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Six years after her marriage, Haley Zhang has no plans to have a child. The 33-year-old Shanghai marketing manager is concerned about the effect of fatherhood on her career and the high costs of raising children.
“My supervisor has made it clear that I have to choose my current position with a lot of growth potential or a lower role with more time for the family,” Zhang said. “There is no middle ground.”
Zhang’s reluctance to have a child (let alone two, as the Chinese government has officially encouraged since 2015) highlights the demographic challenge facing the country.
The publication of China’s ten-year census last week has sparked a national debate over whether the world’s most populous country is moving too slowly to avoid a crisis.
The census for the period 2011-2020 showed that the population was growing slower rate in decades. Births fell to 12 million last year alone, the lowest figure since the early 1960s, when China left a country catastrophic famine.
Ning Jizhe, director of the country’s National Statistics Office, avoided calls from experts, the public and China’s central banks because family planning boundaries should be completely removed. existing policies – that to encourage most families to have two children – were enough. “As long as we have supportive policies, the birth potential of China can be achieved,” he said.
The NBS noted the fact that China’s population estimate last year was 1.4 billion for 2019, with the official figure for 2020 an increase of 11.7 million.
He Financial Times reported last month, the government was willing to report its first year-on-year population decline in 60 years. According to people reported on the census survey, early estimates suggested that the 2020 population figure would drop to at least 1.37 billion, but was revised upwards.
Ernan Cui, an analyst at research firm Gavekal Dragonomics, said there were “some obvious inconsistencies” in the official data. “It is even possible that the real population will peak in 2020, a decade ahead of schedule,” he said.
Delayed sensitive data
The publication of the census was delayed by more than a month as officials combed the data. China’s official population figure is extremely sensitive, as it determines from family planning policies to tax expenditures and is only publicly disclosed after government departments agree on a consensus.
Many ministries and regions are looking for larger population figures to justify higher budgets, but the People’s Bank of China has warned that a calculation will come. The central bank argued in a report issued last month – after postponing census data – that the birth rate had been constantly overestimated. “We need to realize that China’s demographic landscape has been reversed,” he said.
Chinese officials have acknowledged that the country can do little to reverse its aging population. Goldman Sachs analysts noted that over the past ten years, the country’s “old age dependency ratio” (the proportion of people aged 65 and over to its working-age cohort) has risen from ‘11% to 20%.
The fertility rate in the country, the average number of children a woman usually has, is only 1.3, lower in the US at 1.7 and even in Japan at 1.4, where the population decline is a reality.
The concerns of women like Zhang suggest that eliminating family planning policies will not be enough. As with millions of people in China’s cities, it lacks one local household record, o hukou, which would entitle their children to attend government-subsidized schools in Shanghai. Instead, Zhang should send them to expensive private daycares. “There is no social safety net that allows women to have children,” she said. “Just relaxing birth control is not enough.”
Bert Hofman, director of the East Asian Institute at Singapore National University, said he hoped the Chinese population would “begin to decline.” [this decade], i [do] so for the rest of this century ”.
But he added that “demographics are not GDP”, noting that China has been facing a reduction in the workforce since 2012, although it continues to achieve strong economic growth.
Between 2010 and 2020, China’s working-age population fell more than 3% to 968 million, but higher education rates, technological advances, and retirement age adjustments will contribute to increase productivity.
“In some ways, the trajectory of the Chinese population should be well received,” Hofman said. “A population half its current size will place a much smaller burden on China’s local environment, its water resources and its limited land.”
However, many analysts believed the government needed a greater sense of urgency. Huang Wenzheng, of the Center for China and Globalization, a Beijing-based think tank, said the official population increase had given authorities “a false sense of security.”
“The latest census has sent a message that no major policy change is needed,” he added. “This creates a time bomb.”
Questions about quality
Skeptics have also pointed to inconsistencies between NBS’s annual data sets and the ten-year census.
The 2020 census reported that in China there were 255 million people aged 14 or under at the end of last year. But the annual birth figures for the period 2006-2020 totaled 239 million, a discrepancy of 16 million.
“This goes against common sense,” said Zhuang Bo, China’s chief economist at TS Lombard, the research group. “The government needs to significantly adjust the figures so that demographic statistics are consistent.”
Chinese authorities have not released an official death toll for 2020, which may have shed light on the impact of the coronavirus pandemic © Aly Song / Reuters
These inconsistencies are common and officials have argued that census figures were more accurate. The 2010 census, for example, found 38 million people under the age of 14 or less than annual surveys.
The NBS also did not report an official death toll for 2020, which could shed light on the damage caused by the Coronavirus pandemic, which peaked in China early last year.
Arguments about the quality of China’s demographic data have fueled concern that the government’s population policies are based on inaccurate projections.
When the Council of State unveiled the nation’s long-term demographic development plan in 2016, its 2020 targets included a population of 1,442 million and a fertility rate of 1.8, much for above the current figure of 1.3.
“The important thing is not whether the Chinese population exceeded 1.4 billion and by what amount [last year], but the fall in the birth rate could continue in the coming years, “Huang said.
Additional reports of Xinning Liu in Beijing
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