent government data, accelerating a population drop that started in 2022. Officials cited a quickly shrinking number of women of childbearing age—more than three million fewer than a year earlier—and acknowledged “changes in people’s thinking about births, postponement of marriage and childbirth.”
Some researchers argue the government underestimates the problem, and the population began to shrink even earlier.
I wonder where China would be right now population wise if it wasn’t for the one child policy.
Look at the population growth rate of India for an example.
Yes and no.
As a nation industrializes and gains access better medicine, the survival rate infants and mothers go up. This leads to a birthrate increase.
That better medicine also includes effective birth control. As birth control becomes accepted, the birth rate naturally falls off.
The next thing that causes a birthrate fall off is the mood of the potential parents. If they think their children will have as good a life or better then they had, then those people will have children. If they think their children will have a worse life, they will not.
India is still in the process of industrialization. Birth control is not widely accepted, and parental optimism is high.
In China birth control is more accepted, and currently parental optimism is low.
It seems it’s also very correlated with education (of women)
Still your points stand, just wanted to add that as well
China enacted the one child policy (which this article talks about) in an era where they were undergoing rapid industrialization (as you mentioned, India is going through it now). Today’s parental optimism (or lack thereof) is separate from that.