For three decades China’s one-child policy helped power this nation’s economic rise. With fewer mouths to feed, families saved. Poverty fell. Living standards improved.

But a social experiment that worked well in some respects is now threatening the country’s hard-won gains. China’s working-age population — the engine behind its prolific growth — will start shrinking within a few years.

Meanwhile, the ranks of elderly are projected to soar. By the middle of this century, fully a third of China’s population will be age 60 or older, compared with 26% in the United States. China’s projected 438 million senior citizens will outnumber the entire U.S. population.

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The numbers are overwhelming: Over the next 17 years, 350 million rural residents (more than the entire U.S. population today) will leave the farm and move to China’s cities. That will bring the Chinese urban population from just under 600 million today to close to 1 billion, changing China into a country where more than two-thirds of its people are city dwellers, says Jonathan Woetzel, a director in McKinsey’s Shanghai office. The change will reverse China’s centuries-old identity as a largely rural country. Thirty years ago, when China started modernizing its economy, more than 80% of Chinese lived in the countryside. And just six years ago it still was about 60%. Today China is just under 50% urban.

The newly urbanized population will live in eight megacities, those with a population of more than 10 million, as well 15 big cities with populations between 5 million and 10 million. In addition, by 2025 China will probably have at least 221 cities with a population over 1 million, estimates Woetzel. That compares with 35 cities of that scale across all of Europe today. These new urbanites are expected to be a powerful booster of growth: Urban consumption as a share of gross domestic product will most likely rise from 25% today to roughly 33% by 2025. “Urbanization is the engine of the Chinese economy—it is what has driven productivity growth over the last 20 years,” says Woetzel. “And China has the potential to keep doing this for the next 20 years.”

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“Population bonus,” the abundant supply of working-age population in a country, is contributing 27% to China’s per capital GDP growth, said Cai Fang, director of the population and labor economics institute with the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. But with an aging population in China, the population bonus will be exhausted by 2013.

Chinese policy makers are increasingly aware that China not only needs to worry about the overgrowth of population, but also about a changing demographic, especially when China’s baby boomers enter retirement age. Now, these people born in the 1960s and 1970s were or have been at the stage in their lives of getting married and buying homes late last century and early this one. But since 1990, China’s birth rate has been decreasing. According to the 2000 census, there were 69 million of those aged 0-4 years old, half the number for the range aged 10-14.

Many worry that while the baby boomers have pushed up the housing market over the last decade, China will soon be dealing with dwindling demand from the new generation coming of age but with a dramatically small population scale. And this will mean a slipping real estate market and dipping house prices.

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The pressure of rising food prices has afflicted not only China, but reflected a greater global trend driven by complex factors such as population growth, changes in dietary trends as groups were lifted out of poverty, increased demand for biofuels, and climate change.

…Ehrlich was an early force in alerting the public to the problems of overpopulation and resource scarcity, and the environmental consequences of public policy. He has co-authored several books on the subject, including Food Security, Population and Environment, and Population, Sustainability, and Earth’s Carrying Capacity.

To tie these issues to China and discuss the greater global food supply situation, the EO conducted an email interview with Ehrlich.

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…Retaining Beijing as the capital continues to present problems. A city of 20 million people located in such a water-poor area raises concerns. Should the authorities not consider the capacity of the environment? Can we really afford the cost of locating the capital in Beijing? Are we already damaging the balanced growth of the nation?

Quenching Beijing’s thirst has already meant tapping the Hai River and water from neighbouring provinces. Now the Han River is to be diverted for a huge project transferring water from the south to the north. The impact of this project on the lower reaches of the Han River should not be underestimated. It will not necessarily solve water problems in the north, but it may well destroy the environment in the south. Beijing may have moved the Shougang steel plant for the sake of its air quality, but it continues to develop water-intensive industry. Why not move the industry and resources where there is more water? [Full Text]

[Image via Chinadialogue]

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The country faces unprecedented challenges in economic and social spheres as a result of a fast expanding aging population, top officials warned Monday.

With two working people for every retiree between 2030 and 2050, the country is expected to see the end of a decades-long advantage it enjoyed with a low-cost labor market.

Currently, the ratio is 6:1, according to figures from the China National Committee on Aging (CNCA).

“We might encounter the heaviest burden especially after 2030, when the demographic dividend is set to end,” said Yan Qingchun, deputy director of the office of the CNCA. [Full Text]

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Beijing’s population is expected to top 19.5 million by 2015 and climb to 21.4 million by 2020, according to a research report released on weekend. The figure is much more than the city’s target of 18 million for 2020, according to the Strategic Report on Population of Beijing, Tianjin and Hebei,” released at the Beijing Population and Development Forum held in Beijing.

Qu Zhenwu, a professor of Institute of Population Research attached to Renmin University, attributed the rapid population growth in Beijing to continuous influx of migrants. “Although Beijing saw zero growth in natural birth rate for the past five years, its population kept expanding as a result of a mass of migrants,” he said….[Full Text]

(Image from Google Image source)

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Chart of GDP growth and The Population Clock.

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In recent years, Chinese cities have expanded rapidly with their urbanization rate rising steadily over the past half century from 29.04 percent in 1995 to 41.76 percent in 2004. The urban scale has enlarged quickly in the wake of growth in urban population. From 2000 to 2005, China’s completed urban areas rose from 22,439 square kilometers to 32,521 square km with the density of urban population increasing from 442 per sq km to 870 per sq km; and the residential housing space was up from 4.41 billion square kilometers to 10.77 billion square kilometers. [Full text]

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“China’s top family planning official has warned that the country, the world’s most populous, could face a population rebound as the newly rich pay to have more children, state media reported on Monday.

Zhang Weiqing, director of the National Population and Family Planning Commission, also said rural residents were still marrying below the legal marriageable ages of 22 for men and 20 for women, contributing to more births. [Full Text]

- Read also related post More Restrictions on Celebrities’ Family Planning via CDT

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The proportion of people 60 and older is growing faster in China than in any other major country, with the number of retirees set to double between 2005 and 2015, when it is expected to reach 200 million. By midcentury, according to United Nations projections, roughly 430 million people ” about a third of the population ” will be retirees.

That increase will place enormous demands on the country’s finances and could threaten the underpinnings of the Chinese economy, which has thrived for decades on the cheap labor of hundreds of millions of young, uneducated workers from the countryside. Changes in the country’s population structure are taking place hand in hand with changes in the structure of the Chinese family. China’s one-child policy, which began in 1980, means that, beginning with the current generation of young adults, couples will face the difficult task of caring for four parents through old age. [Full text]

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From The Shanghaiist blog:

According to this morning’s Metro Express (Êó∂‰ª£Êä•), officials at Shanghai’s Conference on Population and Family Planning declared yesterday that there were 18.15 million inhabitants of Shanghai at the end of 2006 ” and that doesn’t include migrant workers. The figure is said to be 2.07 million more than 2000. By 2010, the population is expected to exceed 19 million. [Full Text]

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China’s population, the world’s largest, grew by almost 7 million people last year, according to an official report.

China’s National Bureau of Statistics said in a report released late Wednesday that the country’s population was 1,314,480,000 at the end of 2006, an increase of 6.92 million people.

The bureau said males accounted for 51.5 percent of the population, adding that the ratio of males to female newborns stood at 119.25 to 100 in 2006.[Full Text]

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…Chinese hospitals have been submerged in recent months under a tide of pregnant women; newborns are arriving in droves; and companies that manufacture diapers are upping their advertising budgets.

The reason is simple: The Year of the Pig, which began Feb. 18, is a good year to be born…

The government’s family planning department said it has not yet established a nationwide estimate for how many extra babies will be born in the Year of the Pig. But Beijing hospital officials surveying busy birthing and prenatal care wards predicted a 20 percent increase. Extrapolating that to the 16 million births recorded annually across China in recent years would mean a jump of about 3 million babies. [Full Text]

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China is bracing for a ‘mini’ baby boom in 2007 as many young Chinese couples want to have an offspring during the auspicious ‘Year of the Golden Pig’, which comes only once in 60 years.

More members of the generation born under the mandatory ‘one-child’ per couple family policy have reached the age of marriage and child-bearing. A mixture of tradition and superstition means that 2007 will witness a mini baby boom in the world’s most populous nation, officials say. [Full Text]

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Con artists and swindlers in China who try to use fake ID will have a tougher time trying to pass themselves off as someone else now that the public has access to the Ministry of Public Security’s population database.

Anyone can now send a text message or visit the country’s population information center’s website, to check if the name and the ID number of a person’s identity card match. If they do match the ID cardholder’s picture also appears, said the Ministry, adding that no other information is available to ensure a citizen’s privacy is protected.

Completed at the end of 2006, China’s population information database, the world’s largest, contains personal information on 1.3 billion citizens. [Full Text]

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As China embraces female emancipation, more women appear to be expressing interest in postponing pregnancy by having their eggs frozen as they pursue careers and enjoy the independence of youth.

However, by law such services are only available to couples with fertility problems.

More than 260 couples had unfertilized eggs frozen through a process called cryopreservation last year at the Shanghai-based International Peace Women and Children Hospital. [Full Text]

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Shanghai’s rapidly aging population means that there’s a labor force shortage, especially in the 25-35-year-old age group (report in Chinese).

Therefore, Shanghai has to “import” 244,000 workers over the next five years to make up for this. We wonder if they include, in these figures, all the migrants that come anyway.

The report says that families will be allowed to have two kids, subject to certain restrictions. We heard before that two only children in Shanghai, e.g. those born in the late 1970s after the enactment of the one-child policy, could have two children, but we never checked to see if that was a law or just hearsay….[Full Text]

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Fines imposed on Chinese who violate the country’s one-child-only policy may be reduced for the poor, a top family planning official said Tuesday, as authorities stressed a broader approach to population management.

The announcement came a day after state media reported that many Chinese believe it is unfair that the wealthy can “buy” a second child by simply paying fines for breaking the one-child-only rule for most urban couples…

The announcement appeared to be part of a broader attempt by officials to put a more human face on China’s much-maligned family planning policies. As the most populous country on Earth — China has 1.3 billion people — the country is struggling with an aging population, a growing rich-poor gap, unemployment pressures and continued reports of family planning abuses, including forced abortions and sterilizations.
[Full Text]

Related AP report: “China Sticking to One-Child Policy” says, “China will not loosen its one-child policy, despite a top family planning official’s acknowledgment Tuesday that it was partly to blame for a worsening problem of too many boy babies and not enough girls in the world’s most populous nation.”

- Also Beijing Review magazine’s Family Planning Policy Not to Blame for Gender Imbalance

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ACCORDING to a State Department report released this week, American citizens adopted 6,493 children from China in 2006, a decline of 18 percent from the previous year’s total of 7,906. And yet, just over a month ago, this newspaper reported that China had prepared strict new criteria for foreign adoption applications because the country claimed it lacked “available” babies to meet the “spike” in demand.

China has always limited foreign adoptions, and it does not publish reliable statistics on the number of children in its orphanages. So how is one to know whether the decrease in adoptions reflects a lack of supply or a lack of demand?

…According to a February 2005 report in The Weekend Standard, a Chinese business newspaper, demographers in China found a ratio of 117 boys per 100 girls under the age of 5 in the 2000 census. Thanks to China’s one-child policy, put into effect in 1979 in order to curb population growth, and a strong cultural preference for male children, this gender gap could result in as many as 60 million “missing” girls from the population by the end of the decade, enough to alarm even Chinese officials. [Full Text]

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