China Will Lose a Billion People By 2100

China has announced Tuesday its first population decline Since 1961. According to the official National Bureau of Statistics, 9.56 million people were born last year and 10.41 millions died.

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China’s total population Officials announced that the 2022 population would be 1.412 billion. This is 850,000 less than in the previous year.

The country’s long demographic slide has begun. By the end of this century, China’s population will be about a third of what it is today. In the absence of disease or war, the projected decline will be the greatest in history.

There are indications that Chinese officials have been substantially overstating China’s population. The population, according to the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Yi Fuxian writing in the middle of last year, was 1.28 billion, not the official 1.41 billion. China’s population began to decline, Yi wroteIn 2018, He pointed out that Beijing’s demographic numbers have not been consistent with other data, official and unofficial.

In any case, the country is set for a sharp drop.

For example: projections issued by the U.N.’s Department of Economic and Social AffairsThese are amazing. The organization’s World Population Prospects 2022, which is roughly based on Beijing’s official figures, shows a high variant estimate for 2100 of 1.153 billion people. The median variant is 766.67 million.

The low variant—the estimate that will be closest to the mark from all indications—is 487.93 billion. The U.N.’s low number has dropped. According to 2019 estimates, it was 684.05million.

Even the 2022 low version looks too high. Demographers at Xian Jiaotong University, late 2021 estimated that China’s population could fall by half within 45 years, assuming the country maintained a Total Fertility Rate—generally the average number of children per female of child-bearing age—of 1.3.

China’s TFR, by contrast, was 1.18 last year, the lowest in the world’s ten most populous nations. Yi thinks it could have been as low at 0.9 in 2020. If Yi is right, it was lower than last year’s TFR.

However, the TFR will likely drop in the coming years regardless of what it is today. A survey by the Communist Youth League found that 44% of urban Chinese women aged 18-26 were female. do not intend to get married. That’s significant because an unmarried female cannot obtain a required permit to have a birth.

China’s demographic problems go beyond women rejecting cultural imperatives to find a husb. Pervasive pessimism and economic decline They also impact the willingness of couples and their desire to have children.

Some people don’t believe China is in crisis yet. “They are not in a doomsday scenario right away,” said Paul Cheung, Singapore’s former chief statistician, to the BBC. China, according Cheung, has “plenty of manpower” “a lot of lead time.”

All this is true, because demographic changes occur over decades, but Beijing’s plans to reverse population changes have been noticeably unsuccessful—as are those of most governments. “The measures taken to boost birth rates have been far too little and too late, and were completely overwhelmed by the impact of Covid Zero on birth rates,” said Bloomberg News: Christopher Beddor, Gavekal Dragonomics “The core issue is that there’s only so much policy can accomplish in this realm, because declining birth rates are driven by deep structural factors.”

Beijing abandoned its One-Child Policy, and switched to its TwoChild Policy at the start of 2016. In 2021, China adopted a Three-Child Policy. However, there has been no increase in births. In fact, last year witnessed the lowest birth rate in the history of the People’s Republic of China.

As the official China Daily stated December 2020 “the trends are irreversible.” If “the true power of China’s rise is a powerful reproductive force”—as many of its people believe—then the magnificent Chinese state is relentlessly heading in the opposite direction.

“Sorry, we are the last generation, thanks!” was a popular—and censored—hashtag in China last May.

So, why is anyone outside of China so concerned about Chinese demography.

Brahma Chaellaney has the answer. “Believing China has a narrow window of strategic opportunity to modify the global order in its favor before it faces a demographic crisis, stalled economic growth, and an unfavorable global environment, Xi is taking major risks,” tweeted On Tuesday, the famous Indian strategist.

Xi Jinping You may be right “the East is rising and the West is declining”—a money line from his speeches—but that view will be exceedingly hard to maintain as people begin to think of China as an irreversibly declining society. He will rush to get his goals. “Chinese dream.”

This could also mean that Xi may have a low threshold for risk and take others by surprise.

India is one example. China made another offensive against Arunachal Pradesh last month with a large-scale land incursion. China must dismantle India before it is too late, argue some Chinese thinkers.

Incidentally, many believe India’s population has just overtaken China’s. Yi, a University of Wisconsin-Madison scholar thinks India overtook China last year.

Xi surely knows that India will have almost a billion more people than China by the time India’s population levels off, sometime in the middle of this century.

China isn’t about to be jealous India—or others, for that matter—alone.

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Gordon G. Chang is a 19FortyFive Contributing Editor and the author of The Coming Collapse of China as well as The Great U.S. China Tech War. Follow him on twitter @GordonGChang. 

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