Lessons from China’s population policy

China’s announcement that it will now permit couples to have three children is a major step for a country which, until 2016, implemented a coercive, often brutal, one-child norm. The announcement seems driven less by giving people freedom of choice, and more by the challenges posed by a shrinking labour force and a fraying demographic structure. The increase in the ageing population has become an economic and social burden. These factors have a geopolitical impact too, for it will hamper China’s ambitions of becoming an economic and military superpower which can challenge the United States (US).

Fertility rates in China have dipped to 1.3 children per woman in 2020 — India’s fertility rate is 2.3. This puts China on par with ageing societies such as Japan and some European nations, but without their accumulated household wealth. But after first pushing couples to have only one child, China will now have to, at considerable economic cost, ramp up incentives for couples to have more children. Couples are reluctant for costs of living have increased. And many couples, themselves single children, have the additional burden of being caregivers for their parents.

The median age in China is 38.8 which will rise to 55-56 by 2050; for India, it is 29 and will go up to 38; and for the US, it is 38 now and will be 44-45 by 2050. Engineering a baby boom after a history of Malthusian family planning will not be easy. There is a lesson for India. At a time when there are calls to restrict family size as a way to address the population “problem”, China’s experience shows that it doesn’t work in the long run.