How China's Population Decline Could Alter the Global Economy Transcript

The world’s most populous country has hit an historic turning point. Today, China announced its first population decline in six decades. China’s National Bureau of Statistics said the country had 850,000 fewer people at the end of last year than in 2021, bringing its total population to 1.4 billion. China’s birth rate also hit a record low last year.

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Mei Fong joins us now, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author and journalist with more than a decade of reporting experience in Asia. Her book, One Child, explores the implications of China’s former one child policy.

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Mei, it’s great to have you here. And this marks a new milestone in China’s deepening demographic crisis. To what can this decline be attributed?

Well, Jeff, China’s not unusual in having seen a population decline. Most modern nations where women are educated and has smaller families do see that. What’s unusual about China is that this transition has occurred at a much accelerated speed. What takes most developed nations maybe 50 years to arrive at this point. China has arrived in one generation, and that’s become the one child policy.

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And what this means is it’s very unique, in that not only does it have fewer people, it also has a very bad mix of fewer people, in that a large portion of the population is very male. And that’s because of the one child policy. So the challenges for China growing ahead is that it will be hard for it to overcome this population decline because of these factors, the fact that it’s very wholly male. A hugely elderly population will make it much, much harder.

This new data came alongside the announcement of China’s worst economic performance in nearly half a century. So what are the implications for China’s economy?

Well, the population decline is one of the economic headwinds that China faces. It’s not the only one, but it is quite a difficult one to overcome, with a one in four of Chinese people will be a retiree by 2050. So the worker to retiree ratio is going to be huge. And some of the results of that will definitely impede economic growth. For example, pension shortfalls, huge public health implications, big economic implications for the growth markets. The kind of markets where we see innovation, where we see creativity are typically younger workforce markets and not elderly populations.

How concerned is the Chinese government about this decline and the potential impacts on Chinese society?

Very. In the most recent speech that Xi Jinping made, he actually talked about the need to talk about population and the need to support and grow population for first time. And for Chinese leaders, where they make a lot of very oblique references, this was about as explicit as you made that. And of course, one of the very clear ways that we saw that the Chinese government is very worried about it is the sudden whipsawing of going from a one child policy to a two and a three child policy in a relative span of just five years. The one child policy was 30 plus years. And now, we’ve gone one, two, three in just less than five years, five, six years.

So what then would a solution look like? Is it as simple as encouraging people to have more children?

No, it hasn’t worked at all. You went from having just one child to just one more please and then one more. And obviously for the last five or six years it hasn’t worked.

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The solution I think will come in a variety of ways. Yes, incentives will have to be a part of it, because China has, I think, more historically gone the disincentives routes, punishments, not rewards. And so, they’re starting to go in that route a little bit, but they need to be doing it a lot more.

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And the other part of it also is I think China is very unique because the population now is so very male and it’s so very elderly. The statistic is if all of China’s retirees would form their own nation, they would be one of the world’s top population rates after China and India, which is poised to overtake China now, as the largest population. Then they would be senior China itself. And so, these are very unique challenges for China that no other nation that’s facing decline faces. And that’s because of the one child policy.

Mei Fong, thanks so much for your insights. We appreciate it.

Thank you.