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Opinion | China’s population crisis: the country might grow old before it grows rich
- While internal migration has boosted development in parts of China, it cannot change the facts of low fertility and population ageing
- If the fertility decline cannot be reversed, China must turn to technological innovation and other adaptations, and set a realistic population policy
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China’s shrinking, ageing population has become a social problem.
Although the government began to relax the decades-old one-child policy in 2014 (by allowing couples to have a second child if either spouse is an only child), and adopted a universal two-child policy in 2016, the fertility rate has not improved as expected. China’s total fertility rate remains well below the replacement level, especially in urban regions.
The one-child policy, which was introduced in 1979, did not immediately slow population growth. The number of births was still on an ascending trend for eight years, reaching around 25.5 million in 1987. But since then, births have been trending down. Between 2003 and 2011, annual births hovered at 16 million, almost 10 million lower than the last peak in 1987.
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The easing of the one-child limit from 2014 made a difference to the trend, but it was a blip. There was a sudden increase in the number of births, from 16.6 million in 2015 to 17.9 million in 2016. In subsequent years, the number continued to drop.
In 2020, only about 10.03 million newborns were registered in China, a steep decline of 15 per cent compared to 2019, according to statistics from the Ministry of Public Security.
We are not optimistic that the universal two-child policy will reverse the fertility decline, and resolve the issue of population ageing, given that small families have become the norm in China. This could prove problematic for a country that is hoping to bypass the “middle-income trap”: China could very well grow old before it grows rich.
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