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Bloomberg’s Businessweek recently provided an update on one of the most tragic social control experiments of all time, China’s One Child Policy. Bloomberg notes that “Communist Party officials say the one-child directive prevented 400 million births though academics have argued the figure is too high because the country’s fertility rate would have declined gradually without government interference. …” Whatever the number, China began to abandon its coercive policy in 2016. AEI scholar Nicholas Eberstadt, a noted demographer, flagged the issues arising from such a policy for China decades ago.
Now, China’s working age population is declining and soon it will be grayer than ours with serious implications for China’s slowing economy. China also has 30 million fewer men than women. At AEI, Eberstadt has been writing about population policies for three decades and he has been especially prescient about China’s One Child Policy mistake, and its implications for people’s personal happiness and for China’s demographic future.
More than a decade ago, in an article titled “China’s One Child Mistake,” he urged China to abandon its policy. In this Wall Street Journal op-ed, Eberstadt analyzes the current birth trends and finds:
Eberstadt even presented his case before an audience of Chinese government officials at an economic forum as well as testifying on the subject before the US Congressional-Executive Commission on China in 2015. In September, 2008, Eberstadt invited Monica Das Gupta, from the Word Bank’s Development Research Group, Ambassador Mark Logan, and Laura Lederer from the US Department of State, for a panel discussion on the unnatural imbalances between the number of baby boys and the number of baby girls born in Asian societies, especially China.
Eberstadt has released this year an update on China’s demographic outlook finding that China’s population is on track to peak in the coming decade and to decline at an accelerating tempo after. He concludes his report with this eerie warning:
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China’s working age population is declining and soon it will be grayer than ours with serious implications for China’s slowing economy. Throughout the decades, AEI’s Nicholas Eberstadt has analyzed this growing issue.
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