Policy’s Long Shadow
China’s demographic anxiety is not a sudden policy headache but a recurring civilizational dilemma. For millennia, numbers have been both China’s greatest strength and its deepest source of unease. An enormous population has long underwritten imperial reach, labour power, and national confidence, even as governing elites worried about scarcity, disorder, and control. That tension ran straight through the revolutionary era. When Mao Zedong warned in 1957 that China’s 600 million people must never be forgotten, it was not reverence but apprehension that framed the remark. Soon after came policies and campaigns that contributed to famine and mass suffering, a grim reminder that managing “the masses” has always been as perilous as it is central to Chinese statecraft. Today’s birth-rate figures — the lowest since 1949 — revive the same paradox in reverse. China still has over 1.4 billion people, yet for the first time in its modern history, the fear is not too many mouths, but too few young ones to sustain economic ambition, social care, and geopolitical stature.
The irony is that this predicament is in large measure self-inflicted. The one-child policy, introduced in 1980, emerged from a moment when leaders believed rapid growth threatened development itself. Limiting births was presented as rational, scientific governance in service of modernisation. For decades, it reshaped family life, gender balance, and social expectations with an effectiveness few policies anywhere have matched. But its long tail has been brutal. A rapidly ageing population now strains welfare systems before the country has fully escaped middle-income status — a dynamic even official outlets like China Daily have acknowledged. Gender imbalances born of son preference persist. Urban only-children, once indulged as “little emperors,” now face the burden of caring for parents and grandparents with little sibling support, often far from home due to labour mobility. The dismantling of rigid household registration rules has brought opportunity, but also loneliness and social fragmentation. When the Brookings Institution called the one-child policy one of the costliest lessons in misguided public policymaking, it was not merely condemning coercion, but warning against the belief that demographic engineering can be cleanly reversed once societies adapt their aspirations and lifestyles.
The state’s current effort to turn the tide reveals how deeply policy has collided with culture and modern life. Classical Chinese ethics treated having children as a moral obligation, woven into filial piety and ancestral continuity. Limiting births was always an awkward fit with that inheritance. Under Xi Jinping, the leadership has sought to revive older narratives, recasting population size as national armour — a “great wall of steel” formed by people themselves. The urgency has sharpened since India overtook China as the world’s most populous nation, subtly undermining Beijing’s claim to demographic exceptionalism and leadership of the Global South. Policy responses now range from the symbolic to the systemic: tax breaks, childcare incentives, cultural campaigns promoting marriage and childbearing, even removing levies on contraceptives and matchmakers alike. Planning documents promise to reduce the cost of raising children to near zero, a vision Xinhua News Agency has described in almost utopian terms. Yet persuasion and subsidies confront a reality forged over four decades: young Chinese, especially in cities, are educated, mobile, career-focused, and acutely aware of housing costs, job insecurity, and the emotional toll of parenting in a hyper-competitive society. Asking them to have more children is not simply a fiscal question; it is a request to reorder life priorities shaped by the very modernisation the state once encouraged.
What makes China’s predicament especially revealing is that it exposes the limits of state power over intimate life. Authoritarian capacity can mandate ceilings, but it struggles to manufacture desire. Fertility decisions are ultimately private calculations about work, autonomy, gender roles, and the future — areas where command-and-control tools lose effectiveness. This is why the present moment echoes Mao’s old formulation about contradictions among the people. The contradiction today lies between a state that once disciplined fertility in the name of development and a society that internalised those signals too well. Reversing course is harder than imposing it. China’s challenge is not just to raise birth rates, but to rebuild trust that policy will not swing again, to create conditions where having children feels compatible with dignity, opportunity, and security. Whether tradition and modernity can coexist at this scale remains uncertain. What is clear is that China’s demographic story, once defined by excess, is now defined by absence — and by the enduring question of how a civilisation that mastered numbers can adapt when the numbers no longer obey.
