A rapidly ageing, gender-skewed population is giving China a headache – as are migrant workers who have moved off the land
One in five of the world's population is Chinese, a statistic that has generated a number of bad jokes and, more importantly, the unavoidable weight of a rising China in the world. In few other countries have the questions of how many people there are, and where and how they live mattered more for public policy.
Last November, 6 million census workers interviewed 400 million households in China in the country's sixth national census. The first results, released by the National Bureau of Statistics, reveal a rapidly ageing, male-dominated population that continues to expand – up 5.7% since 1990 to 1.339 billion, that is considerably better educated at tertiary level than a decade ago and, for the first time in Chinese history, is on the edge of becoming predominantly urban. The census results are both a map of three decades of profound social and economic change in China, and a signpost for the future.
China's planners are still grappling with the consequences of Mao Zedong's belief that the more people China had, the better: China's huge population, Mao thought, could survive a nuclear war with the USSR. Faced with an imminent further population explosion, Mao's successors imposed China's draconian one-child policy which, 30 years later, is still shaping China's social and economic choices.
Clearly visible in these latest census results are the trends that informed China's 12th five-year plan, published earlier this year: first, that the day is in sight when China will run out of the cheap labour that has fuelled its growth in the past three decades; second, that the gender imbalance is worryingly large, the result of a preference for an only son over an only daughter; and third, that the burden of caring for a growing population of elderly citizens, in what is the world's most rapidly ageing population, will inevitably fall on a shrinking proportion of the economically active.
The impact of a shrinking labour pool is already visible in the rising wages and labour shortages that have been affecting low-end manufacturing in China's coastal provinces, forcing factories to move nearer to the inland labour pool, or abroad. The government response is to attempt to move China up the value chain, following the example of Japan, Taiwan and South Korea, but the statistics are a reminder that this is a race against time and will reawaken the worrying doubt that China might grow old before it grows rich: compared with 10 years ago, the number of people over 60 has risen by nearly three percentage points to 13.3%, while the percentage of under-14s has dropped 6.3 percentage points to just 16.6%. China must now balance the risks of relaxation of the policy – the threat of a further rapid rise in population – against the risk of stagnation.
The pattern of economic development is also visible in the distribution of the population and how they live: that the size of households has fallen is attributed both to low fertility and the growth of nuclear family living. The proportion of non-Han Chinese has risen slightly, as China's so-called national minorities enjoy a more relaxed birth-control regime. And, most striking in the data released so far, China's migrant workers – the underprivileged and exploited floating population who left the land to build China's cities – has nearly doubled, up 81% to more than 261 million.
The future of these migrants is another headache for Chinese planners. Migration for work does not bring the right of residence in China since the household registration system, devised half a century ago to keep China's peasants tied to the land, remains in force. While China's cities rely on migrant labour, they are unwilling to shoulder the costs of providing migrants with health, housing or welfare. As they cannot register as urban residents, migrant labourers can be expelled by force to their home towns, they have no access to medical services and their children have no right to be educated in city schools. It's a system that has exacerbated China's deep social divisions and has been increasingly questioned as the country moves towards middle income status, a target it is likely to attain by the time of the next census in 2020.
By then, if things go according to plan, another 300 million people will have moved off the land and China's small farms will have been consolidated as the government attempts to feed the country's many mouths. By then, too, it has been predicted that 30 million Chinese males will not be able to find wives, with unpredictable social consequences. That may prove an even more intractable problem for China's planners.
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