China’s population shrank last year, marking the first reversal for the world’s most populous nation in six decades. According to figures released on Jan 17, China’s population stood at 1.41175 billion in 2022, falling by 850,000 from 2021. At 6.77 births per 1,000 people, 2022’s birth rate was down from 7.52 in 2021.
This is the first time deaths had outnumbered births in China since 1961, when the Great Leap Forward, the failed economic experiment by former Chinese leader Mao Zedong, led to widespread famine and death.
If China cannot reverse today’s population decline, it will be the end of Chinese history, says Singapore’s former foreign minister George Yeo in a public lecture on Jan 13.
“At the rate the Chinese are going, they will become extinct as a race,” adds Yeo in his lecture at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, National University of Singapore.
That said, Yeo cautions against writing off the efforts of China’s leaders. “I don’t underestimate the willpower of the Chinese Communist Party.”
Yeo says party members who are single may face questions about why they have yet to wed, while married members may be asked about their plans to have children.
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Yeo’s comments may have preceded the announcement by China’s National Bureau of Statistics, but hints of the trend — and efforts to stem it — are not new. A December 2021 editorial in state media outlet China Reports Network suggested party members are obliged to have three children. The opinion piece said party members “should shoulder the responsibility and obligation of the country’s population growth and act on the three-child policy”.
The piece, which was deleted after it went viral on Chinese social media platforms, also said: “No party member should use any excuse, objective or personal, to not marry or have children, nor can they use any excuse to have only one or two children.”
In their quest to lift falling birth rates, China’s leaders face practical problems about daily life, says Yeo. He raises an example of mothers playing multiple roles and being unable to cope with both work and family, a problem exacerbated by men who do not pull their weight at home — “the old ways of being men”.
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The Chinese will use “all ways and means” to reverse this demographic trend, says Yeo. “Unlike the Christian West, the Chinese have few hang-ups about abortion and new ways to conceive babies, [such as] surrogate mothers and so on.”
“There will be things that they will do which may trouble some of us; they will go their own way,” he adds. “Will they succeed? I don’t know. But they will certainly try.”
Population growth is but one measure, says Yeo, a quantitative one. Another aspect to consider is the quality of tomorrow’s generation, he adds.
“China now has one-third of the world’s robots. Yes, one-fifth or one-sixth of the world’s population, but last year, one in two robots was born in China,” says Yeo. “There are other dimensions we should think about.”
