BEIJING (Reuters) – China’s once-a-decade census is expected to show a further decline in the percentage of young people in its rapidly aging population as high living costs and aversion to having children among urban couples push China closer to a cracked demographic outlook.
Political decision-makers are under pressure to come up with incentives for family planning and to arrest a declining birth rate, the world’s most populous country at risk of irreversible population slippage if effective measures are not found.
China is expected to publish the results of its latest census, conducted at the end of 2020, in the coming days. It is believed that the proportion of older people in the population has increased, but more significant will be the data about its young people.
In 2010, the proportion of the population aged 14 and under fell to 16.60% from 22.89% in 2000, as a result of a decades-old policy. Citizens aged 60 and over accounted for 13.26%, up from about 10%.
Continuing these trends will undermine China’s working-age population and influence productivity. A declining group of working adults will also test their ability to pay and care for an aging nation.
In 2016, China gave up the one-child policy, hoping to increase the number of children. It also set a population growth target of around 1.42 billion by 2020, from 1.34 billion in 2010.
But the birth rate continued to fall.
This is partly due to the fact that urban couples, despite parental pressure to have children, value their independence and career more than raising a family.
Yu Tao, 31, a product designer in Beijing for a major technology firm, said he was reluctant to make the sacrifice in terms of the time he would have to make if he and his wife had a child.
As such, he usually arrives home from work at midnight, at the earliest.
“I like my balance now, the way I balance my life and my personal life, and I don’t think I can still be in that good balance once I have a child,” Yu said.
IRREVERSIBLE SLIP?
Yu and his wife have a combined income of more than 700,000 yuan ($ 106,888) a year, but said they do not feel financially secure enough to have a child, although they earn considerably more than an average household.
Annual disposable income per capita was 43,834 yuan in 2020, compared to 19,109 yuan in 2010, official data show.
“We are not ready for a child both financially and mentally,” Yu said.
Rising living costs in big cities, a major source of children because of their huge population, have taken couples out of children, especially the cost of housing.
Among urban households, annual per capita household spending increased to 6,958 yuan in 2020 from 1,332 yuan in 2010, according to official data, more than five times.
“If the government simply allows people to have children without political support, it is unlikely to have too much of an impact,” said social and labor expert Liu Kaiming.
“In general, if people are reluctant to have children or have fewer, it is irreversible.”
State media are making increasingly serious predictions, saying the population could start to shrink in the next few years – a gloomier forecast than the United Nations, which predicts a population peak in 2030 and then a decline. .
In 2016, China set a 2020 target for its fertility rate of about 1.8 children per woman, up from 1.5-1.6 in 2015.
If the rate falls below 1.5, many demographers say China is unlikely to ever get out of the so-called fertility trap.
The recent comments of the Minister of Civil Affairs according to which the fertility rate had already passed a “warning line” and the population had entered a critical period of transition has gone viral on social media.
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Reporting by Ryan Woo; Additional reporting by Liangping Gao, Lusha Zhang and the Beijing editorial office; Edited by Robert Birsel