China’s census reveals the magnitude of the problem of population growth

Six years after their marriage, Haley Zhang has no plans to have a child. The 33-year-old Shanghai advertising executive is concerned about being a parent at work and the high cost of raising children.

“My supervisor has made it clear that I have to choose my current role with greater potential or lower responsibility for having more family time,” Zhang said. There is no middle ground. ”

Zhang’s suspicions of having one child – no more than two, as the Chinese government has officially promoted since 2015 – reflect the challenges facing the country.

The release of China’s 10-year-old census last week has sparked a global outcry over whether the world’s most populous country is moving slowly to avoid problems.

The population growth for 2011 to 20 showed a growing population a significant decrease over the years. Births dropped to 12m last year, the lowest mark since the early 1960s when China emerged from severe starvation.

Ning Jizhe, director of the National Bureau of Statistics, did not respond to any comment from experts, individuals and the central bank of China that family planning borders should be completely lifted, saying existing policies – which encouraged more families to have two children – was enough. “As long as we have the resources to support it, China’s birthright can be realized,” he said.

The NBS also said that the Chinese population last year was 1.4bn for 2019, with the official 2020 projected increase of 11.7m.

The program of The Financial Times reports last month when the government was ready to report annual decline in its population by 60 years.

Ernan Cui, a researcher at Gavekal Dragonomics, a research company, said there were “obvious contradictions” in the government’s approach. “It is possible that the actual population growth will rise in 2020, a decade later,” he said.

A lot of ignorance is too late

The release of the public was delayed by more than a month when supervisors analyzed the information. The Chinese population is very unfortunate, as it confirms everything from family planning programs to monetary policy and is only disclosed to government departments upon consensus.

Many services and regions require more people to support larger budgets, but the People’s Bank of China has warned that accounting is coming. The central bank also said in a report released last month – after census calculations – the birth rate was constantly increased. “We need to recognize that China’s population has changed,” he said.

Chinese officials have acknowledged that there is nothing that the country can do to change the aging process. Researchers at Goldman Sachs found that over the past decade, “the number of older people” – an increase of 65 or more working people – had risen from 11% to 20%.

The fertility rate in the country, the number of children born to the mother, is only 1.3, lower compared to the US at 1.7 and Japan at 1.4, where the population decline is real.

Complaints from women like Zhang show that eliminating family planning is not enough. Like millions of people in Chinese cities, they do not register your home, or hukou, which would give his children the opportunity to attend government-sponsored schools in Shanghai. Zhang instead had to send them to an expensive luxury storage. “There is no social security system that helps women have children,” she said. “Mere contraception is not enough.”

Bert Hofman, director of the East Asia Institute at the National University of Singapore, said he hoped the Chinese “would begin to decline [this decade], and [do] the same for all the centuries of this century ”.

But he added that “population growth is not GDP”, noting that China has been working with declining population since 2012 while still benefiting. strong economic growth.

Between 2010 and 2020, the number of people working in China fell by more than 3% to 968m, but higher education rates, technological advances and years of retirement will help to increase productivity.

“In other words, the Chinese population should be welcomed,” Hofman said. “Half the population living here will not be a burden on China, its water supply and limited resources.”

Many researchers, however, believe that the government should be more proactive. Huang Wenzheng at the Center for China and Globalization, a thinker in Beijing, said the growing number of civilians has given the authorities “false security concepts”.

“Recent audits have sent a message that there is no need to change the main points,” he added. “This creates a time bomb.”

Behavioral questions

The skeptics also pointed out the discrepancy between the annual NBS pages and their ten-year registration.

The 2020 census also revealed that China had a population of 255m for 14 years or more at the end of last year. But annual figures for 2006-20 increase to 239m – a difference of 16m.

“This is inconsistent,” said Zhuang Bo, China’s chief financial officer at TS Lombard, the research team. “The government needs to change the numbers drastically so that these numbers don’t change.”

Such inconsistencies have become commonplace, and government officials have said that censuses are more accurate. The 2010 census, for example, found a minimum of 38m people aged 14 years and less than the annual survey.

The NBS has not yet announced the 2020 demise, which could shed light on corona virus epidemic, which arrived in China early last year.

Controversy over China’s population growth has raised concerns that government policies were flawed.

When the State Council unveiled the democratic development plan in 2016, its targets for 2020 included an increase of 1.42bn and an increase in fertility at 1.8, more than the 1.3.

“The important thing is not whether or not the Chinese population exceeds 1.4bn [last year], but the number of births could continue in the coming years, ”Huang said.

Additional reports of Xinning Liu in Beijing