The Chinese Academy of Social Sciences predicts that the Chinese population will peak at 1.44 billion in 2029 before entering ‘unstoppable’ decline.15 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.16 It is also contemplating raising the retirement age, which is 60 for men and 55 for women.17
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 1980.18 That healthy, working-age population helped to drive its unprecedented economic growth.19 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.
China v America
America has long been a demographic exception, with a higher birth rate than most other rich countries. China’s population is currently around four times the size of America’s. But that gap will have halved20 by the end of this century, unless America slams the door shut on immigrants.
The chart below gives a glimpse into the geopolitics of the next few decades. It shows China’s working-age population dropping, along with Europe’s, while America’s remains stable:
Before the financial crisis, the American population was sustaining itself, with a birth rate of 2.12.21 This is partly because it has higher levels of immigration, and because immigrants tend to have larger families. In the US, 23 per cent of births are to foreign-born women,22 while only 13 per cent of the population is comprised of immigrants.23
American women also become mothers earlier than in any other OECD country: at an average age of 26, compared with 28 in the UK, and 31 in Italy. Only 14 per cent of US women remain childless, compared to 18 per cent in the UK and 23 per cent in Germany.24
There is a dark side. America has been lagging behind other rich countries in life expectancy, partly because its high rates of obesity mean it has failed to combat deaths from stroke. But now, US life expectancy at birth has dropped for three years in a row, the first drop since the AIDS/HIV epidemic, partly because of what the Princeton professors Case and Deaton have dubbed ‘deaths of despair’25 – from suicide, alcohol and opioids.26 Poverty and inequality pose real challenges.
In 2017, America also hit a 40-year low in its fertility rate, of 1.76.27 What is not clear is whether this is a post-crisis blip or a new direction. The fertility rate of Mexicans in America dropped by a third between 2006 and 2013, partly because of the financial squeeze – and it hasn’t yet recovered. If migrants are to keep working their magic on fertility, they need to keep coming, because second- and third-generation immigrants tend to adopt the cultures of the host country and have fewer babies. Any president who builds a wall could therefore get more than he bargained for: because population is shaping up to be a powerful geopolitical weapon.
India: Educating Rhia
Today’s Indian couples say their ideal family size is two children, according to a poll by The Economist.28 That’s smaller than the ideal family cited by Brits and Americans. Fifty years since the biologist Paul Erhlich predicted mass famine in his book The Population Bomb, India’s youthful population is growing slowly. The average woman now has just 2.3 children – fewer if she is Sikh, Jain or Christian, slightly more if she is Hindu and a bit more again if she is Muslim.
India did not need a One-Child Policy to reach this point. Although government has nudged people to have smaller families in various ways, India is a good advert for the principle that educating girls reduces the number of children they have. Especially if you accept that education comes in many forms. Birth rates have fallen where cable TV has arrived in rural areas, bringing Bollywood soap operas featuring independent childless women and chic urban mothers with small families.29 Audiences name their babies after the characters, become less tolerant of domestic violence and use contraception. India is not alone: telenovelas have had a similar effect in Brazil.30
While India still wrestles with poverty and illiteracy, it seems that urbanisation, growing prosperity, public health and most of all education are powerful contraceptives.
Singapore: City Living
‘Having kids was important to our parents,’ one thirty-something civil servant in Singapore explained to researcher Joel Kotkin, who conducted extensive interviews with young professionals. ‘But now we tend to have a cost and benefit analysis about family. The cost is tangible, but the benefits are not.’31
Such chilling pragmatism resonates in many parts of Asia, especially those where property prices are high. It is no accident that Singapore, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Shanghai and Beijing, some of the world’s most expensive cities, have some of the lowest birth rates. The Singapore government’s ‘Marriage and Parenthood Package’ offers substantial bonuses to couples who have children. But it’s not working too well. Many ambitious youngsters seem more focused on their careers: a third of graduates aged 30 to 34 years old are single in Singapore, and the birth rate is 1.2.32
These modern workers don’t seem to worry that no one will look after them in old age. Across Asia, the traditional model of close-knit families is breaking down. Social networks are increasingly made up of friends, not relatives: reinforcing the notion that childlessness is normal.
Europe: Waiting for Mr Right?
‘Capitalism + atheism + feminism = sterility = migration,’ tweeted Julian Assange, founder of WikiLeaks and fugitive from justice, in 2017. ‘EU birthrate = 1.6,’ he went on. ‘Replacement = 2.1. Merkel, May, Macron, Gentiloni [the leaders of Germany, Britain, France and Italy at the time] all childless.’
This was a neat summary of Europe’s plight. And nowhere does it apply more strongly than in Italy, which most of us still associate with large Catholic families. The country of ‘amore’ now has the lowest birth rate in Europe. This is partly a consequence of youth unemployment. The long, grim recession since the financial crash of 2008 has seen many Italians travel abroad to find jobs, and others fearing they can’t afford children.
The average Italian woman would still like two or more children.33 But she doesn’t have her first child until 31 – older than anywhere else in the EU.34 One reason may be that two-thirds of Italian men under 35 are still living with their parents, in contrast to most young women.35 Politicians have dubbed these Mama’s boys ‘bamboccioni’ (‘big babies’) who won’t grow up. Political commentator Antonio Politi has claimed that women are being deterred from raising families by men who are neither fulfilling their roles as breadwinners, nor stepping up to fatherhood.
Attempts