What does population decline mean for China? Scott Rozelle on a globally invisible issue shaping the lives of millions of the countryâs rural kids. â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â The Deep End What does population decline mean for China? Scott Rozelle on a globally invisible issue shaping the lives of millions of the countryâs rural kids. Sean Nangle / The Signal Chinaâs worldwide competition with the United States regularly captivates global attentionâas with Washington recently shooting down a Chinese spy balloon, ongoing [tensions over Taiwan]( [Beijingâs support for Russiaâs war in Ukraine]( or the U.S. administrationâs [ban on the export of advanced semiconductor chips to China](. But the countryâs greatest challenge might now come from withinâin its shrinking population. In January, Beijing announced that Chinaâs population had dropped by about 850,000 from 2021 to 2022, with the total number now at 1.41 billion. Outside demographers have estimated for years that the number of people in the country had been declining, regardless of authorized statistics from the Chinese government. Now that itâs official, what are the implications? Scott Rozelle is an American development economist, a researcher at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University, and the director of the Instituteâs Rural Education Action Program, whoâs spent several months a year working in rural China over the past four decades. To Rozelle, whatâs happening to the countryâs population will inevitably bring a number of clear challenges, at home and abroadânot least in Beijingâs economic capacity to care for an aging generation with fewer children. But âthe biggest problem China has that no one outside the country really knows aboutâ is most directly confronting its younger generationsâin the more remote areas where the majority of Chinese people live. And in time, Rozelle says, their problem will be Chinaâs. Eve Valentine: What do we really know about Chinaâs declining population? Scott Rozelle: We know itâs real and serious. Birth and fertility rates are falling fastâbirth rates being births per thousand people; fertility rates, births per woman of childbearing age, which is a clearer indicator of whatâs going on. And looking at the World Bankâs numbers, the overall fertility rate in China is down from about 1.7 to about 1.3 in six years. But then thereâs the question of where itâs happening. Western press coverage tends to focus on the urban picture: Most urban families have one kid; many have none. Of course, this is a big part of the picture as a whole. But the majority of Chinaâs population isnât falling in the cities; itâs falling in rural areas. More than 60 percent percent of babies in China are rural babies. And in rural China, the fertility rate is down to about 1.5 from about 2.5 just 10 years ago. My research group, the Rural Education Action Program out of Stanford, does a lot of work on rural families, and if you look at a typical sample of them, around 65 percent have two kids; 30 percent have one kid, without planning to have another; and around 5 percent have three kids or moreâvery few anymore. At the same time, there was a longstanding historical preference among rural Chinese families for having boys to work on the farm, and thatâs almost entirely disappeared. Itâs true that thereâs still a certain cultural bias favoring boys, but people are increasingly happy with girls too. When you speak with a family that has two girls, youâll often hear, Itâs great, weâll never have to pay a bride price!âthe ceremonial tradition of a groomâs family paying his fiancéâs. Now, I donât know what the bride price is going to look like 20 years from now, as the greater number of girls in the population get to marrying age. But these days, the bride price is very, very highâon account of the sex-selection problem from 40 years ago: Between 1980 and 2015, China imposed a one-child policy across the country, which brought an era of sex-selective abortion that skewed the rural population as a whole significantly male. Valentine: So whatâs driving the fall in rural fertility rates now? Advertisement Rozelle: After the end of the one-child policy, the main drivers have been the increasing cost of havingâand educatingâchildren and now the decreasing need for them in rural labor. In urban areas, itâs very expensive to raise kids, who havenât historically been so essential to family economies there as they have been in rural areas. But in rural areas, you donât really need kids to farm anymore. Chinese farming is almost totally mechanized now. So while the government in Beijing ended the one-child policy eight years ago, the incentive to have more children has actually diminished since. Rural parents, meanwhile, now tend to want their kids to be educated and to end up working in an off-farm sector. Which means a high-school degree, ideally a college degree, and ultimately a white-collar job. Which in turn means incurring some of the considerable expense urban parents experience in educating their children. And which ends up meaning that more rural parents want fewer kidsâto be able to focus as much of their resources as possible on those they have. Valentine: How do you understand the impact of these demographic changes? Rozelle: They certainly raise a lot of questions. The most obvious is, are there going to be enough people in the labor force? Now, I expect that in an era when weâre seeing more and more applications of robots, automation, artificial intelligence, and so on, weâll plausibly end up seeing less and less need for human labor across sectorsâin construction, for example, or manufacturing. We know technology is going to affect the demands on labor in these industries drastically. But exactly how is a question. A deeper question is how China is going to develop economically overallâspecifically, how high Chinese incomes will get in terms of GDP per capita by the time todayâs working adults become elderly. China has a very, very weak social-security system, and taking care of the elderly is the main thing they need it for. So with an ongoing population decline, supporting that system will depend on driving GDP per capita up. There are related questions about what Chinaâs global stature will look like over the same time span: What will Beijing be in a position to spend on military expansion? What will it be in a position to spend on its Belt and Road Initiative?âthe global infrastructure-development strategy itâs used to enhance its influence around the world. If you look at what China spent on Belt and Road in 2022, itâs already about a tenth of what it was three years prior. But the biggest issue these changes are driving is the biggest problem China has that no one outside the country really knows aboutâa widening gap in what social scientists call human capital between urban and rural children. In plain terms, this means two things: One is that Chinaâs education system isnât adapted to the challenge of preparing rural kids for life off the farm; itâs not training them for the emerging economy. But more fundamentally, rural Chinese families arenât adapted to preparing their kids for the challenge of integrating into the education system in the first place. Sean Nangle / The Signal More from Scott Rozelle at The Signal: âWhat we find across the countryâand it doesnât matter if itâs East China, or Central China, or West China, or the semi-rural areas around big citiesâis that thereâs a huge problem with cognitive development among rural kids. Itâs nothing genetic, and it has almost nothing to do with nutrition. Itâs mainly the result of a psycho-stimulated parenting problem.â âTheyâre cognitively delayed essentially because their parentsâwho love them and want them to go on to college and a good lifeâare still raising them as if they were raising a farmer. So they make these kids strong, they make them hardy, and they think, When my child gets into school, theyâll start to learn what they need to know there. But kidsâ early stimulation is such an important part of their development, and rural parents simply donât know how to support this for the world they want to send their children into.â âThat may not be a problem from Beijingâs perspective as long as they end up putting these kids to work in an iPhone factory. But those jobs wonât last. And in any event, they wonât help China become the kind of high-skill, high-income society it needs to become if itâs to compensate for its declining population over the next decades. Thatâll require creating paths for the emerging population into jobs that depend on knowledge of science and math and computing and so on. The Chinese are now in a position where they need to offset the dropping quantity of human capital with rising qualityâand theyâre not really doing it.â [Continue reading ...]( [The Signal]( explores urgent questions in current events around the worldâto support it and for full access: [Subscribe now]( The Signal | 1717 N St. NW, Washington, DC 20011 [Unsubscribe {EMAIL}](
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