China is aging and shrinking. The country’s population fell from 540 million in 1949 to a peak of 1400 million in 2021, but leaned towards decline in 2022. In the coming decades, the rest of East Asia will adhere to a long streak of low fertility, immediate aging, and a shrinking population. By mid-century, China is expected to have up to two hundred million fewer people than it does today. At the same time, the average age will rise from 38 in 2020 to around 50.
Demographics are not destiny. Neither a declining population nor an aging population are necessarily synonymous with unhappiness for China. But the demanding situations presented by a declining workforce and growing numbers of seniors are significant and will require effective long-term plans and unpopular decisions. Official statements via the Chinese Communist Party underscore the importance of fulfilling the wishes of an aging society, and Chinese officials and academics have warned that they oppose raising the retirement age too much. But China’s evolving political formula under the leadership of an autocratic general secretary, Xi Jinping, is inadequate for mounting demanding situations.
As China returns to an era of one-man rule, the country’s decades-long technocratic governance practices are crumbling. This makes it more complicated to carry out long-term planning, especially in rural China. otherwise, restrict Beijing’s ability to adopt reforms that may harm the interests of urban elites, such as cutting their pension benefits. Finally, the Communist Party’s increasing adoption of traditionalist gender roles risks further exacerbating declining fertility rates by reinforcing the underlying points that drive young Chinese, especially women, to give up marriage and child-rearing.
By the middle of the twenty-first century, China is most likely to face a number of serious domestic challenges, in addition to growing tensions with urban elites over pension and health costs, the worsening situation of the rural elderly, and a poisonous atmosphere for women and children. foreigners who will increasingly restrict the country’s rise as a world power.
China’s most severe demographic demand situations are in its poor rural areas. The country’s elderly population is disproportionately concentrated in rural areas: in 2020, 17. 7% of rural citizens were aged 65 or older, compared to only 11. 1% in urban areas. These numbers will skyrocket in the coming decades, putting enormous economic and social pressures on communities. Planning for the wishes of rural seniors will be one of the most difficult responsibilities facing leaders in Beijing.
At first glance, China appears to be well equipped to meet this challenge. After all, it has a large bureaucracy of experts producing detailed policy documents with impressive titles, such as the 2019 Medium- and Long-Term National Plan to Address Population Ageing.
In practice, however, those plans fail in the face of China’s harsh political realities. As economist Scott Rozelle and researcher Natalie Hell have documented, four decades of similar attempts to address the desires of rural youth have failed in the Maoist legacy of hukou (household registration), which largely links citizens’ access to social benefits, such as education and physical care. to the place where your circle of relatives is registered. In doing so, it has entrenched inequalities between urban and rural citizens when it comes to receiving government. Resources.
The same disparities exist with respect to rural older people. Rural citizens get monthly pensions of around $26, far less than the $506 their urban counterparts get. Health care resources and the insurance policy are also flawed. They have noted, this two-tier health care formula has resulted in an “uneven distribution of health resources among the elderly” and a dramatic divergence between how urban and rural citizens view their appointments with the state: Americans living in cities see themselves as citizens with rights while rural citizens themselves are “peasants unworthy of state care. “
Xi will abandon zero-COVID almost overnight and without warning.
China’s return to one-man rule further erodes Beijing’s ability to plan for the future. While Xi marginalizes technocratic voices and institutions, state policies seem ominous symptoms of satisfying his whims. For example, this year’s plans to reform rural health care call for expanding the use of classical Chinese medicine to meet the desires of a rapidly aging rural population. There are serious dangers that such plans will be seen less as an effort to improve the physical condition of China’s elderly than as an example of state bureaucracies venturing into the new political winds created through Xi’s resolution to promote classical medicine as a symbol of national pride. what he calls “the treasure trove of ancient Chinese science and the key to the archives of Chinese civilization. “
Beijing’s handling of the late stages of the COVID-19 pandemic offers a troubling insight into the practical upheavals caused by those policy changes. , politically made officials plan or even talk about what might follow. Even as the virus became increasingly transmissible, they were forced to rely on expanding lockdowns as their main tool to combat the pandemic. The country’s vaccination crusade was again uneven, and efforts to import foreign vaccines and stockpile antiviral drugs stalled. This has left the elderly dangerously exposed.
In late 2022, Xi radically changed course. Just weeks after the conclusion of the 20th Congress of the politically sensitive Party, he made the decision to abandon 0 COVID practically overnight and without warning. Shelves of anti-fever medicine in a wave of panic buying. Elderly rural citizens have been left to finish on their own, encouraged through state media to rely on the folk remedy with classic Chinese medicines. Meanwhile, urban elites bought limited stocks of drugs shown as Paxlovid at inflated costs on the black market.
As Yanzhong Huang, senior fellow for global fitness at the Council on Foreign Relations, pointed out, those radical policy adjustments have come at a significant cost. They subjected millions of citizens to exceptionally severe lockdowns in the most sensible of zero COVID policies in 2022. and left a death toll of one million to 1. 5 million after its abrupt uprising a few weeks later.
Demographic changes will also force Beijing to reconsider promises made to past generations regarding government benefits. As Chinese society ages, retirement formulas become increasingly unsustainable. The retirement age, which was raised in the 1950s, is again exceptionally low (55 for women for blue-collar staff) and 60 for men. The Chinese Academy of Social Sciences predicts that the main urban pension fund, a more generous formula that covered some 450 million urban employees, retirees and party cadres in 2020, will be depleted until 2035. (China’s underclass, made up of more than 500 million migrant workers and rural residents—a much larger percentage of the population—is covered by a much narrower formula. )
One might think that China’s leaders are better able to deal with such dangers and enforce mandatory reforms than their Democratic counterparts, given Beijing’s harsh repressive apparatus. resistance. Beijing’s abrupt decision to end zero-COVID policies in November came after scattered anti-lockdown protests showed symptoms of jumping from city to city and turning court cases over lockdown policies into direct attacks on party leaders.
Such considerations have stalled significant reforms under Xi. Although Beijing has identified a desire to raise the official retirement age for at least a decade, it has not done so. Leaders now vaguely note that they will publish a plan through 2025. The delay reflects serious considerations that a significant pension reform would harm the interests of China’s giant urban middle class, adding retired officials, party cadres and members of their circle of relatives. These constitute a very important aid base that the party is reluctant to offend, unlike other teams it has cracked down on in the afterlife: LGBTQ activists, ethnic minorities in Xinjiang, and blue-collar workers laid off through state-owned enterprises in northeast China.
Redistributive policies aimed at reducing the rural-urban divide have suffered the same fate. As scholars such as Wei Cui and Mary Gallagher have pointed out, Xi has reversed limited spending reforms introduced just over a decade ago under the administrations of General Secretary Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao. Meanwhile, Xi’s own “common prosperity” initiative has remained little more than paper promises amid his mounting warnings about the risks of “welfarism” among China’s disadvantaged.
With the exception of China, all East Asian societies facing demographic decline have turned to imported labor to mitigate the effects of declining birth rates and immediate aging. But Xi’s turn toward ethnonationalism will torpedo Beijing’s ability to use this tool.
Despite the fantasies of a twenty-first century populated by robots, the generation has not eliminated the need for young human painters. today. Another percentage point is naturalized aliens who have received citizenship through marriage. The streets of Taipei now resonate with the voices of Filipino and Indonesian women concerned about the elderly and sick Taiwanese; Tens of thousands of Vietnamese men now paint on sites of Taiwanese structures and fishing boats.
Other East Asian governments are looking to expand those trends to ease growing pressures of hard work. Japan relaxed immigration legislation in 2019, granting more rights to foreign blue-collar staff and creating new visas to attract mid-level professional staff in the fields. Taiwan passed a parallel reform in 2022 and the head of its National Development Council proclaimed that Taipei was trying to attract another 400,000 migrant workers over the next decade.
If Beijing were serious about making plans for its own aging future, it would have its own cards to play. China has a wealth of embryonic ties with Africa, the only region in the world that will revel in a youth boom in the coming decades. The number of African foreign scholars in China increased from 1793 in 2003 to more than 80,000 in 2018, and a colorful network of tens of thousands of African investors and immigrants had grown in Guangzhou by 2010. Beijing is also involved in a primary expansion of vocational training. education. Theoretically, one can only imagine systems painstakingly designed to exercise a generation of African technicians to run Chinese factories and African caregivers to care for tens of millions of rural elderly as China’s population ages and shrinks.
Students and foreigners in China have been met with a wave of hostility with the outbreak of the pandemic.
But that almost certainly wouldn’t happen. Under Xi’s slogan of “rejuvenating the Chinese nation,” socialist slogans are giving way to a more particular framework of China in terms of culture and race. The authorities have banned foreign cultural products, be it architecture or Christmas parties, deemed incompatible with the very essence of China. China, while ethnic policies are moving away from Soviet-style autonomy towards competitive assimilationism.
This ethnonationalist fans the simmering flames of anti-foreigner sentiment. In the early 2010s, Guangzhou’s local government carried out a harsh crackdown on immigration that would halve the city’s African network by 2016. Students and other foreigners were met with a wave of hostility with the outbreak of the pandemic in early 2020, adding mass expulsions of many Africans in Guangzhou that led to coordinated diplomatic protests by several African nations.
This hardening of social attitudes has derailed China’s half-hearted efforts to liberalize its migration policy. Since the early 2010s, the government has revised its immigration formula to deepen ties with the Chinese diaspora and attract more foreign talent. But when Beijing issued a draft regulation to sparingly increase the permanent residence of foreigners in 2020, it sparked a furious maelstrom of nativist sentiment online, with more than 4 billion perspectives of posts on the subject on social media platform Weibo in a single week. As scholar Tabitha Speelman has painstakingly detailed, officials dismissed their proposals when faced with overwhelmingly negative comments, accusations of promoting the country to “fake foreigners” (i. e. , Chinese elites who had been granted foreign citizenship), and racist criticism directed at communities. African traders.
Such trends will test China as it ages and shrinks. In urban areas, conflicts will arise between the government and the growing number of urban retirees concerned about protecting their benefits. Recent protests offer a taste of China’s future: In February, thousands of retirees from state-owned enterprises amassed in the cities of Dalian and Wuhan to protest local reforms that reduced state contributions to their private physical health accounts. Such scenes will be a normal spectacle for years to come, with one program of public performances after another. , as the Chinese government is forced to take into account immediate demographic adjustments and expanding budget constraints. Local government will be strongly tempted to oppose or delay measures that negatively affect urban communities while shifting prices to less privileged, less connected and quieter rural areas.
For the Chinese campaign, those trends bring with them a long series of growing despair. Political economist Nicholas Eberstadt and demographer Ashton Verdery have predicted that by the middle of this century, a share of Chinese citizens over the age of 70 will have a child or no children, up from around 20% today. Demands for elder care will strengthen the country, but rural spaces will face the heaviest burden. Rapidly aging Chinese immigrants will increasingly face the need to care for themselves and their own elderly parents in the countryside with limited help from the state or their siblings.
Beijing’s introspective technique will hamper its ability to identify formal legal channels for hard overseas workflows to meet China’s developing needs. But urgent domestic demands will only cause social pressures to evolve in darker, more subterranean directions. the trafficking of Pakistani and Burmese women in China’s substandard rural spaces or the emergence of systems that theoretically bring foreign scholars from less developed countries to China for education, while exploiting them as a source of hard and cheap labor.
This is not a recipe for a rise to global domination, or even for long-term social stability. On the contrary, China’s aging population and increasingly inflexible autocratic policy formula will seriously hamper the country as it stumbles into the middle of the twenty-first century. .