BEIJING (Reuters) – China’s once every decade census is expected to show a further decline in the percentage of young people in the rapidly aging population as the high cost of living and aversion to having children between city couples draw closer to China at a demographic crunch.
Policy makers are under pressure to devise family planning incentives and halt a declining birth rate, putting the world’s most populous country at risk of irreversible population decline if effective measures are not found.
China is expected to release the results of its latest census, taken in late 2020, in the coming days. The proportion of older people in the population is believed to have increased, but more important will be the data on the young.
In 2010, the share of the population aged 14 or younger declined from 22.89% in 2000 to 16.60%, as a result of a decades-old one-child policy. Citizens of 60 years and older accounted for 13.26%, against about 10%.
The continuation of these trends will undermine China’s working-age population and weigh on productivity. An ever-diminishing number of working adults will also test their ability to pay and care for an aging nation.
In 2016, China scrapped the one-child policy in the hope of boosting the number of babies. It also set a goal to expand the population to about 1.42 billion by 2020, from 1.34 billion in 2010.
But the birth rate has continued to decline.
In part, this is because city couples, despite pressure from their parents to have babies, value their independence and career more than raising a family.
Yu Tao, 31, a Beijing-based product designer for a major technology company, said he was reluctant to make the sacrifice in terms of time he would have if he and his wife had a baby.
As it is, he usually gets home from work at midnight at the earliest.
“I like my balance right now, my work-life balance, and I don’t think I can still be in this balance once I have a child,” said Yu.
IRREVERSIBLE SLIDE?
Yu and his wife have a combined income of more than 700,000 yuan ($ 106,888) per year, but said they did not feel financially secure enough to have a child, even though they earn significantly more than the average household.
According to official data, the annual disposable income per capita was 43,834 yuan in 2020, compared to 19,109 yuan in 2010.
“We are not ready for a child, financially or mentally,” said Yu.
Rising living costs in major cities, a major source of babies due to their huge population, have also deterred couples from children, particularly housing costs.
Among urban households, annual per capita housing expenditure increased to 6,958 yuan in 2020 from 1,332 yuan in 2010, more than fivefold according to official data.
“If the government just allows people to have children without policy support, it probably won’t have much of an impact,” said social and labor expert Liu Kaiming.
“In general, the case where people hesitate to have children, or to have fewer, is irreversible.”
The state media is making increasingly dire predictions, saying that the population could start to shrink in the coming years – a bleak forecast than that of the United Nations, which predicts a population peak in 2030 and then a decline.
In 2016, China established a fertility rate of about 1.8 children per woman for 2020, up from 1.5 to 1.6 in 2015.
If the rate dips below 1.5, many demographers say China is unlikely to ever emerge from its so-called fertility trap.
Recent comments from the Secretary of State that the fertility rate had already passed a “warning limit” and that the population had entered a critical transition period went viral on social media.
($ 1 = 6.5489 Chinese yuan renminbi)
Reporting by Ryan Woo; Additional reporting by Liangping Gao, Lusha Zhang, and Beijing editors; Editing by Robert Birsel