Stumbling into the future

China's TFR before and after introduction of the one-child policy (Chaparro and Kulkarni 2015). Did that policy really change anything?



The European world has entered "demographic autumn"—on the one hand, fertility rates have fallen below replacement level; on the other, non-European immigration has risen progressively. These two trends can have only one outcome.

A similar demographic autumn is developing in East Asia. In some ways the situation is worse—fertility rates are at their lowest here. The record is held by the provinces of northeastern China, which have a total fertility rate of only 0.75 children per woman (Wang 2018). South Korea has an estimated TFR of 0.96, and a significant number of those births are to immigrant mothers from Southeast Asia (Haas 2018). Japan is doing better only by comparison, with a TFR of 1.4.

As for China as a whole, the rate is officially 1.6 and unofficially 1.05; the authorities revise this statistic upward to include second children who go unreported because they are illegal under the one-child policy (Wang 2018). That policy was scrapped in 2016, yet those second children still seem to be in hiding. Do they really exist? Did they ever? The Chinese government is stuck in a classic quandary: what do you do when you realize you've not been telling the truth?

The truth is that China’s TFR is half of what it needs to maintain its current population. This should be no surprise. In fact, it’s in line with what we see in Taiwan (1.1), in Singapore's Chinese community (1.1), and in Malaysia's Chinese community (1.3). Looking back, one can wonder whether the one-child policy ever had much impact on the TFR (Chaparro and Kulkarni 2015). The decline seems to have deep roots in modern Chinese society:

China faces an intractable and protracted demographic crisis driven by millions of individual family planning choices made by its increasingly wealthy and urbanized population. Policies restricting births imposed by the authorities have played only a contributing role in the drama. Similar aging trends can be seen throughout East Asia, especially in Japan, Taiwan and Hong Kong — territories that never had the types of legal restrictions imposed upon mainland Chinese couples.

[...] The current relaxation of family size restrictions is simply too little, too late. Before the policy was completely abolished in 2013, the Chinese government relaxed the one-child policy by allowing 11 million couples in which both spouses had no siblings to have two children. However, by May 2015, only 18 percent of eligible couples had taken advantage of the opportunity. This shows to what extent China's declining fertility is driven by personal considerations, as opposed to public policies.

In October 2015, the country's National Health and Family Planning Commission estimated that some 90 million families would qualify for the new, two-child policy. By the end of the year, however, only two million families had applied for permission to have a second child. China Daily conducted a survey in 2016 which showed that nearly 60 percent of working mothers do not want a second child, citing time and energy needed to raise it. Other concerns of the women included career risks, the pain of childbirth and little faith in their marriages. (O'Reilly 2019)

This problem is made worse by the gender imbalance: fewer girls than boys are being born. China now has 33 million more males than females. Finally, there is no reason to believe that the decline will stop at one child per woman.


Stumbling into the future

China's workforce is already shrinking, and the total population will begin to shrink before the mid-2020s.  The decline could be offset by pro-natalist measures. For instance, men and women could be encouraged to remain in rural areas and small towns, where conditions are better for family formation. To deal with the shrinking workforce, there could be measures to phase out low-paying jobs through automation and robotization. Of course, there must first be a willingness to act. Unfortunately, such willingness is far from evident, to judge by the current denial and inaction.

China will stumble into its demographic future, with one ad hoc solution after another. One of them may be immigration: "[China] currently hosts some 900,000 legal migrants and untold numbers of illegals, most of them factory workers from Vietnam. Also, desperate Chinese bachelors, unable to find Chinese mates because of the gender imbalance, are increasingly marrying Cambodian or Vietnamese women" (O'Reilly 2019). This is not to say that immigrants will be actively recruited. As is already the case, most will come illegally, being lured by jobs and empty housing. The onus will then be on the authorities to act—in the face of opposition not only from the business community but also from the migrants' home countries, many of which provide Chinese industry with valuable raw materials.

The solutions will ultimately depend on the ideological environment. Westerners often believe that the Chinese are intensely nationalist. In reality, there is a range of views within China, with the majority supporting civic nationalism. This is not coincidentally the view that the government promotes, partly out of conviction and partly to co-opt Tibetans, Muslims, and other minorities. Meanwhile, younger, university-educated people are moving toward the globalist consensus that reigns in the West.

One such person is Yinghong Cheng, who went abroad to study and is now a professor at Delaware State University. His latest book has a chapter titled "Racism and Its Agents in China" (Cheng 2019). In it he argues:

As an ideology, racism or racial discourses do not exist for their own sake or by themselves but always reflect power relations that may be addressed in other social hierarchy-based or identity-related discourses. In China today, racial thinking can appear in various discourses addressed to the political and ideological needs of the party-state, cultural and intellectual elites, and ordinary citizens: nationalism, patriotism, statism, social Darwinism, Han Chauvinism (or Hanism), non-Han ethno-nationalism, populism, and the Chinese civilizational supremacism in general (associated with the traditional ethnocentrism of China). (Cheng 2019, p. 241)

Elsewhere, he describes Hanism as “an ultra-ethnic supremacism” that “comes close to racism in its way of essentializing differences in a condescending manner” (Cheng 2019, p. 264). “The anti-Qing Hanist racism and a racial hierarchy of the world are the twin of the discourse of race in modern Chinese history. Like any other racial discourse in the world, they reflect power relations in reality but construct imaginary orders for a racially ideal—or “natural”—world” (Cheng 2019, p. 16). “… the Han political and intellectual elite exploited the social science disciplines of history, archaeology, and ethnology to establish the centrality of the Han blood and ancestors …” (Cheng 2019, p. 7).

Cheng overstates his case when he describes racism as an ideology that always reflects power relations. This is untrue if we examine its core value: preference for one’s kind. Throughout history and prehistory, humans have cared a lot about their kith and kin, even to the point of sacrificing their lives—and this has been no less true in simple societies with no elite or ruling class. Indeed, the oldest societies were essentially clans of related individuals. Furthermore, kinship is key not only to human life but also to the lives of organisms incapable of having ideas, let alone an ideology. 

Please note: I'm not arguing that kin preference is innate (although that argument can be made). I'm simply saying that it predates ideology and has long been the main organizing principle of society. Perhaps it's now obsolete. Perhaps it’s time for us to become self-defining individuals in a global marketplace. That’s the mainstream liberal argument. But that’s not Cheng's argument. He is arguing that kin preference always was wrong, and now we finally have a chance to get rid of it for good—by eliminating the "agents of racism." How this elimination is supposed to happen is not discussed. Indeed, he never applies to himself the sort of painstaking analysis he applies to others.

In all this, Cheng’s thinking is strangely ahistorical. If kinship has always been the basis for human society, perhaps there is a reason. Perhaps it has been the best way to organize social relations. Or perhaps not. Could we at least have a debate without being accused of base motives? Or being eliminated?

A big problem here is cargo-cult reverence for the West, and this reverence extends to the individualism and globalism that has become so dominant in North America and Western Europe, particularly in elite circles. Cheng denounces China for not doing enough to follow their example, while quoting Chinese writers who point to the resulting problems. If that model of society is already problematic in the West, where it has existed for a longer time, has deeper roots in the culture, and has greater chances for success, why should it do better in a country like China?

Cheng further reveals his ahistoricism when he argues that racism suits elite interests. Yes, it did back in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when elites were nation-based. But they haven’t been that way for some time. Elites no longer have a national conscience, particularly in the West. Their self-interest now pushes them to liquidate the nation-state, notably by outsourcing jobs to low-wage countries and by insourcing low-wage labor for jobs that cannot be outsourced in construction, agriculture, and services. It is this two-way movement—and not "racism"—that is steadily increasing the Gini index, the most common measure of the gap between the rich and the poor.

Do China’s elites still have a national conscience? One can wonder. Unfortunately, this question goes unanswered in Cheng's book. Only nationalism is seen as problematic in the new China, and only nationalism is viewed as serving elite interests. Yet globalism, too, exists within a context of power relations. It, too, serves certain interests. 

As China's working population continues to shrink, will the elites push for higher wages so that labor may be used more sparingly? Or will they keep wages down by bringing in migrant labor? Which scenario is more likely if policymaking is in their hands? And which scenario will get better coverage in the Chinese media?


References

Chaparro, R. and K. Kulkarni. (2015). Does high population growth help or hurt economic development? Cases of China and Pakistan. International Journal of Education Economics and Development 6. 162. 10.1504/IJEED.2015.070629.
https://www.inderscienceonline.com/doi/abs/10.1504/IJEED.2015.070629

Cheng, Y. (2019). Discourses of Race and Rising China. Palgrave Macmillan
https://books.google.ca/books?id=ht-GDwAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&hl=fr&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false

Haas, B. (2018). South Korea's fertility rate set to hit record low of 0.96. The Guardian, September 3
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/sep/03/south-koreas-fertility-rate-set-to-hit-record-low

O'Reilly, B. (2019). China lacks the wherewithal to adjust to demographic decline. Austrian Economics Center
https://www.austriancenter.com/china-lacks-the-wherewithal-to-adjust-to-demographic-decline/

Wang, M. (2018). For Whom the Bell Tolls: A Retrospective and Predictive Study of Fertility Rates in China (November 8, 2018). Available at SSRN: 
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3234861