It’s a rite of winter. Near every year’s end, Red China’s National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) releases its population numbers. The result is guaranteed to disappoint either the Malthusian, who dreads population growth, or the globalist, who dreads population decline.
The latest report shows a “population fall for a third consecutive year in 2024” and that “marriages plummeted by a fifth, the biggest drop on record.”
So the latest from NBS ruined the day for anyone who thinks declining population spells disaster. “Countries such as China that allow very little immigration are especially at risk.”
“Left unaddressed, China’s demographic trap could precipitate a civilizational collapse,” says Yi Fuxian of the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Fear porn
For some reason, journalists don’t write such alarmist stories about Switzerland or Japan, both of which might be considered to be in “a demographic trap” (and they too allow very little immigration). But Chinese data spirals into fear porn (Newsweek, November 20, 2024):
By 2025, China’s population is projected to drop from its 2021 peak of 1.41 billion to 1.36 billion, Ada Li, a senior industry analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence, said in a forecast based on United Nations data….
The long-term outlook is even grimmer. The United Nations estimates China’s population will shrink by 50 percent by the end of the century. The Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences earlier this year predicted an even steeper 60-percent drop….
By 2035, China’s dependency ratio—the proportion of dependents to the working-age population—is forecast to reach 53 percent, up from 46 percent in 2021, according to a January report from the Economist Group’s Economist Intelligence Unit.
Someone tell the central planners (and their running dogs in the press) that people will manage. In fact, they have long been managing with a population lower than 1.41 billion, although how much lower is hard to specify.
Strength in numbers
As editor of a Mideast business newsletter in the 1970s, I noticed that the CIA’s World Factbook put the population of Saudi Arabia at two million something and the Saudis themselves put it at six million something. Higher population projects strength. Higher population delivers better geopolitical outcomes.
This is one benefit from overestimating population, one that probably fueled the CCP regime’s early pronatalism. Surely, then, it works against the regime’s interest to project declining population?
Short term, maybe not. Public discussion of declining numbers can set the table for certain unpalatable domestic policies to come, such as higher mandatory retirement ages, higher taxes, fewer or less generous social services. And since the numbers are subject to Party control, they can be increased or decreased as needed anyway.
But it’s an open question whether today’s communists know that they are overestimating or by how much: their data is rotten at the source.
“Some demographers, for example, think the country’s population might have already peaked in 2021 or even earlier,” says Pew Research Center. “These other estimates sometimes rely less on official Chinese population data (which researchers say is inflated because of financial incentives for local governments) and instead use other data, such as the number of mandatory vaccines” [emphasis added].
Generated locally, head counts influence the disbursement of national funds. The incentive to exaggerate or lie must be powerful. Yi Fuxian concludes that “all of China’s economic, foreign, and defense policies, as well as those of the U.S. and other countries towards China, are based on faulty demographic data….
“Economically, China’s local governments have a strong incentive to inflate population figures. More residents mean larger fiscal transfers from the central government, including funds for priorities like education, pensions, and poverty alleviation. The political cost is so great that the Chinese authorities dare not admit the true population figures.”
The vanishing billion
The most dramatic challenge to Beijing’s numbers comes from a refugee known simply as Lei who posts on the You Tube channel Lei’s Real Talk. See especially “The Vanishing Billion: Exposing China’s Population Myth.”
Lei starts with the Republic of China’s population figure of 490 million. How can that figure have doubled in 50 years given civil war, the Korean War, the purges, collectivization, famines, cultural revolutions, one-child policy, and COVID deaths? Lei walks us through calculations that estimate a total pre-COVID population of around 300 million.
On the way to this conclusion, she mentions two Russian studies. The first, in 2018, came up with a range of 500 to 800 million; the second, using a different methodology, added up the populations of cities and rural villages to produce a total of 560 million mainland Chinese. It would be interesting to read those studies directly.
So Red China’s radical population decline has already arrived in the form of the disparity, whatever it may be, between the 1.4 billion that we’re told and reality. No need for contingency plans; the decline has been managed with or without central planning up until now. Confine the planning to fixing all the harm caused by using an inflated population figure.
As for civilizational collapse, the Cultural Revolution took care of that already, many years ago. □
James Roth works for a major defense contractor in Virginia.
Also see:
Lei’s Real Talk: Video: “The Vanishing Billion: Exposing China’s Population Myth”
BBC News: “Cultural Revolution: No desire to dwell on the past”
