Now it’s official: China’s population is shrinking. This development was expected given a one-child policy that had lasted for three decades. The population of the People’s Republic of 1.4 billion people is said to have shrunk by around one million people for the first time last year. This number may not sound huge given the total number of residents.
However, this number will now increase every year and will have increased to a total of 110 million people by 2050. Depending on the birth rate used to project the population of China in future years, the population could even drop to 488 million by the year 2100. A slightly better scenario assumes 767 million people.
China is suffering from demographic change
While not enough children are being born, the population of the People’s Republic is also aging: every year between five and ten million people will now retire from working life. In 2035, 30 percent of the population, that is around 400 million people, will be 60 years and older.
This could mean the death knell for the development of the People’s Republic into a modern industrial state: China is getting old before it gets rich. Beijing will not (and will not) be able to compensate for this development through immigration.
As with many figures reported from the People’s Republic, the accuracy of the information cannot be relied on here either. However, since the provincial governments receive grants from Beijing based on population, there is reason to believe that the regions are over-reporting population numbers and that in fact there are already fewer people living in China than the Communist Party claims.
Declining population thwarts Xi’s plans
Ruler Xi can’t use the news of the declining population: he has set himself the goal of transforming the People’s Republic into a prosperous industrial nation by 2049. He appropriately calls this process the “rejuvenation of the nation”. This process has so far been more of a regression to a maxist-Leninist doctrine, controlled state capitalism, extreme nationalism and a leader cult strongly reminiscent of fascism. In Xinjiang, Xi has locked up more people in concentration camps than at any time since Hitler’s dictatorship.
Military spending has been rising steadily for years, and the arsenal of nuclear warheads has grown to around 400. Even if Beijing won’t officially admit it: Xi needs people to expand the army and to keep China’s largest economy in the world palatable to the rest of the world. Only if China remains interesting in this way will Beijing have enough potential to blackmail countries that need the Chinese market.
Xi lacks personal power
Under Xi, the threat of the military has become part of everyday life for many Asian countries. The People’s Republic has border disputes with all its neighbors, above all with India, which will surpass the population of the People’s Republic this year and become the most populous country in the world. With Delhi, the dispute between the two countries has already escalated violently, with dead soldiers on both sides.
Xi is in a hurry to establish facts in the western Pacific: he and his vassal have signaled North Korea’s aggressiveness towards South Korea and Japan to the east and the Philippines to the south, underlining it with missile tests and risky maneuvers. And the island democratic republic of Taiwan would like to be conquered by Xi and “reunited” with the mainland by force.
But sooner or later the leader will run out of manpower: China can neither maintain a war economy nor an army in the long term that could put Xi’s imperial wishes into practice.
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2049 maybe not enough able-bodied
The fact that this leads to panic in Beijing has already been shown when Hong Kong’s democracy was leveled. The treaties actually stipulated that Hong Kong would be allowed to retain its special status (“one country, two systems”) until 2049. There was no obvious reason to strike thirty years earlier. Except when you consider that in 2049 there might not be enough men and women of legal age left to rein in Hong Kong.
Because in addition to the people in the formerly autonomous metropolis, Beijing also oppresses people in Tibet, Inner Mongolia and, as already mentioned, Xinjiang. If they all wanted to free themselves from Beijing’s yoke at once, the army could no longer stop this quest for freedom.
This could also be the reason why Xi has already committed his army to dark times and, at least according to some military experts, is planning to conquer Taiwan sooner rather than later. It will not only take thousands of soldiers to conquer Taiwan, but at least as many more to occupy the island and hold it as a Chinese conquest.
Xi’s nightmare of democracy
It also doesn’t look like the people of China, cheered on by Xi’s nationalist slogans, are willing to have more children. The People’s Republic is following the modernization course that Japan, South Korea and Taiwan have also gone through: the cost of living is rising, the need for better educated people is growing. These opt for smaller families.
In addition, people in South Korea and Taiwan decided in the late 1980s and early 1990s that they would rather live in a democracy in the future because of this development.
That the same could happen in China is not impossible, and thus Xi Jinping’s nightmare. At the moment, however, this is nothing more than music of the future. It is all the more relevant now to price in the population development in the People’s Republic in scenarios that try to make predictions for what Xi Jinping could plan militarily, be it in relation to Taiwan, be it with regard to other trouble spots, of which the ruler has accumulated numerous.
