Be Careful What You Wish For: China Confronts Population Decline

CHINA IN THE WORLD DISTINGUISHED LECTURE

When China launched its draconian one-child policy nationally in 1980, the goal was not simply to slow population growth, but actually to initiate an eventual decline in China’s total population.  The history of that campaign is full of paradoxes and lessons about bad national social policies.  As of 2022, China’s population began to decline, and India has become the most populous country in the world.  However, the decline in China’s fertility rate was not mainly the result of enforcement of the one-child policy, and since that policy was ended (on January 1, 2016), the annual number of births has continued to decline rather sharply, so that China today has one of the lowest total fertility rates in the world.  Since 2016 CCP policy has reversed 180 degrees, with families encouraged to have two children, and since 2021 to have three.  Xi Jinping wants to promote a “marriage and childbirth culture” in China, but so far pro-natal propaganda and new incentives are not boosting birth rates.  Should China’s success in slowing and then reversing population growth be regarded as an accomplishment, or as a looming national crisis?

Martin King Whyte is John Zwaanstra Professor of International Studies and Sociology, Emeritus, at Harvard University.  He specializes in the study of grass roots social organization and social change in the People’s Republic of China in both the Mao and reform eras.  Since 2000 he has been directing survey projects in China to examine how ordinary citizens view the very high levels of income inequality in that society, with the first of three national surveys (conducted in 2004) summarized in his book, Myth of the Social Volcano, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010. His most recent book is Remembering Ezra Vogel (co-edited with Mary Brinton), Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2022.