Say what you will, but at least they escaped the Malthusian trap.
Behind China’s much-ballyhooed demographic decline is a great irony. Historians might shudder at the oversimplification, but the story of human development can generally be divided into two eras, one defined by minimal economic growth and mean reversion to subsistence-level living after short-lived periods of improvement, the other by comparatively rapid growth and exponential improvements in living standards.
The latter period’s a relatively recent development, beginning during the second half of the 19th century alongside the dawn of industrialization. Thereafter, the Global North, as it were, emancipated itself from millennia of what to the modern eye would appear as acute indigence perpetuated in no small part by Thomas Malthus’s famous dictum.
In a nutshell, Malthus argued that population growth will invariably outstrip resource availability, thwarting progress and condemning the species to a sort of socioeconomic Groundhog Day wherein every step forward is necessarily followed by a step back, confining humans to bare existence in perpetuity.
Today, that’s an antiquated notion, particularly in the developed world where Malthus’s rule gets short shrift. We like to imagine the high standard of living in advanced economies is purely a function of ingenuity, technology and scientific advancement. But the fact remains: The more mouths you have to feed as a family unit, the more resources you need and although resources themselves aren’t scarce in rich countries, people’s capacity to obtain those resources is limited by their income. That’s a Malthusian check.
China, in its decades-long, and ultimately successful, attempt to transform living standards in the country, took the Malthusian trap quite seriously. So seriously in fact that the Party set about deliberately curbing population growth through the infamous “one-child policy” which ran from 1979 until 2015. The idea was straightforward: Prevent a scenario where geometric population growth outran the availability of resources, which tend to expand arithmetically.
Avoiding the Malthusian trap was especially important in China, where the CCP governs on a modified social contract which promises incremental, but consistent, quality-of-life improvements in exchange for acquiescence to one-party rule by a paternalistic autocracy.
The figure above’s a reminder: The Party delivered. It also repressed, tyrannized and murdered, but… well, you know what they say about making omelets.
Of course, not all, or even most, of China’s economic miracle is attributable to population controls, and many argue the one-child policy was unnecessary — that fertility rates would’ve declined of their own accord, particularly if the Party liberalized the economy. But I’ll leave that for another time.
A decade on from the abandonment of the one-child policy and the CCP finds itself staring down the opposite problem: Demographic decline.
Data released on Monday showed China’s population contracted by the most since Mao’s first go-around running things. (There’s a Xi joke there. Don’t miss it.)
There’s the chart. Deaths outstripped births by 3.4 million for the year. The natural growth rate shrank at an accelerated 2.5%. It was the fourth straight year during which the population contracted.
Why is this bad? Well, let me count the reasons. Most immediately, China’s at pains to engineer a revival in consumer spending, which is tepid on acquisitive days. Who spends? Young people — “recent babies,” if you like. If there are no babies, there are no young people, and that means slower consumption and a stymied economic transition.
More broadly, and looking out over a longer horizon, China’s pension system is famously underfunded and the country’s retirement age is among the lowest in the world (women retire in their 50s).
As The New York Times, citing a government think tank, noted in 2024, “China is aging so quickly that over the next quarter-century, 520 million people will be older than 60 and over the next decade the public pension will run out of money.” Over the course of that decade, the ratio of working-age Chinese to elderly is expected to fall by 40%.
In addition, the prospect of a shrinking workforce increases the stakes for China’s tech investments. In short: Those bets better pay off in the form of sharply higher productivity, or gains that are at least sufficient to offset missing workers.
Coming full circle, China’s efforts to preempt one sort of demographic trap (the Malthusian shackle) dead-ended 40 years later in another sort of demographic quandary (depopulation). So far, the Party’s efforts to reverse course have proven ineffectual.
What is China’s actual population? 800M? Nobody knows.
Similar issue in the US where capitalism and growth go hand in hand. That is why the fight against immigration is so perplexing.
If you scratch a MAGA apologist with an education, they will invariably mutter: something something economic imperialism. It’s not a bad pitch, prima facie: let’s import wealth and productivity from our overseas holding while keeping the onshore population ethnically pure and lily-white.
Of course, experience has shown, over decades, that the benefits of those escapades acreue to a tiny subset of society. Then there’s the matter of the physical brick-and-mortar world which requires sustained economic activity: “I need someone to be flipping my burgers,” as I typically sum it up. Without that activity, quality of life for the would-be emperors suffers dramatically, and the demographics are not kind to the pool of labor for all of those society-sustaining jobs.
Invariably, they change the subject on me at this point. The anti-immigration position is one of ignorance that can’t stand up to even simple scrutiny. Alas, fear is a far more natural response to ignorance than learning.
Remember sir, the power guys got it backwards again. America grew into the worlds biggest economic power as a a result of immigration-based population growth. But that created competition for old white men who want to make sure that doesn’t happen again. Trouble is you can’t sell houses when there is no one to fill them. Look at China. Empty houses everywhere. Look around. Who started new businesses in the 20 century? Old rich people? No. New immigrants struggling to breathe free ….
I don’t think this trend is a coincidence. More like the result of an agreement the wealthy Chinese men are forced (?) to make with Xi- to keep their wealth and stay out of prison. This is from WSJ, but even the New York Post is covering this. They probably all secretly follow Elon on X.
https://www.wsj.com/us-news/chinese-billionaires-surrogacy-pregnancy-7fdfc0c3?st=P4UEDp&reflink=article_copyURL_share
How does a 3.4 million population decline equate to a 2.5% population decrease in a country with 1.4 billion people?
It’s that “population natural growth rate” series.
I get it now, thanks.
The beatings will continue until progress is made !
Apparently a fair number of young people in China are already “lying flat” and/or underemployed. Because they don’t have the optimism and security about the future that is necessary to start a family and buy a home etc. AI and robotics is unlikely to result in more hiring and better incomes for most entry-level jobs for college graduates. And if 2 incomes are needed to support a desired urban standard of living, then child care is an additional expense. So it’s hard to explain how having more children improves their national economic situation and increasing domestic consumption, when there isn’t a plausible future of stable incomes that ensures the security of a stable desired standard of living.
One thing to add about Malthus: his “food grows arithmetically” claim was based on limited data. Over longer periods, food production, like most other processes, grows exponentially through compounding % gains. Arithmetic growth only shows up when a system starts hitting limits that slow the growth rate.
Interesting graph on the eradication of extreme poverty.
In absolute numbers, it would appear the CCP has been the most effective in advancement of human progression.
That poverty chart is remarkable. Would love to see what that looks like in say the post Civil War United States and the post WWI Soviet Union.
And here’s to hoping the continent of Africa can do something similar in the next 30-40 years.