BEIJING (Reuters) – The Chinese census of once a decade is expected to show a further decline in the percentage of young people in the rapidly aging population, as high cost of living and a dislike of children among urban couples China is closer to a demography pushes crunch.
Policymakers are under pressure to come up with family planning incentives and arrest a declining birth rate, with the world’s most populous country at risk of entering an irreversible population trajectory if effective measures are not found.
China is expected to announce the results of its latest census, which was done at the end of 2020, in the coming days. It is believed that the proportion of elderly people in the population has increased, but the most important is the data on young people.
In 2010, the share of the population aged 14 or younger dropped to 16.60% from 22.89% in 2000, an effect of a decades-old one-child policy. Residents 60 years and older accounted for 13.26%, compared to about 10%.
Continuing these trends will undermine the working age population of China and weigh productivity. A shrinking pool of working adults will also test the ability to pay for and care for an aging country.
In 2016, China scrapped the policy for one child in hopes of increasing the number of babies. It also sets a target to increase its population to 1.42 billion by 2020, from 1.34 billion in 2010.
But the birth rate kept falling.
This is in part because urban couples, despite parental pressure to have babies, value their independence and careers more than a family.
Yu Tao, 31, a product designer at a major technology company in Beijing, said he was reluctant to make the sacrifice in terms of time he would have had to do if he and his wife had a baby.
Similarly, he usually leaves work early at midnight.
“I like my balance at the moment, how I balance between my job and my personal life, and I don’t think I can still be in this good balance once I have a child,” Yu said.
IRREVERSIBLE SLIDE?
Yu and his wife have a combined income of more than 700,000 yuan ($ 106,888) per year, but said they do not feel financially secure having a child, even though they earn significantly more than an average household. .
The annual disposable urban per capita income was 43,834 yuan in 2020 compared to 19,109 yuan in 2010, according to official data.
“We are not financially and mentally ready for a child,” Yu said.
Rising living costs in large cities, a major source of infants due to their large population, have also turned couples away from children, especially housing costs.
Among urban households, the annual per capita expenditure on housing rose to 6,958 yuan in 2020, from 1,332 yuan in 2010, more than fivefold, according to official data.
“If the government simply allows people to have children without policy support, it is unlikely to have much impact,” said Liu Kaiming, a social and labor expert.
“In general, the fact that people are reluctant to have children, or to have less, is irreversible.”
State media made increasingly serious predictions, saying the population could begin to shrink in the next few years – a darker forecast than that of the United Nations, which predicts a peak in population in 2030, and then a decline.
In 2016, China set a target for 2020 for its fertility rate at about 1.8 children per woman, compared to 1.5-1.6 in 2015.
If the rate drops below 1.5, many demographers are likely to say that China will never recover from its so-called fertility decline.
Recent remarks by the Minister of Civil Affairs that the fertility rate has already exceeded a ‘warning line’ and that the population has entered a critical period of transition have been working on social media.
($ 1 = 6.5489 Chinese yuan renminbi)
Reporting by Ryan Woo; Additional reporting by Liangping Gao, Lusha Zhang and Beijing Newsroom; Edited by Robert Birsel