By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers

The World's Second Most Populous Country

U.S. politicians have begun to lament the country’s falling birthrate. Their concern is legitimate; The United States’ total fertility rate has fallen from a robust average of 2.12 births per woman in 2007 to less than 1.7 births per woman today. (Demographic experts generally identify 2.1 as the rate needed to keep the population stable absent immigration.) From a smaller tax base and a shrinking labor pool to higher pension burdens that could crowd out spending on things such as education and infrastructure, falling birthrates represent a looming social and economic drag on U.S. prosperity.

This discourse, however, misses key context—namely, that the demographic situations in China, Russia, and the European Union are an order of magnitude worse. Far from being a drag, the United States’ relatively strong demographic hand endows it with a key advantage in an age of great-power competition with China and Russia.

While the United States may be in a demographic transition, its competitors are increasingly in demographic turmoil. Nowhere is this more apparent than Chin in. In less than a decade, its birth rate has plunged from 1.81 births per woman to 1.08, according to the official figures, placing it among the lowest anywhere. Chinese authorities anticipate a modest rebound, speculating that fertility rates will rise above 1.3 by 2035, a figure that would still spell demographic doom for the world’s second-most populous country.

But far from recovering, a confluence of demographic and social trends suggests that the Chinese birthrate still has further to fall.

Start with the fact that after decades of the one-child policy, there are dramatically fewer Chinese citizens able to have children in the first place. There are, for example, 216 million Chinese citizens in their 50s but just 181 million citizens in their 20s, meaning that the population is all but destined to fall since the pool of potential parents is now so much smaller.

Even worse, a societal preference for sons has created a severe shortage of women. There are a whopping 11.7 million more Chinese men in their 20s than there are women in the same age bracket. A small portion of this imbalance can be attributed to nature’s slight tendency for boys over girls at childbirth. (Some scientists speculate that human may have evolved this tendency to compensate for higher mortality rates for men later on in the life cycle.)

A much larger share of the imbalance, however, can be attributed to the many sex-selective abortions and the Chinese girls who were put up for adoption during the peak years of gender selection, before government efforts began to close the gender gap. Decades of the one-child policy, in short, have resulted in a shortage of young people and an even greater shortage of young women. Both factors condemn the country to continued demographic decline for the foreseeable future.

Despite the government’s best efforts to convince people to have babies, including a turn to patriarchal language under Chinese President Xi Jinping, new social realities also suggest that China’s ultra-low birthrates are here to stay. Chief among these is a newfound and ingrained cultural preference for small families, especially among the generation of people who grew up without siblings. Chinese women surveyed about their preferences, for example, reported an ideal family size that averages to just 1.7 children, far lower than almost everywhere else in the world. This means that even if Beijing was able to afford every woman the perfect conditions for raising a family, Chinese fertility would still be far below the threshold required to maintain population size.

China’s relentless urbanization, then, promises to act as a continued check on Beijing’s ambitions to raise birthrates. Most worrying for Beijing is the fact China has a lot of room left to urbanize: Less than two-thirds of Chinese citizens live in cities, compared to 81 percent of South Koreans and 92 percent of Japanese. Beijing will find efforts to raise the birthrate even harder as a greater share of the 34 percent of its citizens currently living in rural areas decamps to cities.

 

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