2024-01-17 15:22:52
The Chinese population already adds two years in Red numbers. India has already replaced it as the leading demographic power and there is no sense of an end to a decline that pushes the country into a very delicate economic context of declining manpower y tensions in it pension system. If one thinks of the Chinese as a uniform mass that only moves at the impulse of the Government, one can take a look at their olympic passatism of desperate requests.
China had long feared that it would decline again after those famines of the Great Leap Forward that decimated the country in 1961. It happened last year, with a reduction of 850,000 inhabitants. And this year, far from being corrected, the negative balance has climbed to 2.08 million. More negative records: its birth rate has fallen in one year from 6.77 children per thousand inhabitants to 6.39, the lowest since the foundation of the People’s Republic in 1949. There are 9.02 million births in 2023 compared to 9.56 the previous year.
Las deaths of the last year, 690,000 more than the previous one, shed light on the mystery of the bill that was charged at the beginning of the year for the blowing up of dams against the covid and the immediate tsunami of infections in a country that had not known it. Those almost 700,000 deaths, the most likely total number caused by the pandemic in China, are much more credible than the ridiculous official numbers, but they certify that that policy so reviled in the West prevented a death toll. USA, with a quarter of the Chinese population, suffered 1.2 million deaths. With that proportion, China He got five million.
Wasted efforts
The efforts of Beijing to stimulate births are vacant. China withdraws one-child policyhe largest demographic experiment in history, in 2015. First he allowed the couple and then the trio. He expected a ‘baby boom’ and found a timid and short-lived rebound before the declines returned. She has tried almost everything: housing aid, tax discounts, maternity leave… Also appeals to the patriotism. The president, Xi Jinping, has stressed the urgency for women to recover their old domestic roles and policies have been designed from Beijing to promote the culture of marriage and family. The national press has encouraged everyone to participate in “the rejuvenation of the nation.”
Young Chinese marry later or not at all and disdain offspring in flagrant conflict with the traditional confucian values. The reasons are very similar to those that drive birth rates in the West: the high cost of life, the enjoyment of free time and uncertainty. The chinese economy has not enjoyed the expected post-covid rebound and the youth strike It is so high that the Government has stopped publishing the figure.
China It shares the drama with all advanced societies, both European and Asian. Japan suffers the same birth rate (6.3 per thousand inhabitants) while the South Korean rate falls to 4.9. What distinguishes China is the speed of the process and that it has reached the demographic aging before full development. In 2021, its population already exceeded 14% of those over 65 years of age, the threshold of the “old” country, according to the World Bank. In just eleven years, according to their projections, China will already be “super old”, when they concentrate 20% of the population.
A fading miracle
That vast cheap labor that fueled the economic miracle in the factories it disappears. The working age sector, between 16 and 59 years old, shrank by 10.75 million last year, according to the National Statistics Office. Retirees in 2035 will have surpassed 400 million, 120 million more than the total US population. The Academy of Social Sciences calculates that then will dry the pension fund.
This year’s sporadic incidents already hint at the magnitude of the future problem. The elderly have protested in the streets of a handful of cities when they, gripped by the faltering economy, cut their quotas. monthly health coverage. Beijing has ordered local governments to delve into the potential of “silver economy”, in reference to the elderly, with the aim of making them happy and adding drivers of growth. Of all the challenges China faces, internal and external, there is none more urgent and complicated than its demographics.
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