Counting babies in China (and elsewhere)

THE EDITOR, Madam:

In 2014, Chinese film-maker Zhang Yimou and his wife paid a fine of $1.2 million for having a third child, which was against the law. They didn’t go to jail. It was treated more like a very big parking ticket, but it was assessed according to the parents’ income and it was meant to hurt.

Zhang just had bad timing. Had he waited one more year, he would have kept that money because having a third child was declared legal in 2015. Indeed, under the new pro-natal rules announced last month, he and his wife now would be entitled to $500 a year for each child under three (but he’s not getting his money back).

The Chinese regime has been obsessed with its population for half a century – and getting it wrong at almost every turn. The original ‘One Child Policy’ was imposed in 1979, only three years after Mao Zedong’s death. Under the Great Helmsman, a huge population was a good thing, but subsequent planners thought it would hold China back.

Between 1970 and 1978, just before the policy was inflicted on 600 million Chinese, the fertility rate plummeted from an average of 5.8 children per woman to only 2.7. It has continued to drop more slowly, passing through 1.7 in 2015 and bottoming out at 1.0 in 2023.

The latest estimate is that China’s population, now 1.4 billion, will be back down to 600 million by 2100. A much larger share of that population than usual will be past working age as is always the case when populations fall for non-catastrophic reasons. And the pro-birth measures that the government is now rolling out will have little effect. They rarely do.

It is not just China; it’s the new normal. South Korea never had a one-child policy, but it shows an almost identical trend line, dropping from a fertility rate of 6.1 children per female in 1960 to 2.8 babies per woman in 1980, and only 0.75 children per woman in 2023.

Even China’s One-Child Policy, with its forced abortions, sterilisations, and cash penalties, achieved little. The regime still claims that it spared the country another 400 million mouths to feed, but leading academics estimate that it avoided 100 million births at most over three decades.

The real takeaway is that declining populations almost everywhere except in Africa and bits of the Middle East should not be seen only as a problem. They bring with them problems like a higher dependency ratio (more elderly people depending on a shrinking workforce), but managing this kind of ‘problem’ is what governments are there for.

We got from two billion to eight billion in the past 80 years, but the old place is still essentially the same. If we are now heading back down to three or four billion in the next century (as we probably are), we shouldn’t feel particularly threatened.

GWYNNE DYER