The Guardian - China-Beijings demographic crisis means China could get old before it gets rich
September 24, 2023 5 min 871 words
这篇报道着重指出了中国面临的严峻人口危机，而你作为观点犀利的新闻评论员，可以提出以下几点评论： 1. 中国的人口危机是一种令人担忧的趋势。随着年轻一代推迟生育的时间，中国的出生率降至历史新低，人口数量首次出现了50多年来的下降。这一现象不仅在中国，全球范围内的年轻女性都推迟结婚和生育，但中国的情况尤为严重。 2. 中国的经济可能会在老龄化问题上遇到困境。与此同时，虽然中国的人均收入在21世纪飙升，但直到2022年，它的人均收入仍然没有达到世界银行定义的高收入国家的标准。这引发了担忧，认为中国可能会在变得富裕之前变老。 3. 中国与日本之间的比较引人深思。日本在上世纪90年代早期进入了经济低迷时期，部分原因是由于股市崩盘，但更深层次的原因是日本的老龄化人口。中国已经有大约14%的人口年龄超过65岁，这个比例在1993年就超过了日本。而中国只用了六年就完成了从10%到14%的跃升，未来20年内，中国老年人口的增长速度可能超过美国总人口。 4. 政府已经采取了一系列鼓励生育的政策，包括取消一孩政策、提供新婚夫妇的长假、提供试管婴儿折扣以及为第二胎和第三胎提供现金补贴。然而，这些激励措施似乎未能产生明显的效果，因为越来越多的受过教育的年轻女性像Cici一样，不愿意按照官方的家庭规划标准生育。 5. 中国的年轻人面临着高昂的房价和生活成本，这是推迟生育的一个主要原因。例如，Cici和她的男友需要存下200万元人民币才能在北京购买一套房产，而北京的平均房价已经非常高昂。这意味着，只要年轻人觉得养育子女经济上不划算，中国的劳动力将继续减少。 6. 中国的养老金体系也面临着压力，中国社会科学院曾经警告，主要的国家养老金基金可能在2035年用尽。这个问题在过去几年的经济减速中变得更加严峻，尤其是在疫情期间政府允许企业暂停社保缴纳。养老金基金的赤字问题可能是暂时性的，但随着人口的减少，增加养老金基数将变得非常困难。 7. 中国拥有世界上最低的退休年龄之一，这对问题的严重性起到了推波助澜的作用。建议提高退休年龄引发了公众的抗议，但也许这是不得不做的一步。中国政府必须面对老龄化人口和经济问题，以确保国家持续繁荣。 总之，中国的人口问题不仅影响经济增长，还涉及社会政策和文化变革。解决这一挑战需要综合性的政策和社会改革，以应对老龄化社会的挑战。
Cici, 27, doesn’t want to have a baby until she’s at least 35. Her mother is putting pressure on her to get married and “have a stable life”, but with a busy job at a tech company in Beijing – while also completing a master’s degree in law – she hardly has the time to think about starting a family.
Cici’s story is not unique; across the world, young women are putting off marriage and childbirth for longer than their mothers did. However, in China the phenomenon is so acute that last year the population shrank by 850,000, the first decline in more than 50 years, as the birthrate fell to a record low.
As the population contracts, its makeup is changing in a way that portends serious problems for China’s economy.
Cici’s predicament might be familiar to millennials in many wealthy countries, but China cannot yet count itself among that rarefied group. The World Bank defines a high income country as one in which the gross national income per person is more than $13,845. Although China’s income per person has skyrocketed in the 21st century, in 2022 it had only reached $12,850. Many economists now fear that China will get old before it gets rich.
An ageing country, a falling birthrate
Comparisons are being made between China and Japan, which entered a gloomy economic period in the early 1990s. The trigger for what became known as Japan’s “lost decades” of deflation and stubbornly low growth was a stock market crash, but it was exacerbated by the country’s ageing population.
About 14% of China’s population is now over 65, a threshold that Japan passed in 1993. But while it took Japan nearly a decade to reach that level from 10%, China made the jump in just six years. In the next two decades, China is on track to add more over-65s to its population, than the US has people.
The government is well aware of these problems. In 2016, it abandoned the decades-old one child policy, replacing it with what is now a three child limit. Some provinces have abandoned restrictions on family-sizes altogether, one of a raft of measures to encourage women to have more babies. Other policies include up to 30 days of paid holiday for newlyweds, discounts on IVF and cash subsidies for second and third babies.
These incentives have made little difference. China now has a generation of young women like Cici who are more educated than their parents and are unwilling to adhere to patriarchal norms around family planning, despite official exhortations.
Last year, after unveiling a politburo that excluded women for the first time in 25 years, Beijing passed an amendment to China’s gender law that called on women to “respect and obey … family values”. Since then online feminist groups that call on women to reject marriage and procreation have been shut down.
The sums don’t add up
Cici says she just wants to reach “career stability” before starting a family. Her and her boyfriend need to save up up to 2m yuan (US$270,000) to buy a property in Beijing, where average prices in July were 70,740 yuan (US$9,500) a square metre, according to a data provider.
As long as young people like Cici feel like the sums don’t add up on having children, China’s workforce will continue to shrink. Between 2019 and 2022, the number of people of working age declined by more than 40 million, making supporting the growing ranks of elderly people increasingly difficult.
In 2019, government thinktank the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, warned that the main state pension fund could run out of money by 2035. That was before the massive slowdown of the past few years, which hit pension contributions. As an emergency relief measure during the pandemic, the government allowed companies to pause social security contributions for up to six months. This saved businesses 1.54 trillion yuan, but also hit revenues for pension funds by 13%, sending the system into deficit for the first time.
The pensions deficit may be a temporary problem, says Zoe Zongyuan Liu, a fellow at thinktanks the Council on Foreign Relations, but “with the shrinking population it becomes very difficult to increase the pension base, therefore you have to increase your investment. The Chinese government has been developing different programmes to allow pensions to invest in different varieties of assets to increase investment returns … but it really depends on how the economy goes”.
“If the economy is not doing well, if investments are not doing well, and the government continues to cut contribution rates,” then the deficit problem will worsen, Liu says.
The fact that China has one of the lowest retirement ages in the world does not help matters. Men can retire at 60, while for women it is 55, or 50 for blue collar workers. Suggestions about raising the age have prompted public outcry.
This year state media said that Beijing was pushing ahead with plans to raise the age, without specifying when this would happen. But needs must, and wherever China’s famously bottle black leaders look, they are finding grey hairs that threaten to derail the economy.