Threats, advantages seen in China’s shrinking population

For seven decades, China’s Communist Party has ruled the world’s most populous country. As the country’s population crests and begins to shrink, experts say, it will face challenges ranging from supporting the elderly to filling the ranks of its military.

Population growth has been slowing for years, but the announcement on Tuesday that the country’s population fell by about 850,000 in 2022 came sooner than earlier projections.

“Those developments... may well feed domestic challenges at home and strategic challenges abroad. The Party, in short, may be in for a rough go,” said Mike Mazza, an analyst of Chinese military modernisation at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington.

Others are less pessimistic.

“China’s increasingly becoming a higher-tech nation, so concentrating on improving the educational system, particularly in impoverished rural areas, and even in cities, is vital. So as well is increasing productivity. Wealthier people will buy more, which also increases GDP,” said June Teufel Dreyer, a Chinese politics specialist at the University of Miami.

With the trend expected to continue, the UN estimates China’s population will fall from 1.41 billion to about 1.31 billion by 2050 and keep shrinking from there.

Beijing previously tried to rein in its population growth. Worries that China’s population was getting too big prompted it to adopt its “one-child policy” in the late 1970s.

Beijing says the policy prevented 400 million additional births, but demographers disagree about how much of the drop in birth rates is explained by the policy.