The Chinese census shows the depth of the demographic challenge

Six years after she got married, Haley Zhang has no plans to have children. The 33-year-old marketing director from Shanghai is concerned about the impact parents have had on his career and the high costs of raising their children.

“My supervisor has made it clear that I need to choose my current position with high or less growth potential in order to have more time for the family,” Zhang said. “There’s no middle ground.”

Zhang’s unwillingness to have a son – at least two, as the Chinese government has officially pushed for it since 2015 – highlights the country’s demographic challenge.

The release of China’s ten-year census last week has sparked a national debate over whether the world’s most populous country is moving slowly to avoid a crisis.

The 2011-2020 census showed that the population was growing the slowest rate in decades. Births last year dropped to 12 million last year, which is China since the early 1960s. catastrophic famine.

Ning Jizhe, director of the country’s National Statistics Office, rejected calls from experts, the public and the central bank of China, saying the limits of family planning should be completely removed. existing policies They were enough to encourage most families to have two children. “As long as we have solidarity policies in place, China’s birth capacity can be realized,” he said.

The UN has stated that last year China’s population estimate was 1.4 billion by 2019, and the official figure for 2020 is 11.7 billion more.

The The Financial Times reported last month the government was ready to report on the first year-long decline in the population for 60 years. According to information from the census study, initial estimates put the population at 2020 at least 1.37 billion, but it was revised upwards.

Ernan Cui, an analyst at research firm Gavekal Dragonomics, said there were “some obvious inconsistencies” in the official data. “It is possible that the real population will peak in 2020, a decade earlier than expected,” he said.

Sensitive data has been delayed

The census release was delayed by more than a month as officials combed through the data. The official data of the Chinese population is very sensitive, as it starts with family planning policies and determines tax revenues, and is published only after government departments have agreed to the agreement.

Many ministries and regions are looking for larger numbers of people to justify larger budgets, but the People’s Bank of China has warned that calculations are coming. The central bank argued in a report released last month – after delaying census data – that birth rates were constantly overvalued. “We need to realize that China’s demographic picture has been reversed,” he said.

Chinese officials have acknowledged that the country can do little to reverse the aging population. Analysts at Goldman Sachs point out that over the past ten years the country’s “dependency ratio on old age” —the ratio of people aged 65 and over to working age cohorts — has risen from 11 percent to 20 percent.

The country’s fertility rate, the average number of children a woman tends to be, is just 1.3, while the US is 1.7 and Japan is also 1.4, as the population’s decline is a reality.

Concerns about women like Zhang suggest that abandoning family planning policies is not enough. As with millions of people in Chinese cities, he doesn’t have one local household record, or hukou, which would give his children the right to attend government-subsidized schools in Shanghai. Zhang would have to send them to expensive private day centers. “There is no social safety net that allows women to have children,” she said. “It’s just enough to calm the birth control.”

Bert Hofman, director of the East Asian Institute at the National University of Singapore, says China’s population “expects to start declining” [this decade], and [do] so at the end of this century ”.

But he added that “demographics are not GDP”, noting that China is still facing a shrinking workforce since 2012. great economic growth.

Between 2010 and 2020, China’s working age population fell by more than 3 percent to 968 million, but higher education rates, technological advances and adjustments to the retirement age will help increase productivity.

“In some ways, the trajectory of China’s population should be welcomed,” Hofman said. “The population, which is half the current size, will have a much smaller burden on China’s local environment, water resources and limited land.”

Many analysts, however, believed that the government needed more urgency. Huang Wenzheng, a Beijing-based think tank at the China and Globalization Center, said official population growth had given the authorities a “false sense of security.”

“The latest census has sent a message that there is no need for a major policy change,” he added. “That creates a time bomb.”

Questions about quality

Skeptics have also pointed to inconsistencies between the NBS’s annual data sets and the ten-year census.

According to the 2020 census, China had 255 million people aged 14 and under at the end of last year. But the number of births in 2006-2020 increased by 239 million – 16 million disagreements.

“That goes against common sense,” said Zhuang Bo, chief economist at China’s TS Lombard research group. “The government needs to significantly adjust the numbers so that demographic statistics are consistent.”

Such inconsistencies are common, and officials have argued that census data were more accurate. The 2010 census, for example, found 38 million fewer people than annual surveys.

The NBS also did not report an official death toll by 2020, which could shed light on the damage caused. coronavirus pandemic, which reached its peak in China last year.

Arguments about the quality of China’s demographic data have raised concerns that the government’s population policy should be based on inaccurate projections.

When the Council of State introduced the nation’s long-term demographic development in 2016, its target for 2020 was 1.42 million and a fertility rate of 1.8, above the current figure of 1.3.

“The most important thing is not whether China’s population was more than 1.4 billion people [last year], but a drop in birth rates that may continue in the coming years, ”Huang said.

Additional report by Xinning Liu in Beijing