The city of Beijing is expected to become a super-aged city by 2035, with more than a third of its population over the age of 60, the state-run newspaper Beijing Daily reported on Monday.
The news mirrors wider trends in Chinese society, where the legacy of the one-child policy continues to tarnish the country’s demographic outlook. The government is poised to spend nearly $27 billion this year on policies designed to boost the birth rate, according to an estimate by Reuters.
China’s government began to address its fertility crisis 10 years ago by removing the one-child policy. But citizens have continued to show a preference for smaller families — in part because of social changes common to many East Asian countries, in part because of pressures of child-rearing specific to China.
Among its neighbors, however, China is unique in that it will likely grow old before it grows rich. Though it is now on the verge of becoming a developed country, Chinese people enjoy significantly less broad-based prosperity than citizens of Japan, Korea and Taiwan before those countries began to age.
The result is a China still in need of dynamism and economic growth, with a government weighed down by a growing responsibility to provide for the country’s elderly.
The rapid deterioration of China’s demographic picture comes at a moment of deep structural challenges for its economy. The collapse of the country’s real estate sector, which relied primarily on local government finance, has left the Chinese economy dependent on exports to sustain its growth.
Chinese government statistics released last week underscored this picture: Retail sales grew by only 1.1% in September compared with last year, while industrial production grew by 5.5%.
The reality of China’s bleak economic future seldom breaks through to a casual foreign audience, bombarded as it is by gushing social media content on the country’s impressive high-speed rail network and exotic cuisine.
“Many reporters coming back from China these days tell me: Basically, we just want to write stories about the employment crisis. We just want to write stories about jobs, and our editors just want us to write stories about tech,” said Logan Wright, who leads China markets research at Rhodium Group, in a recent appearance on the ChinaTalk podcast.
The economic and demographic statistics, grim as they are, may obscure the true scale of the problem. In an article published this month in the journal Contemporary China Review, University of Wisconsin-Madison demographer Yi Fuxian (易富賢) argued that China has been overreporting its population estimate by more than 130 million people.
China’s official economic growth rate remains at 4.5%. Independent assessments suggest it could be as low as half that.
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