China’s demographic implosion has begun and will unfold rapidly

The South China Morning Post (SCMP) has cited a forecast by the Rhodium Group research team according to which China’s population will shrink by 60 million people over the next ten years.

Even such a decline, comparable to the population of France (68.5 million people), does not at first glance seem catastrophic against the backdrop of China’s total population of 1.4 billion. Boris Johnson might even consider it an excellent result worthy of congratulating the Chinese leadership.

The issue, however, lies in the trend and the outlook. Population decline in China has now been recorded for a fourth consecutive year since 2022. But the roots of this great demographic turning point go back to the 1970s.

At that time, the global ‘population explosion’ was seen as a threat to humanity’s sustainable development, and China, where more than 25 million children were born every year, looked like the main source of that threat. Yet already in the 1970s, China’s total fertility rate had begun a steep decline, falling by half over the decade from 5 and thereby approaching replacement level (2.1).

In order to curb the growth of an already enormous population and prevent overloading land, water, and energy resources, the leadership of the People’s Republic of China decided to accelerate the decline in births by means of state regulation. Thus in 1979 the ‘One Family, One Child’ policy was introduced. This happened at the same time as the launch of market reforms and the policy of openness. In this way, two long-term strategies for transforming Chinese society began simultaneously: integrating the Chinese elite into capital accumulation and curbing demographic growth while transitioning to demographic contraction.

The subject of development strategies is the ruling class – in this case, the Chinese one. Western influence (the Club of Rome and the UN doctrine of ‘sustainable development’) was of course present, but not decisive. It should be noted that both strategies – global capitalism (capitalist globalization) and demographic contraction – formed a single conceptual complex that in the last third of the 20th century became the dominant universalist mindset of transnational elites (financial oligarchy, multinational corporations, international bureaucracy) and national elites alike, thereby creating the material basis for the de facto convergence of nominally “antagonistic” elites of capitalist and socialist states.