Opinion | Beijing finally wakes up to demographic reality, in a case of better late than never

Beijing has finally woken up to demographic reality after losing the title of world’s most populous country to India last month.

For nearly four decades, China had taken for granted that it was overpopulated and believed that a smaller population was desirable. But Beijing has apparently changed that view after its own data painted a demographic crisis of shrinking population, rapid ageing and plunging birth rates.

China’s top leaders concluded last week that the country “must recognise and adapt to” its new demographic situation and “strive to maintain appropriate fertility levels and population size”. In other words, Beijing has started to worry about China’s falling population and is ready to embrace family friendly policies to replace its infamous birth restriction regime.

In retrospect, it is hard to imagine that China implemented its strict family planning policy, particularly the brutal and clearly unsustainable one-child policy, for so long. Even when it became clear that birth restrictions were becoming excessive and counterproductive, bureaucratic inertia prevented China from seeing the elephant in the room. As late as 2019, China’s then-statistics chief was publicly brushing aside concerns about a population drop.

The reality is that China’s fertility rate, or the average number of children born to women, dropped to 2.1 as early as 1991, the moment the one-child policy should have been relaxed or scrapped. But it was not until the late 2010s that the government started to relax draconian birth controls, by taking baby steps. It started by allowing “couples with one side as the only child” to have a second child under the ridiculously overblown fear that a full “two-child” policy would result in a tsunami of new births, undoing decades of effort to keep a lid on the population. Of course, such a thing never happened.

One explanation for Beijing’s inactivity is vested interests of the family planning authority. To implement the one-child policy, China built up a massive birth-police apparatus with enormous power and a big budget. Independent voices challenging the official narrative were ignored or even censored. The ideological inertia was so strong that even now, China’s three-child policy is in theory a birth-restriction policy. But in reality, the state would not punish parents for their fourth or fifth child.