is foreign. Although the government recently created new visas for low-skilled foreign workers in industries like construction and care, and has broken a taboo by letting those workers bring their families immediately, rather than after five years, the numbers are a trickle. Only 18 foreign workers have qualified for the care-worker visa, partly because the exams are in Japanese.
‘The worst scenario in my mind,’ Dr Saito confides, ‘is that even if we open up the country, nobody comes.’
China: Growing Old Before It Gets Rich
They call it the grey wall of China. By 2100, China’s elderly population will dwarf that of any other country except India. It’ll be so large, wags joke, that you’ll be able to see it from outer space. At the park around Beijing’s Temple of Heaven, in the cool of early morning, hundreds of older people are playing cards, doing tai-chi or exercising. A group of about 50, mainly women, dance to lilting music. They move gracefully, quietly, in a choreographed routine, on the paths between the trees.
It’s an uplifting, harmonious scene. The women place their feet confidently, and with precision. But it’s hard to feel so confident of the future. Most of the people in this park are retired. China’s working-age population has been in decline since 201214 and is set to fall by almost a quarter by 2050. The demographer Nicholas Eberstadt, of the American Enterprise Institute, has predicted that this will drag down China’s GDP growth rate. By mid-century, China’s population could look much more like Japan’s – but without Japan’s affluence.
The birth rate was falling even before the government introduced the One-Child Policy in 1978. Now, China is awash with only children. Many find themselves having to support two parents and four grandparents – known as ‘the 4–2–1’ problem. There is the added, disturbing glut of bachelors because so many families preferred sons to daughters. These ‘guang gun’ (bare branches) will struggle to find brides.
Sensing the danger, the Communist Party dropped the One-Child Policy in 2015. But it is probably too late. Few eligible families have applied to have a second child. Many don’t feel they can afford it, because so many have moved to cities where the cost of living is high. Seven in ten Chinese mothers work, with little time for an extra child.
Marriage is becoming less attractive. On TV dating shows like If You Are the One, successful Chinese women criticise potential suitors for being ugly or poor. More women than men now attend Chinese universities, and many are defying the jibes about unmarried women being ‘shengnu’, or ‘leftover’. A survey by the Chinese dating website Baihe.com has found 75 per cent of women saying that any husband should earn twice as much as them.
The Chinese Academy of Social Sciences predicts that the Chinese population will peak at 1.44 billion in 2029 before entering ‘unstoppable’ decline.15 By 2065, it says, the population will have shrunk to the levels of the mid-1990s.
What could this mean for China as a military power? Mark L. Haas, a political scientist at Duquesne University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, has suggested that China could be forced to make ‘geriatric peace’ with other nations, as it becomes too burdened by its elderly to maintain military spending. That is not certain: China may not feel beholden to spend as much as a democracy on older citizens, and it can use technology to raise productivity. But it is too big to be able to level the playing field by importing enough immigrants.
Instead, the government has started offering five-year multiple-entry visas to tempt its diaspora back home – something South Africa and India are also doing.16 It is also contemplating raising the retirement age, which is 60 for men and 55 for women.17
Will they be fit enough? China faces an increasing burden of chronic disease approaching Western levels. Junk food and stress have accompanied rapid urbanisation and the country has not yet broken the smoking habit. Under Mao, China’s population was surprisingly healthy: it saw the world’s most sustained increase in life expectancy, from 35 in 1949 to 65 in 1980.18 That healthy, working-age population helped to drive its unprecedented economic growth.19 But now, China is growing old with neither Japan’s wealth nor its health, at a time when many of its jobs still require physical, manual labour. And its rival, America, is on a different path.
China v America
America has long been a demographic exception, with a higher birth rate than most other rich countries. China’s population is currently around four times the size of America’s. But that gap will have halved20 by the end of this century, unless America slams the door shut on immigrants.
The chart below gives a glimpse into the geopolitics of the next few decades. It shows China’s working-age population dropping, along with Europe’s, while America’s remains stable:
Before the financial crisis, the American population was sustaining itself, with a birth rate of 2.12.21 This is partly because it has higher levels of immigration, and because immigrants tend to have larger families. In the US, 23 per cent of births are to foreign-born women,22 while only 13 per cent of the population is comprised of immigrants.23
American women also become mothers earlier than in any other OECD country: at an average age of 26, compared with 28 in the UK, and 31 in Italy. Only 14 per cent of US women remain childless, compared to 18 per cent in the UK and 23 per cent in Germany.24
There is a dark side. America has been lagging behind other rich countries in life expectancy, partly because its high rates of obesity mean it has failed to combat deaths from stroke. But now, US life expectancy at birth has dropped for three years in a row, the first drop since the AIDS/HIV epidemic, partly because of what the Princeton professors Case and Deaton have dubbed ‘deaths of despair’25 – from suicide, alcohol and opioids.26 Poverty and inequality pose real challenges.
In 2017, America also hit a 40-year low in its fertility rate, of 1.76.27 What is not clear is whether this is a post-crisis blip or a new direction. The fertility rate of Mexicans in America dropped by a third between 2006 and 2013, partly because of the financial squeeze – and it hasn’t yet recovered. If migrants are to keep working their magic on fertility, they need to keep coming, because second- and third-generation immigrants tend to adopt the cultures of the host country and have fewer babies. Any president who builds a wall could therefore get more than he bargained for: because population is shaping up to be a powerful geopolitical weapon.
India: Educating Rhia
Today’s Indian couples say their ideal family size is two children, according to a poll by The Economist.28 That’s smaller than the ideal family cited by Brits and Americans. Fifty years since the biologist Paul Erhlich predicted mass famine in his book The Population Bomb, India’s youthful population is growing slowly. The average woman now has just 2.3 children – fewer if she is Sikh, Jain or Christian, slightly more if she is Hindu and a bit more again if she is Muslim.
India did not need a One-Child Policy to reach this point. Although government has nudged people to have smaller families in various ways, India is a good advert for the principle that educating girls reduces the number of children they have. Especially if you accept that education comes in many forms. Birth rates have fallen where cable TV has arrived in rural areas, bringing Bollywood soap operas featuring independent childless women and chic urban mothers with small families.29 Audiences name their babies after the characters, become less tolerant of domestic violence and use contraception. India is not alone: telenovelas have had a similar effect in Brazil.30
While India still wrestles with poverty
