| A halting rise |
| For years, American politicians have warned that China could challenge the U.S. as the world’s top superpower. As China’s growth regularly outpaced Western rivals, it seemed on track to become the world’s biggest economy. |
| But even the most bullish assessments of China’s rise always anticipated its growth would eventually slow. That slowdown has arrived sooner than expected, as a result of poor decisions by Chinese leadership. |
| Two developments yesterday highlighted the risks for China. Chinese officials announced that the country’s population declined last year for the first time in more than 60 years. They also released data showing that the country’s economy grew only 3 percent last year, well below the government’s target of 5.5 percent. |
| Both these outcomes are closely linked to Chinese policy. Decades-long government efforts to reduce birthrates nationwide, including the policy of allowing most families to have only one child, sped up the population decline. And the economic slowdown is in part tied to the zero-Covid policy that China backed away from only last month, which left the country unprepared to reopen. |
| This newsletter will explain what yesterday’s developments mean for China’s future. |
| Stifled growth |
| Experts have long anticipated China’s population decline. Some analysts argue the decline actually started years ago. Regardless, the drop is coming more quickly than expected; previous projections from China and the U.N. suggested the decline would not begin until the next decade. |
| The population is aging rapidly. The median age in China has already surpassed that of the U.S. and could rise above 50 by 2050. Even Europe’s fastest-aging countries are not expected to surpass a median age of 50 until around 2100. |
| To some degree, China is following a typical trajectory: Birthrates tend to drop and median ages tend to rise as countries develop. Birthrates have also dropped in general across East Asia. But China sped up its trajectory with its one-child policy, which began in the late 1970s and was in effect until 2016; its fertility rates are now lower than those in the U.S., Europe and Japan. |
| China “will no longer be the young, vibrant, growing population,” Wang Feng, an expert on China’s demographic trends at the University of California, Irvine, told my colleagues Alexandra Stevenson and Zixu Wang. “We will start to appreciate China, in terms of its population, as an old and shrinking population.” |
