China’s population, reported to be 1.41 billion, will drop to 330 million by the end of the century, predicts Yi Fuxian of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. This startling conclusion is included in a paper to be published in the Winter 2024 issue of the Contemporary China Review. He’s not the only one concerned. “China has embarked on a road of demographic no-return,” writes Wang Feng of the University of California, Irvine. Yi puts it this way: “Left unaddressed, China’s demographic trap could precipitate a civilizational collapse.”
Why do we care? Rapid demographic change can push an ambitious China to become even more militant and accelerate dangerous plans.
The crisis is plain to see. Yi’s stunning 330 million figure assumes that China will be able to stabilize its total fertility rate—generally, the average number of children born to a woman over her lifetime—at 0.8. China’s TFR in 2023 was 1.0. and is dropping over time. A country generally needs a TFR of 2.1 to maintain a stable population.
Yi believes that China’s TFR could even fall to 0.7, meaning China could have even fewer people by 2100.
How far will China’s population fall? The 2024 Revision of the U.N.’s World Population Prospects shows a low estimate of 403.8 million people at the end of the century. The U.N.’s figures closely track China’s, which for two decades have overestimated the size of the Chinese population. Yi’s prediction, although considered extreme today, will probably be closer to the mark when the clock strikes 2100.
China today is 4 times more populous than the United States. At the turn of the century, it could conceivably have roughly the same number of people as America.
China’s in a fix. No other society has ever faced a steeper population decline absent war, disease, or famine. These one-off events throughout history have resulted in disastrous demographic drops, but societies almost always bounce back. China itself bounced back fast after the famine during the Great Leap Forward at the end of the 1950s and the beginning of the following decade. Then, the country’s population plunged by at least 30 million people. Some estimates are double that figure.
Today, China’s population decline is caused by deep-seated changes in society, continued economic failure, and a deepening gloom enveloping the country. Young Chinese now speak of themselves as China’s “last generation.”
These anti-natal attitudes are partly the result of the regime’s relentless indoctrination enforcing the One-Child Policy. Deng Xiaoping, Mao Zedong’s successor, instituted the policy in 1979 as one of his first initiatives after assuming power. During the existence of the coercive program, “probably the largest social experiment in human history,” China’s fertility declined, falling from 2.9 births per female to 1.1 births in 2015.
China moved to a two-child policy in 2016 and, when that didn’t work, a three-child one in 2021. The successive policy relaxation has not done the trick. The country’s population peaked in 2021.
China could adopt a 27-child policy, but this would have no effect. “Notwithstanding the totalitarian conceit that population trends are something that government can ‘fine tune,’ the reality is that birth trends tend to comport very closely with the desired family size of real life parents,” Nicholas Eberstadt of the American Enterprise Institute told me. “It is possible to use bayonets and police power to force birth rates down against the will of a people; it is very much more difficult to use state force to push birth rates up.”