This development is not exactly a surprise, but it has arrived sooner than expected. Overwhelmingly to blame is the plummeting birth rate — something that, you may point out, the Chinese state would once have celebrated. The nation’s One-Child Policy is the stuff of Geography textbooks everywhere. Whereas the Communist lunacy of the Great Leap Forward was relatively easy to reverse, the One-Child Policy — which cruelly persecuted and hounded people who wanted to have two children, never mind three — casts a long shadow.

But to blame it for China’s current demographic crisis is too easy. Egregious though the One-Child Policy was, it is not at the root of the nation’s current problems; it merely brought them on earlier than would otherwise have been the case. In the Seventies, before the policy was introduced, China’s fertility rate fell precipitously, halving from around six to around three children per woman in the course of a decade. It would have continued to nose-dive even without intervention.

The underlying reason for the lack of births in China is fairly obvious. The nation has developed. And urban, wealthy, educated people do not have large families — often choosing not to have children at all. Economic and cultural factors may differ a little between nations, but this is pretty much true the world over. It’s intriguing, then, that young Chinese people blame a lack of prosperity for their reluctance to have children; the Guardian reports one Weibo user posting, “Now who dares to have children, housing prices are so expensive.”

What has really changed is not economics, but expectations. When prosperous professionals have a sixth of the offspring their penurious peasant grandparents produced, lack of funds cannot be the ultimate explanation. The issue here is not material well-being; it is the matter of how one’s affluence compares to what one’s peers are experiencing. In days of old, people had large families in hovels not knowing where the next meal would come from. Today, quite understandably, the new normal is to want a decent home and a degree of financial security.

More from this author

Has Hungary conceived a baby boom?

By Paul Morland

The consequences of this demographic shift are already showing, with Chinese factories already reporting a shortage of labour. But we haven’t seen anything yet. The workforce is in free fall. Back in the mid-Eighties, four or five people entered it for everyone who reached retirement age, but the two groups are now roughly equal. Rust-belt cities are losing their life. Regions like Dongbei, once the beating heart of Maoist industrialisation, are now shadows of their former selves. The ballooning number of elderly rely on thinly-stretched single children to look after them — offspring of the One-Child Policy who have no siblings with whom to share the burden. One typical young adult, trying to juggle caring for her parents and working full-time (so that she can pay their medical bills), laments: “It’s a real struggle. Sometimes I just want to quit my job, but now I need the money more than ever.” In just a few decades, there will likely be two people in their early sixties for every person in their early twenties.

The median citizen of the People’s Republic is already in his or her late thirties — similar to the median American and only slightly younger than the median Brit. But while America and the UK will age only moderately, in a generation or two the average Chinese person will be pushing 50. An ageing China might be relatively peaceable and crime-free, but it will lack the dynamism which has vaulted the country up the economic and political ranks over the past 40 years. The crisis is bad enough for Xi Jingping to have vowed to implement policies to boost the birth rate, in an effort to reverse national ageing.

China is the world’s great population behemoth: what happens to the nation’s demography has significant ramifications for the rest of the world. As Charles Goodhart and Manoj Pradhan pointed out in their book, The Great Demographic Reversal, the tremendous flow of subsistence peasants into the factories of China’s coastal plain not only fuelled the country’s stratospheric economic growth but also provided the developed world with a vast pool of cheap labour. Manufacturing transitioned out of Europe and North America to the PRC, where there was an endless supply of cheap labour. Now this era has ended. As this vast labour reservoir dries up, expect to pay more for everything from toys to tablets.

What can be done? Wealthy Western countries can choose to plug a shortage of workers with immigration, but this is not an option for China — for three reasons. First, as a middle-income country it is relatively unattractive to those seeking brighter lights and pavements paved, if not with gold, then at least with tarmac. Second, China is geographically and culturally distant from the parts of the world whose population is still booming, namely sub-Saharan Africa, where French and English are widely spoken, and Paris and London are easier to reach. And third, whereas a country like the UK can meaningfully top up its population with immigrants to ameliorate pinch-points in the labour market, China, with a population more than 20 times ours, would have to hoover up hundreds of millions to make much of a difference.

Suggested reading

The myth of Chinese supremacy

By Edward Luttwak

China’s demographic decline will impact geopolitics as well as world economics. True, the nation will still have plenty of young men to fill its army’s ranks, but as it ages its politicians may be less inclined to lose them. Parents who have been forced by the Party to have only one child — and who have traditionally valued sons above daughters — will be doubly reluctant to lose them. In Russia in the Eighties, mothers received coffins containing the bodies of their sons who had died in Afghanistan; their protests have been evoked in the nation’s most recent war. Although worries about maternal discontent were not enough to stop Putin invading Ukraine, the precedent may give Xi Jinping pause for thought before he sets out on any military adventures.

And more significantly, there is a country jostling to fill the void that China will leave at the top of the world’s population ranks — a country that has not, historically, been the PRC’s friend. The global balance of power will of course be shifted by the fact that, for the first time in thousands of years, China is about to be eclipsed as the world’s most populous nation by India. India has a very long way to go before its economy catches up with China, but its demography means that it is almost certain to be the faster growing of the two economies over the next 20 years or so.

India has not suffered such absurd policies as China; when vasectomies were forced on men in the Seventies, there was a furious backlash and the policy was dropped. Though the Indian government has long encouraged smaller families — “Ham Do Hamara Do” (“We Two and Our Two”) was the slogan of the day when I first visited in the Eighties — population control has been more persuasive than coercive. Development has also been slower: less urbanisation, less education, less prosperity. It is no surprise, therefore, that India’s fertility rate has been coming down more slowly than China’s.

But it has been coming down nonetheless, from about six children per woman in the mid-Sixties, to just over two today. Still, the population can sustain itself — and besides, India has years of “demographic momentum” ahead of it: the population will continue to grow simply by dint of the large number of young people starting families, even if those families are fairly small, compared to the small number of older people dying. India can look forward to a couple of decades in which it can reap the so-called demographic dividend, with plenty of young people entering the workforce, relatively few leaving it, and the new workers not burdened by a surfeit of children. These are the circumstances which coincided with fantastic economic booms in places like Korea, in the Seventies, and Indonesia, in more recent times.

Suggested reading

Overpopulation isn't a threat

By Alison Bashford

Scratch beneath the surface of the national data in India, however, and all is not well. Fertility is still high in the north’s poor Hindi belt, in places such as Uttar Pradesh (which has a population three times that of Britain’s) and Bihar. In those Indian states where the economy is flourishing, however, like Gujarat and Tamil Nadu, the average woman has a similar number of children to women in the UK. In West Bengal, fertility is closer to the level of Japan. As India plunges headlong into greater prosperity, it is rapidly losing its demographic edge. Indeed, India’s demographic crisis, though a few decades behind China’s, appears to be just as extreme; the first whiff of escaping dire poverty and birth rate seems to collapse. It looks as if India, for reasons that are hard to pin down, having reached replacement level fertility, is going to swiftly plunge below it. Countries such as Indonesia and Sri Lanka, by contrast, have managed to hold steady at around two children per woman for decades. India too will be ageing and waning before long.

Beyond individual nations, if our species is to continue thriving, it must find a way to combine modernity with a pro-natal attitude. And on this front, there’s only so much a government can do. China may be famous for its controversial demographic policy, but the only way to really shape a population’s size is a cultural, rather than a political, shift — a change in attitude such as that witnessed in Georgia when its leading cleric called on its people to procreate. As China’s population starts to decline, and India’s looks set to follow, the question for the whole of humanity is: who, in the long run, is going to be keeping the lights on?

White House staffers, and Obama’s first Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates, would ridicule Biden’s repetitious perorations that simply ignored the expert consensus: both the civilian and military chiefs in the Pentagon, backed by leading “think tank” experts, fully agreed with Generals McChrystal and (Dr.) Petraeus. They were the commanders in Afghanistan who believed that progress was accelerating as more and more Afghans were rejecting fanaticism to embrace progress… and the first-class experts agreed with them! Petraeus would soon promulgate his Counterinsurgency manual FM 3-24 ( my review: “counterinsurgency as military malpractice”).

On April 1 2011, when Mazar-i-Sharif demonstrators attacked the UN Assistance Mission, they killed three “Christians” including the female Norwegian colonel Siri Skare. This after President Karzai (yes, him) had denounced a Koran-burning incident in the United States. At no point did Petraeus stop and deplore the Koran burning, nor the murders, or the responsibility of made-in-USA Karzai for the fiasco.

Biden’s Afghanistan problem was that he could not persuade Obama because Obama was already fully persuaded. But as a new President new to Washington, new even to politics Obama simply refused to oppose the Washington consensus of  media-savvy generals, would-be tough think-tankers and CIA-friendly columnists. It all had to wait till Biden himself became President, but by then his Afghanistan policy (evacuate) had become Trump’s and so…

But in 2009, Biden’s other problem was even bigger: one more reason he wanted the US out of Afghanistan (and Iraq) was to focus on China as a rising threat, when very few Americans agreed with him, and none in the White House. At that very time — the worst of the financial crisis — the US was asking the Europeans, Japan and also China to pump up public spending to save the world economy that was falling into a depression. The Europeans were skeptical (“Crisis? What crisis?  Just your Lehman crisis, you fix it”, was the European response). Only the British responded, and the Chinese, who immediately launched Belt and Road, and other projects that deliberately employed tens of thousands with shovels — not just bulldozers. Obama was grateful and the US Treasury Secretary Geithner was ecstatic —it took two years (!) for the Europeans to react, and even then they moved very slowly, and spent very little.

In this climate, Biden was again isolated when he pointed out that China’s helpful public spending included very fast-growing military spending that contradicted its Peaceful Rise policy proclaimed in 2004. Having long chaired the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Biden heard warnings from several experts including the present writer [The Rise of China and the Logic of Strategy Harvard U Press 2012] and more importantly, Kevin Rudd, then Australia’s prime minister, who explained that China’s leaders believed that the fatal “General Crisis of Capitalism” had finally arrived. It had come too late for the USSR but just in time for the PRC to become the world’s most powerful state.

More from this author

America's failed Machiavelli

By Edward Luttwak

When Obama White House aides plaintively asked (the Treasury was more dignified) for fast spending from the PRC, its leaders took it as their licence to assert China’s power in all directions. Of that I received a personal intimation from Vice Foreign Minister Fu Ying 傅莹. She had always been a charming lady, but when I met her in Beijing at the height of the 2009 financial crisis she was almost shouting: “America is down! China is up!”. When I later complained to Zheng Bijian author of the Peaceful Rise policy he replied: “Shīkòng de mǎ”, 失控的 — “runaway horses”.

Rudd’s opinion was especially weighty because he was considered pro-Chinese (he happily speaks Chinese and even has a Chinese name, Lù Kèwén). In that year, 2009, Australia published a Defence White Paper that called for a broad coalition to contain China. At the time, India’s PM Singh refused to be diverted from the economy, Japan had its first neutralist government and Washington liked China better than Europe. It was only later that Japan’s 2010 Senkaku incident — which resulted in anti-Japanese riots, border intrusions in the Himalayas, and incidents at sea — changed attitudes. And it was only at the end of 2011 that Hilary Clinton as Secretary of State spoke of rotating out of the Middle East to focus on China, with Susan Rice on Obama’s staff strongly disagreeing… until Xi Jinping ‘s 2015 visit ended all illusions.

Again, as on Afghanistan, Biden’s China policy was anticipated by Trump, who in his own blundering way finally implemented Kevin Rudd’s coalition strategy, meeting Japan’s PM Shinzo Abe even before his inauguration, and India’s Modi as soon as he could, building up the alliances; while his White House staff cut off China from the US technology pipeline, in spite of Silicon Valley’s resistance. So it is only now that Biden can finally implement his 2009 policy — covered in opprobrium because the Afghan army had turned out to be a fraud exactly as he had predicted, leaving him only the cruel choice between sending troops back to Afghanistan or chaotic flight. But on China at least he has full support at home, and in every country around China except for Pakistan — which will not receive one cent more from Biden.

There is only one exception in the media coverage. The China Times – whose owners famously sympathise with Beijing – barely mentioned the Hong Kong protests at all. For most Taiwanese, such self-censorship is just another indicator of the ideological obedience expected by the Communist Party of China.

The official language of Taiwan might be Mandarin Chinese, the island may be only 100 miles across the sea from the mainland and its majority culture very similar to it, but the desire for political union is now a distinctly minority interest.

After 1949, when the nationalist Kuomintang lost the civil war and retreated to Taiwan, the party acted on the basis that it was the legitimate government of the “Republic of China” and would one day reunite the whole country under its leadership. Theoretically, that is still the basis of the country’s constitution, though few believe it.

With the Democratic Progressive Party currently in power, the political options now are more often expressed as a choice between the uneasy status quo and a move towards outright independence, despite the risk that might entail invasion by the People’s Republic. The older generation generally prefers the former and younger people the latter.

More from this author

The Welsh Baptist who transformed China

By Bill Hayton

The more that Beijing gets heavy in Hong Kong, the more the mood in Taiwan turns towards the idea of independence. The idea of ‘one country, two systems’ provided the basis for Hong Kong’s reunification with the People’s Republic in 1997. In January, Xi Jinping proposed it as the model for Taiwan too. But the view here is that it is rapidly becoming a hollow lie in Hong Kong, so why would Taiwan entrust its future to the idea?

Mandy Hsiao-chuan Liao, Assistant Professor of Political Science at National Taiwan University has observed a change of mood in the island’s politics:

“A person advocating the possibility of ‘one country, two systems’ is now seen as a person who will sell Taiwan to China and denigrate Taiwan’s identity and values of democracy and freedom. As a result, the Hong Kong events have encouraged more young people to support a Taiwan identity separate from China.”

Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party must have known this, and yet they pressed on with moves to erode Hong Kong’s special status. Above all things, Beijing seems to fear disintegration; the ruling party is concerned that tolerating local diversity could unravel the country. According to Chi-Ting Tsai, Executive Director of the Centre for China Studies at the National Taiwan University: “One of the greatest fears among the Chinese leadership is fragmentation. There’s a concern that they can’t control what goes on in the provinces.”

But there is more to national unity than political control. President Xi also seems wedded to a vision of enforced homogeneity. In many areas of life, his leadership is enforcing policies based on the idea that there is only one way to be Chinese – that the majority culture must become the universal culture.

From the incarceration of up to a million Muslims in detention camps in Xinjiang province, to the suppression of Tibetan identity, to the imposition of policies intended to supplant the Cantonese language in Hong Kong, the aim appears to be the eradication, or at least the minimisation, of difference. Xi Jinping’s vision of national unity demands it.

Suggested reading

How Africa is converting China

By Christopher Rhodes

In the past few years, members of the Politburo have repeatedly spoken of the need for ethnic minorities to follow the ‘five identifications’. They must identify with the motherland; with the Chinese nation; with Chinese culture; with the Chinese socialist road and with the Communist Party.

The same prescription applies to everyone else. In Hong Kong the battle has often focused on language. Most are proud to speak Cantonese and view it as their mother tongue, yet that is not how the national government sees it.

Ben Bland, the author of a recent book about young people in the former British colony, Generation HK, argues:

“Young Hong Kongers have put themselves on the front line of the current protests because they are fighting not just for their freedoms but for their very identity. The generation that has come of age since the handover in 1997 see themselves, first and foremost, as Hong Kongers, not Chinese citizens.”

That is anathema to the Politburo in Beijing.

In April 2017, the Chinese Ministry of Education announced a ruling that 80% of the country’s citizens must speak the national language – Mandarin Chinese – by 2020. The Ministry’s ruling was an admission that almost a third of the population, around 400 million people, do not speak the nominally ‘national’ language. Instead, they speak regional ‘topolects’ – Cantonese, Shanghainese and others – that are mutually unintelligible. This diversity threatens the homogenisers. The campaign to impose Mandarin nationwide has been stepped up.

The reaction among the young bubble tea-drinkers in Taiwan has been to take greater pride in speaking their native tongues. Although they are taught Mandarin at school, they are increasingly proud of speaking the local topolect of Fujianese, even calling it ‘Taiwanese language’.

Enforced monoculturalism has formed a major strand of the Chinese nationalist project since its emergence at the end of the 19th century. The problem of how to define the ‘Chinese Nation’ – the ‘zhonghua minzu’ – has dogged thinkers and politicians alike for decades.

For long periods, under Soviet influence, the Communist Party was prepared to tolerate difference, delaying the creation of a single homogeneous nation into the far future. However, in the wake of the breakups of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, some Chinese theoreticians began to argue vociferously for a new approach: a ‘melting pot’ in which differences would be eradicated in the interests of national unity.

Xi Jinping seems to have listened to them.

Suggested reading

What I learned about freedom in Xinjiang

By Geordie Stewart

During the 1990s, as orthodox communist ideology retreated, Communist Party pronouncements increasingly featured the word ‘nation’ alongside the more traditional ‘people’. Whereas the ‘people’ only included socialists, the ‘nation’ could include anyone, so long as they followed Beijing’s definitions of what the ‘nation’ believed. Since Xi’s coming to power in late 2012, the Party has doubled-down on national uniformity.

What should we call this new political ideology – one that features a single ‘core’ leader, insistent demands for national homogeneity, intolerance of difference, rule by party not by law, corporatist economic policies, a focus on discipline and an ideology based on racial exceptionalism – all backed up by a massive surveillance state?

China’s Communist Party has long talked of building “socialism with Chinese characteristics”. Xi Jinping now seems more interested in building “national-socialism with Chinese characteristics”.

As the Taiwanese argue about their island’s political future, what they see across the water fills them with concern. Xi Jinping’s problem is that the more worried the Communist Party becomes about national fragmentation, and the more it tries to impose national unity, the more it generates movement in the opposite direction.

Bill Hayton’s book The Invention of China will be published next year