A decade from now, about 2025, experts predict that China's
population will peak — reaching as high as 1.4 billion — and begin to steadily
decline. Some of them are predicting that a shrinking, aging population could
lead to a national crisis.
One way to peer into the future is to visit a county in
eastern China that pioneered population controls a decade before the rest of
the country — and is now feeling their impact.
Rudong County is in Jiangsu province, on China's east coast
just north of where the Yangtze River empties into the East China Sea.
Both the province and the county are known throughout China
for their good schools and bright students.
But school principal Miao Boquan says there aren't many of
them left.
"There used to be 14 schools in this township, one in
every village," Miao says. "Now we are the only remaining elementary
school. All the others have been merged."
There are 460 students at Miao's school in the town of
Yangkou, about half the number a decade ago. The school appears modern and
well-equipped. But some of the students face difficulties at home.
Many of the students' parents have gone to work in the
cities. As rural migrants, they're not entitled to education or any welfare
benefits there.
So they leave their children in the countryside in the care
of their grandparents.
Miao says this causes developmental problems for some kids.
"The grandparents' love is a doting love," he
says. "They don't know how to love them. They don't know what to give them
or talk to them about."
Meanwhile, in a nearby town in Rudong County, senior
citizens sit down to dinner at their government-funded retirement home.
They're bundled up against the cold, as there's no heat in
winter here. Most of them have no income or children to support them.
In recent years, this town went from having one such
facility to having five. That doesn't include private retirement homes, where
children pay to have their parents looked after.
He Jingming, 58, lives at the government-funded facility. He
contracted polio as a child. He never married. Before retiring, he collected
scrap for recycling. He says he's grateful to be here.
"We have it easy here," He says, smiling. "We
get to eat without having to do any work. The state looks after us and is good
to us. Our director here speaks humbly to us, and would never curse at
us."
He glances at the director, Chen Jieru, who used to work as
the Communist Party secretary of a nearby village.
Beginning in the 1960s, Rudong County launched a family
planning pilot program, a decade before China's one-child policy began in 1979.
Beijing held up the county as a successful model to be emulated nationwide.
Chen remembers that he spent a lot of time implementing the
program, which meant being on the lookout for pregnant women.
"Having a second child wasn't allowed, so we had to
work on them and persuade them to have an abortion," he recalls. "At
the time, we village cadres' work revolved around women's big bellies."
By one estimate, 15 years from now, 60 percent of Rudong
County residents will be 60 years old or older. There are a growing number of
centenarians.
But Chen Youhua, a Nanjing University demographer who grew
up in Rudong County, says that the family planning policy is not the only
reason the county is aging so quickly.
"Another reason is that our young people go elsewhere
to seek their education, and few of them return," he says. "The third
is that with improvements in health, people are living longer."
In other words, Rudong County's population would have shrunk
anyway without the one-child policy. The policy just speeds it up a bit.
Experts argue that the same goes for China. Rising levels of
income and education would have had the same effect as population controls. It
might have taken a few more years, but it would have also avoided coerced
abortions, a gender imbalance (roughly 118 men for every 100 women) and a
generation of kids without siblings.
In 2013 China loosened the one-child policy to allow some
families those in which one parent is an only child — to have two children.
But despite family planning officials' warnings that lifting the controls could
trigger a baby boom, only a small fraction of those families eligible have
applied to have a second child. In Beijing, for instance, less than 7 percent
of eligible couples have applied.
Some Rudong County locals are aware of the irony that after
pioneering population controls, they're now the first to suffer the problems of
an aging society. But Chen Youhua, the sociologist, says not everybody makes
the mental connection between past and present.
Besides, the real difficulties may be yet to come.
Chen calculates that in a 150-year period from 1950 to 2100,
China's population will have gone from about 500 million to a peak of 1.4
billion and then decline more or less to where it started. His graph looks like
a symmetrical mountain.
Chen and other experts say that if China is to avoid a
national crisis — including soaring health care and pension costs, and
collapsing real estate markets — it needs to scrap the one-child policy
immediately, and get Chinese citizens to make more babies.
But Chen admits that this could be difficult.
"Only yesterday, China was emphasizing the advantages
of the one-child policy," he points out. "To encourage people the
next day to have children is a 180-degree reversal."
For decades, he adds, Chinese have been taught that all of
their problems from poverty to chaos boil down to having too many people.
He says that idea is deeply ingrained and difficult to change.
