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China economy
OpinionComment
Yi Fuxian
Yi Fuxian

Opinion | Can China’s new premier raise the birth rate and avoid a demographic collapse?

  • With clear and frequent discrepancies in the data, no one knows the true extent of China’s ageing demographics
  • What is clear is that to improve China’s economic prospects, Li Qiang needs to boost births and raise the retirement age

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Employees work on aluminium products at a factory in Huaibei, in China’s eastern Anhui province, on January 30. China’s workforce is not getting any younger. Photo: AFP
Yi Fuxian
At a recent press conference, China’s new premier Li Qiang argued that the country’s demographic dividend had not disappeared, even though the population is declining. He supported his claim with impressive-sounding figures: China has nearly 900 million working-age people, out of a population of 1.4 billion, with more than 15 million people joining the workforce every year. But should we believe these numbers?
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An examination of Chinese demographic data reveals clear and frequent discrepancies. For 2000, for example, the National Bureau of Statistics reported 17.7 million births – a figure that aligns with the 17.5 million first graders in 2006. And yet, while the 2000 census showed only 13.8 million children under the age of one, there were 14.3 million ninth graders in 2014.

There are several reasons Chinese demographic data is unreliable. For starters, local governments have a strong incentive to inflate population figures. More residents mean larger fiscal transfers from the central government, including funds for priorities like education, pensions and poverty alleviation. Likewise, households might claim to have more members to receive extra benefits from the local governments.

Politics provides another motive for exaggerating the birth figures. For example, to show that the shift from a one-child policy to a two-child policy worked, the National Health and Family Planning Commission reported 17.86 million births in 2016, a 7.9 per cent increase from the previous year. In the Shandong and Zhejiang provinces, the reported increase was considerably higher.

But the two-child policy was introduced in January 2016. So how could there be such a huge spike in births that year?
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The simplest explanation is that it never happened. The number of administered doses of the Bacillus Calmette-Guérin vaccine – required for every newborn – barely increased in 2016. Moreover, there were only 17 million first graders in 2022 – instead of surging as expected, the number fell year on year, by 5 per cent nationwide and in Shandong, and by 1 per cent in Zhejiang.

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