Population & the Fate of Nations

BreakPoint WorldView » December 2008

The current global economic recession-oh-dear-Lord-don’t-let-it-be-a-depression has people wondering if we are finally entering the long-awaited and much-ballyhooed “Asian century.” Specifically, they wonder if now is the time when the world depicted in the television series “Firefly”—where human beings a long time from now and in a galaxy far, far away speak Mandarin as a second language—begins to take shape.

After all, while the American economy is thrown into reverse (a “grinding halt” would look good right about now) by a lack of credit, the Chinese are sitting on the proverbial pile of money. That’s money they got from us: an estimated one trillion dollars in American paper. While the rest of the developing world built their economies, as historian Niall Ferguson wrote in the December 2008 Vanity Fair, by “borrowing capital from wealthy countries,” the Chinese built theirs by getting those same foreigners “to build factories in Chinese enterprise zones—large, lumpy assets that could not easily be withdrawn in a crisis.”

Throw in the high savings rates of both Chinese citizens and corporations and it may be time to join Mal and company in a hearty Ai ya, wo mun wan leh.[1]

Or maybe not. For all its economic advantages, people who know China well doubt that that it’s “poised . . . to dominate the 21st century the way the United States dominated the 20th.” The reasons have a lot to do with the number of Chinese; but not in the way most people would think.

One of those doubters is John Pomfret, the former Beijing bureau chief for the Washington Post. In a July, 2008 article in that paper’s Outlook section, Pomfret wrote that he’s “struck by the breathless way we talk about” China. After assuring readers that he is “no China basher,” Pomfret describes the “constraints” that will prevent those breathless predictions from becoming reality.

The first “constraint” he cites is China’s “dire demographics.” In Pomfret’s words, “China’s demographics stink.” “Because of the Communist Party’s notorious one-child-per-family policy, the average number of children born to a Chinese woman has dropped from 5.8 in the 1970s to 1.8 today -- below the rate of 2.1 that would keep the population stable.”

This “birth dearth,” when combined with increasing life expectancy, means that “no country is aging faster than the People’s Republic.” For a country that depends on perpetual economic growth to maintain a semblance of order and social cohesion, this is bad news: “Economists worry that as the working-age population shrinks, labor costs will rise, significantly eroding one of China’s key competitive advantages.”

An aging population not only means fewer workers to fuel economic growth but also more people who are dependent on that shrinking workforce: “Chinese demographers such as Li Jianmin of Nankai University now predict a crisis in dealing with China’s elderly, a group that will balloon from 100 million people older than 60 today to 334 million by 2050, including a staggering 100 million age 80 or older. How will China care for them?”

These “dire demographics” augur a dubious distinction. As Nicholas Eberstadt of the American Enterprise Institute has written, whereas “Japan became rich before it became old; China will do things the other way around.” The result may be what Eberstadt calls “a slow-motion humanitarian tragedy in the making . . . .”

Even now, China is feeling the effects of its “stinky demographics.” A well-documented consequence of the “one-child-policy” is a pronounced gender imbalance. Families determined to make sure their one child was a boy practiced sex-selection abortion on a large scale. As a result, there are 37 million more men than women in China and in some parts of China, there are 60 percent more male children than female children.

That means that many Chinese men growing up today—by some estimates, 10 percent of them—will be unable to find wives. Or, as a marriage broker quoted by Mara Hvistendahl in the New Republic put it, “if they’re ugly and can’t find work . . . No one wants them.”

Ugly and unwanted? Maybe. Unnoticed? Definitely not. After the first generation of “one child” boys hit adolescence, China’s juvenile crime rate more than doubled. Chinese officials complained about young men committing crimes that were “without specific motives, often without forethought.” Chinese officials worry about the “hidden threat to social stability” posed by a cohort of “hopeless, volatile men.”

They’re right to worry: young Chinese men gather in bars where they pay $15 a minute to assault the waiters. Or, if the customer prefers, the waiter will dress in women’s clothing before being beaten.

I doubt that these were the results the Communist Party had in mind when it told villagers “YOU BEAT IT OUT! YOU CAN MAKE IT FALL OUT! YOU CAN ABORT IT! BUT YOU CANNOT GIVE BIRTH TO IT!”

While China’s demographic future seems especially, well, dire, it’s by no means unique. At least 60 countries, including every industrialized one with the possible exception of the United States, have below-replacement level birthrates. (“Replacement level,” as the name suggests is the number of children a woman must have to replace herself and her partner. That number, for most countries, is 2.1 births per woman.) Philip Longman, the author of “The Empty Cradle,” says that this decline is “the single most powerful force affecting the fate of nations and the future of society in the 21st century.”

That’s because, absent significant levels of immigration, these countries will experience substantial population loss. How substantial? Within 50 years, Europe will lose more people to declines in fertility than it lost in both world wars: Spain will lose 24 percent of its population and Italy 20 percent. (In Russia and parts of Eastern Europe, the population is expected to decline by one-third to one-half by 2050!)

This means slowed economic growth (if not economic contraction) as there are fewer people to produce and consume. It also means older populations are more dependent on a shrinking working-age population for both economic support and actual care. And finally, it may mean, in some cases, cultural changes—“upheavals” might not be too strong a word—resulting from the displacement of the native population by very different newcomers.

How different? As Ferguson wrote in a previous Vanity Fair piece, “whereas a large proportion of immigrants to the United States come from countries that were colonized by Roman Catholics . . . the situation in Europe is altogether different.”

Much has been written about the estimated 20 million Muslims living in the European Union and the prospects—or the lack thereof—for their assimilation into European society. It isn’t only Muslims: Chinese immigrants are gradually overtaking Russians in Russia’s Far East, a change with, to put it mildly, global political implications.

What’s been called the “Demographic Winter” isn’t limited to the industrialized world: countries like Mexico, Sri Lanka and Iran also have below-replacement-level birthrates that threaten to undo their newly-found prosperity.

While the “Demographic Winter” and the problems associated with low birthrates and population decline have been drawing some attention, the vast majority of the public (including most Christians, I suspect) still thinks that the problem is too many people, not too few.

It could hardly be otherwise: for nearly forty years we have been told that many of the world’s problems are the result of overpopulation. Even when that’s demonstrably false, the momentum towards a “Demographic Winter” is sustained by our beliefs about the “good life” and the role that children play in that life. According to these beliefs, children, instead of being the reason that we work hard to get ahead, are an impediment to getting ahead. They and their needs are obstacles to be overcome, or at least managed, in our quest for the “good life.”

We may not say this in so many words but our actions shout it. We increasingly plan on having children in a way that differs only in degree, not in kind, from the way we plan for retirement or a sabbatical. All three are contingent on having enough time and money to pull them off in a way that is consistent with what we consider the good life.

In other words, childbirth and children accommodate themselves to our aspirations, not vice-versa.

Sometimes the “aspirations” are those of the state—most of the time, they’re those of ordinary men and women. In either case, the result is almost always the same: Ai ya, wo mun wan leh.

[1] “We’re in big trouble.”

Roberto Rivera joined Prison Fellowship in 1991, first serving as director of research and development for Justice Fellowship. Today, in addition to his work writing for BreakPoint radio, BreakPoint Online, and Worldview, he is a frequent contributor to Christianity Today, Books & Culture, Touchstone, and Citizen magazine, as well as other online outlets including Boundless and Beliefnet. Roberto currently lives in Fairfax County, Va., with the light of his life, his son David.