From Extra Time (Camilla Cavendish, 2019) pp16-8
China: Growing Old Before It Gets Rich
They call it the grey wall of China. By 2100, China’s elderly population will dwarf that of any other country except India. It’ll be so large, wags joke, that you’ll be able to see it from outer space. At the park around Beijing’s Temple of Heaven, in the cool of early morning, hundreds of older people are playing cards, doing tai-chi or exercising. A group of about 50, mainly women, dance to lilting music. They move gracefully, quietly, in a choreographed routine, on the paths between the trees.
It’s an uplifting, harmonious scene. The women place their feet confidently, and with precision. But it’s hard to feel so confident of the future. Most of the people in this park are retired. China’s working-age population has been in decline since 2012 and is set to fall by almost a quarter by 2050. The demographer Nicholas Eberstadt, of the American Enterprise Institute, has predicted that this will drag down China’s GDP growth rate. By mid-century, China’s population could look much more like Japan’s but without Japan’s affluence.
The birth rate was falling even before the government introduced the One-Child Policy in 1978. Now, China is awash with only children. Many find themselves having to support two parents and four grandparents known as ‘the 4-2-1’ problem. There is the added, disturbing glut of bachelors because so many families preferred sons to daughters. These ‘guang gun’ (bare branches) will struggle to find brides. Sensing the danger, the Communist Party dropped the One-Child Policy in 2015. But it is probably too late. Few eligible families have applied to have a second child. Many don’t feel they can afford it, because so many have moved to cities where the cost of living is high. Seven in ten Chinese mothers work, with little time for an extra child.
Marriage is becoming less attractive. On TV dating shows like If You Are the One, successful Chinese women criticise potential suitors for being ugly or poor. More women than men now attend Chinese universities, and many are defying the jibes about unmarried women being ‘shengnu’, or ‘leftover’. A survey by the Chinese dating website Baihe.com has found 75 per cent of women saying that any husband should earn twice as much as them.
The Chinese Academy of Social Sciences predicts that the Chinese population will peak at 1.44 billion in 2029 before entering ‘unstoppable’ decline. By 2065, it says, the population will have shrunk to the levels of the mid-1990s. |
What could this mean for China as a military power? Mark L. Haas, a political scientist at Duquesne University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, has suggested that China could be forced to make ‘geriatric peace’ with other nations, as it becomes too burdened by its elderly to maintain military spending. That is not certain: China may not feel beholden to spend as much as a democracy on older citizens, and it can use technology to raise productivity. But it is too big to be able to level the playing field by importing enough immigrants.
Instead, the government has started offering five-year multiple-entry visas to tempt its diaspora back home something South Africa and India are also doing. It is also contemplating raising the retirement age, which is 60 for men and 55 for women.
Will they be fit enough? China faces an increasing burden of chronic disease approaching Western levels. Junk food and stress have accompanied rapid urbanisation and the country has not yet broken the smoking habit. Under Mao, China’s population was surprisingly healthy: it saw the world’s most sustained increase in life expectancy, from 35 in 1949 to 65 in 1980. That healthy, working-age population helped to drive its unprecedented economic growth. But now, China is growing old with neither Japan’s wealth nor its health, at a time when many of its jobs still require physical manual labour. And its rival, America, is on a different path.
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