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Top Scholar Predicts “Slow Motion Humanitarian Tragedy” in China

Stinging rebuke delivered during address to World Economic Forum in Dalian, China

By Samantha Singson

NEW YORK, September 21, 2007 (CFAM.org) - Likening the Chinese one-child policy to a “slow-motion humanitarian tragedy,” prominent demographer Nicholas Eberstadt urged the Chinese government to “immediately and without reservation” scrap the coercive population control program that has been “a tragic and historic mistake.” Eberstadt delivered the stinging rebuke during an address to the World Economic Forum held in Dalian, China earlier this month.

Eberstadt told officials that while the population control program has achieved its objective of lowering the number of births in China, it “directly undermine[s] the country’s future development potential.”

According to Eberstadt’s research, by 2015 China’s working-age population of 15-64 year olds will be in a prolonged decline and in a generation, China’s labor force will likely be smaller than it is today.  Between 2005 and 2030, China’s 15-24 year old population will decrease and face a projected 20 percent decline.  Eberstadt emphasizes “the only part of working age population that stands to increase in size between now and 2030 is the over-50 group.”  China’s aging population will experience a never-before-seen boom. By 2030, China’s 65-plus cohort could more than double and top 235 million.

Another startling outcome will be the undoing of 2500 years of Chinese cultural tradition, he projected. That is because the new face of Chinese culture would have a “4-2-1” composition: four grandparents, two parents and one child. The new equation will hamper economic development as it puts greater strains on the dwindling youth population. Unlike the situation in Japan, where a national pension system was already in place before the aging population began to rise, China has no such pension system. Elderly have depended on sons to provide for them in old age and with the rapid fertility decline, those sons will not exist. “How will the elderly in China get by in the world they will so soon be facing?” he asked.

Another consequence of China’s population policy has been the increasingly skewed gender imbalance. Naturally, about 105 baby boys are born for every 100 baby girls. Eberstadt reports that shortly after the advent of the one-child policy, China began to report biologically impossible disparities. Currently, the sex ratio at birth in China is 123 baby boys for every 100 girls.  In a generation or less, China will have to deal with the problem of tens of millions of unmarriageable young men.

Eberstadt urged the Chinese government to abandon their population control policy as a means of easing “China’s incipient aging crisis, its looming family structure problems, and its worrisome gender imbalances” and encouraged the government to embrace human resources as a blessing which could “be the key to whether China succeeds in abolishing poverty and attaining mass affluence in the decades and generations ahead.”

Eberstadt said he could not be sure, but felt this could have been the first time such a presentation had been made in China. Though many Chinese demographers might agree with Eberstadt analysis, they have been reluctant to openly criticize the policy.

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