The mainland sees its population decline for the first time since the Mao regime in 1961 ­­­– and well before the Beatles had their first hit. Does it matter? finews.asia takes a look.

Let’s talk a short jaunt down memory lane. It is the early 1980s and Deng Xiaoping’s reforms have prompted the average senior western executive to salivate.

Ensconced in some understated yet well-appointed head office, it is hard to get them to stop talking about prospects and future, as yet untainted markets.

Slightly more than a billion nascent new consumers lie in wait, needing everything from refrigerators to bank accounts. Everything, possibly, except bicycles. They are not jaded or brow-beaten by a lifetime spent on the wrong side of a Mad Men advertising campaign or worn out by anodyne products sieved through countless focus groups. They just need and want.

Turning Point

That billion just became slightly less. Apparently. On Tuesday, after discussing things like grain output and industrial production in a press release, the National Bureau of Statistics announced the country’s first decline in population since 1961.

Buried in the tenth and last section, it said the country’s population last year was 1,411.75 million (figures explicitly not being rounded up as they represent human beings). That meant a decrease of 0.85 million from 2021 – yet it was still 400 million higher (or the entire US and a bit) than it was in those early, heady days a couple of decades back.

The bureau went on to discuss things like the birth and death rate, gender ratio, and age structure, likely prompting the page bounce rate to surge as thousands of computer mice, suddenly disinterested, clicked away.

Americans First

The comments ran the gamut of what one might expect (see collated Google search result). US-based media were the quickest to point out the inevitability of the country’s decline («New York Times», paywall) although in fairness «Bloomberg» did come to its defense, as least seemingly.

Mainstream English-language Asia and European media, however, seemed to enjoy wallowing in a more generalized bleakness.

But, as finews.asia has previously commented on, this demographic drop-off is nothing new, and an increasing number of countries in Asia are resorting to various measures, unsuccessfully, to stem it.

Unclear Link

As we argued then, demographic statistics indicate that fertility rates progressively decline as countries move up the economic ladder and that, surprisingly, many Group of Seven industrialized economies have comparable or better fertility rates than China does, and have had for some time now.

As an expert pointed out then to finews.asia, there is a dubious link between the decline in fertility, which results in lower populations, and growth.

In fact, the same expert maintained that development could be positive for people, societies, and the planet if managed well.

Historical Context

Jose Navarro de Pablo, an economist at the Asian Development Bank Institute, said it is important to put China's current population in a historical context.

He noted that when compared to the number of people in the rest of the world, China's population has been in decline since the 1850s. It is currently at about 17% of the world's population which is the lowest that it has been in 1,300 years, with the decline in that rate seen accelerating in coming decades.

He further indicated that when discussing potential geopolitical consequences, it might also be important to also take a look at secular trends on a millennial basis.

Enter India

By most accounts, India is expected to replace China on the mantle as the most populous country in the world this year. That poses interesting questions.

If population is so crucial a variable and such a key imperative, then international business should have been fawning over the sub-continent as the next greatest thing for several years now.

But they haven't. That, in and of itself, bears some thought.