Weighing In: China’s One-Child Policy: No U-Turn Ahead

This is a follow-up post on Alastair Su’s blog post “Taking a Cue From Thailand’s Mr Condom”, looking specifically at China’s one-child policy and its economic impacts.
Just over a year ago, the first few Chinese babies born in 1979 turned 30 – a significant milestone by any measure, but one made all the more momentous by them being the first to have been born in the era of China’s one-child policy. Now in its 31st year, any doubts that China’s well-known population policy was about to be headed for a mid-life crisis were quashed when the National Population and Family Planning Commission recently announced that it would continue with it until “at least 2015”. There seems to be life in this program yet.
Unfortunately, China’s population isn’t ageing as gracefully as its one-child policy is. In 2009, 13 per cent of its population was over 60 – this figure is expected to skyrocket over the coming decades. The accompanying financial strain will arise from not only the increased burden on China’s healthcare system, but the reduction in its taxable working population (its labor force is expected to peak in 2016). Contrasted with that of Asia’s other booming juggernaut, China’s future population is a source of worry, not pride. As The Economist notes, India will soon benefit from its “demographic dividend”, thanks to its young burgeoning workforce. China’s erstwhile blazing economic growth looks set to be eclipsed by India’s in a few decades.
Besides its hobbling of future economic growth, there are other compelling reasons why the one-child policy should be reconsidered. A UN estimate puts the current figure of “missing women” – a result of Chinese families favoring boys over girls – at more than 40 million. This large-scale infanticide has already resulted in the existence of millions of males who are unable to find a wife, as well as increased trafficking in women as brides. The rich have also been more able to flout the rules, giving birth overseas or simply paying the fines outright, raising questions about social equality and corruption.
All this is not to say that China did not benefit from the policy in the first place. While it is difficult to say whether the additional 400 million people that would have been born would have undermined economic stability and employment, it did bestow upon China a very low dependency ratio, creating a favorable demographic “sweet spot” for its breakneck growth in the following decades.
Ultimately though, China should reconsider this blunt policy tool when dealing with a very complex issue which requires the work of many different policy levers. As Alastair Su mentioned last week in a previous blog entry, China should take its cue from countries like Thailand and look at different ways to handle the different problems its population presents at different stages in time. Rising wealth and increasing urbanization, combined with better-implemented and innovative family planning policies would work better to limit population size. If the Middle Kingdom is still frightened by Malthusian spectres, it would do well to remember that if this demographic trend continues, it would soon become a developing country with a developed country’s problem. China’s population is not yet over the hill; but time is running out.
Photo Credit: Tehran Times