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 | | موضوع: POPULATION IN CHINA الأحد يونيو 12, 2011 3:51 pm | |
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China is the world's most populous country, with about 1.32 billion people (estimated 2007). It's closest rival, India, has around 1 billion people but is expected to have more people than China by the year 2030 as a result of having a less successful family planning policy than China.
China’s population hit 1 billion in 1982 and reached the 1.3 billion mark in 2005, a year in which the population grew by 8.1 million, or 0.63 percent. China is projected to have 1.39 billion citizens by 2015, up from 1.32 billion at the end of 2008. About 23 percent of all the people on earth live in China. Every year 20 million infants are born.
There is an old joke that goes: “In China when they say you are one in a million there are a thousand just like you." There are almost twice as many people in China as there are in European Union and the United States combined. India is the only other country that has reached the one billion mark. Together China and India account for a third of the world’s population and 60 percent of Asia's population.
China has been the world’s most populous nation for some time. One 16th century Portuguese trader wrote, the numbers of people in China were "everywhere so great that out of a tree...swarm a number of children, where a man would not have thought to have found any one at all."
The majority of China's people live in the fertile, humid lowlands of the east, with about a third of China’s people living along China's coast. The major population centers include the North China Plain and Shandong Peninsula (an area smaller than Texas with more people than the U.S.); the Sichuan basin, (a Michigan-size area with 100 million people); and the Yangtze River area (where 150 million people live). The deserts and highlands in the west make up half of China's territory but are home to only 6 percent of the population.
Good Websites and Sources: China Population Information and Research Center cpirc.org. ; United Nations Population Fund unescap.org ; Trends in Chinese Demography afe.easia.columbia.edu ; Wikipedia article Wikipedia ; Institute of Population and Labor Economics cass.cn ; Population Trends (PDF file) prb.org ; Links in this Website: ONE-CHILD POLICY IN CHINA Factsanddetails.com/China ; BIRTH CONTROL IN CHINA Factsanddetails.com/China ; PREFERENCE FOR BOYS Factsanddetails.com/China ; THE BRIDE SHORTAGE IN CHINA Factsanddetails.com/China
Chinese Census
The fifth Chinese census was conducted in 2000. It counted 1.26 billion people, 132 million more than the 1990 census. Six million canvassers (double the number of soldiers in the People's Liberation Army) covered the entire country in 10 days. They knocked on the doors of 350 million dwelling, climbed mountains and checked in caves, rode horses in Inner Mongolia to seek out nomads and went shack to shack in urban camps trying to count migrant workers.
An army of 5.2 million canvassers (equal to the number of people in Denmark) was used to take the 1982 Chinese census, which counted 1,008,174,288 people, an increase of more 300 million people over the previous census in 1964. The first census was conducted in 1953. The 1990 census counted 1,133,682,501 people.
In the 2000 census, people were asked if they had a toilet, how many days a week they worked and whether they burned gas, wood or coal to heat their homes. Most importantly, perhaps, they were asked to provide honest answers on how many children they had and were promised by the government they would suffer no consequences if they had more children than they were supposed to. The government wanted also to get accurate numbers on China's "floating population" of laborers.
The statistical variation used when calculating the population of China is greater than the entire population of the United States. Many think that statistics are not accurate and that China is really home to over 1.5 billion people. If that is true then there are 200 million people—two thirds of the pollution of the United States—running around that are not accounted for.
Population Statistics in China
Nearly two-thirds of the Chinese population (750 million people) is under the age of 35; 92 percent are Han Chinese; and 75 percent (900 million people) are rural peasants (compared to 40 percent in most developing countries and 20 percent in developed countries).
Population under 15: 20.4 percent (compared to 48 percent in Kenya and 16 percent in Japan).
Population over 65: 7.9 percent (compared to 3 percent in Kenya and 14 percent in Japan).
Population density: 362 people square mile (compared to 4 per square mile in Mongolia, 72 in the United States, and 1,188 in South Korea). The population density of China is three times the world average of 91 people per square mile. In Shanghai, China's largest city, there are almost 100,000 people per square mile. Only twelve cities on earth, including China's Shenyang, Tianjin and Chengdu, have higher population densities.
In the year 2000 Shanghai had a population of 20 million people; Beijing and Tianjin had 15 million each; and seven other cities had a population of more than 5 million each. More than 100 Chinese cities have a population of more than 1 million.
Population Growth in China
The population of China is greater than the entire world 150 years ago. Every year the population of China increases by 14 million people (the number of people in Texas or Chile). Each decade it increases by about 130 million (more than the population of Japan). About 39,000 new people are added everyday.
Population growth (2007): 0.6 percent. China accounts for 11.4 percent of the world's population increase.
Average number of children per woman: 1.75 (compared to 1.5 in Germany and 7.0 in Ethiopia). The average fertility rate in rural areas is 1.98; in urban area it is 1.22.
According to the U.S. Census Bureau the population of China is expected to reach its peak of 1.4 billion around 2026 and begin shrinking after that. According to a model bu Wang Fend, a demographer at the University of California at Irvine, if current populations trend hold China’s population could shrink by almost half to 750 million. Others think the population of China is expected to peak at around 1.5 billion around 2033 when China is expected to be overtaken by India as the world’s most populous country. Others say the population is expected to start declining around 2042.
The fertility level is expected to drop below replacement level soon. Already the population of Beijing, Shanghai, Tianjin and other cities would be declining were it not for the influx of migrants. Some Chinese demographers hope that China can stabilize its population and then "allow birth control and natural mortality" to reduce the population to 700 million, considered the ideal number for a nation of China’s size.
Large numbers of births occur during lucky or important years. In the year 2000, over 36 million “millennium babies” were born, nearly double the previous years. Births also spiked in 2008, the year of the Beijing Olympics, and years deemed auspicious by the Chinese calendar (See Superstitions). The trend puts pressure on hospitals, schools and job markets when large numbers are born, begin school and look for jobs at the same time
It is unusual for rural women over the age of 35 to have children. Rural Chinese women on average enter menopause five years earlier than Western women because of lifestyle, genetic and dietary factors Wang Yijue of the Sichuan Reproductive Health Research Center told the Los Angeles Times.
Population Problems in China
With such a huge population, every social problem is magnified. If 10 percent of the population in China is unemployed, for example, the number of people out of work is equal to half the population of the United States. A migrant from Henan told journalist Howard French, “I’m frightened for my son’s future, China’s biggest problem is the population. There are just too many of us, and the competition for opportunity is murderous.” [Source: Howard W. French, New York Times, August 28, 2009]
Already the strains of over population have caused severe water shortages in places with high rainfall and produced housing shortages in cities where the average person lives in the space the size of a small closet (12 square feet per person).
The economy in China is booming in part because 70 percent of the population is of working age. This will change dramatically as the population ages and fewer children become adults because of the old child policy.
The Chinese word population is made up of two characters one for “people” and one for “open mouth.” See Problems in Feeding the World's Largest Nation. Agriculture, Economics
Population Control in China
The Chinese have made great strides in reducing their population through birth control. But that has not always been the case. Mao did nothing to reduce China's expanding population, which doubled under his leadership. He believed that birth control was a capitalist plot to weaken the country and make it vulnerable to attack. He also liked to say, "every mouth comes with two hands attached." For a while Mao urged Chinese to have lots of children to support his “human wave” defense policy when he feared attack from the United States and the Soviet Union.
Soon after taking power in 1949 Mao declared: ‘Of all things in the world, people are the most precious.’ He condemned birth control and banned the import of contraceptives. He then proceeded to kill lots of people through vicious crackdowns on landlords and counter-revolutionaries, through the use of human-wave warfare in North Korea and through failed experiments like the Great Leap Forward.
In the 1970s Mao began to come around to the threats posed by too many people. He began encouraged a policy of ‘late, long and few’ and coined the slogan: ‘One is good, two is OK, three is too many.’ In the years after his death, China began experimenting with the one-child policy.
The "Later, Longer, Fewer" policy that is the cornerstone of China's birth control program was put into effect in 1976, around the same time that Mao died. It encouraged couples to get married later, wait longer to have children, and have fewer children, preferably one. The program forced married couples to sign statements that obligated them to one child. Women who had abortions were given free vacations.
See One Child Policy
Graying of China
Another consequence of a low birth rate and one-child policy is an increasingly older population. As of 2005 about 143 million people (more than 10 percent of the population) were over 60. This is more than population of all but about ten countries. The rate is expected to increase at a rate of 100 million a decade. By 2050, there are expected to be 438 million elderly, or one out of four Chinese, compared with one out of ten in 1980.
By 2020 the number of people between 20 and 24 is expected to be half of the 124 million in 2010. During the same time period the number of people over 60 is expected to jump from 12 percent of the population—167 million people—to 17 percent.
In Shanghai, people over 60 already make 21.6 percent of the population and are expected to make up 34 percent in 2020. Similar trend are occurring across the country, especially in urban areas where the working-age population is expect to peak in about 2015.
Nicholas Eberstad wrote in Far Eastern Economic Review, “According to the UNPD's projections, China's 65-plus age group currently numbers around 110 million. Over the coming generation, this group is set to rise to 280 million—growing at a pace of almost 3.8 percent per annum. By 2035, nearly one in five Chinese will be 65 or older, constituting a staggering 280 million senior citizens. The aging situation is likely to be even more acute in the Chinese countryside due to the ongoing migration of younger, rural-born workers to towns and cities. According to the projections of a team of demographers led by Professor Zeng Yi of Peking University, China's rural areas are probably already grayer than its cities—and the difference will grow starker every year. Prof. Zeng's team projects that by 2035 over one in four rural residents would be 65 or older.” [Source: Nicholas Eberstad, Far Eastern Economic Review, December 2009. Eberstadt holds the Henry Wendt Chair in political economy at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C., and is senior adviser to the National Bureau of Asian Research]
By 2050 China will have more than 100 million over 80.
Consequences of Graying Population
An aging population means that relatively small group of young people has to economically support a large number of elderly people. Health care and pension costs will soar as elderly people make up a larger portion of the population. There will be a labor shortage as the demands by the elderly exceed the ability to young people to meet them. The ratio of working people to retirees is dropping quickly. Immigrant labor will be needed to make up the shortfall.
China is the first nation to have to cope with a population that is getting older before it becomes rich. The elderly population is expected to mushroom before the economy and society have the capability to deal with the problem. Already, China is racking up health care and pension costs it can not afford as people born in the 1950s and 60s begin retiring. By 2035 and 2040 the peak of the aging problem China will face a social security deficient of $128 billion.
Nicholas Eberstad wrote in Far Eastern Economic Review, ‘What are the implications of this gray population explosion? For benchmarks, we might consider Japan, which ranks as the world's most aged society. In Japan today, the 65-plus proportion of the country's total population is just over 22 percent. In other words, rural China will be substantially more elderly than any population known to date within a generation.’[Source: Nicholas Eberstad, Far Eastern Economic Review, December 2009. Eberstadt holds the Henry Wendt Chair in political economy at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C., and is senior adviser to the National Bureau of Asian Research]
Despite three decades of dizzying economic growth, rural China remains terribly poor. Average income levels in the Chinese countryside are reportedly less than one third as high as that of Chinese cities. Japan's per capita income level today is maybe 15 or 20 times higher than in rural China. One need not be a Sino-pessimist to suggest that Chinese society will have to cope with its coming age burden on vastly lower income levels than Japan or today's graying Western societies. “ [Ibid]
Who will care for this looming wave of retirees? Certainly it will not be the country's existing pension system. That irregular and arbitrary patchwork construct consists mainly of special arrangements for employees of certain municipalities and state enterprises, covering only a fraction of the country's workforce. Yet even these existing programs are manifestly unsound from an actuarial standpoint. Whereas the net present value of the U.S. social security system's unfunded liabilities are equivalent to America's total output for about one third of a year, the estimated liabilities of China's system are in excess of 100 percent of GDP. The existing social security system is doomed to collapse under its own weight. “ [Ibid]
The traditional Chinese social security system has in fact always been the family, with family members looking after their elderly in countryside and city alike. But with the collapse of Chinese fertility below replacement levels in the 1990s, the Chinese family has become a much frailer support system. In Confucian societies, the first line of support has always been the son. In the 1990s, practically every Chinese woman approaching retirement age had at least one son to turn to: in that time, all but 8 percent of Chinese women who were reaching the age of 60 had given birth to at least one male child. By 2025 the corresponding proportion of older women who have borne no sons will increase to about 30 percent, meaning that one in three elderly couples will have no sons as they head toward retirement age. “ [Ibid]
For many of these individuals, eking out sustenance in old age may amount to a begging game, whereby they beseech the families of their daughters and sons-in-law to divert resources that would otherwise be committed to the son-in-law's parents. Yet even for those who do have a son, support from one's progeny will require that the traditional ethos of filial piety holds firm; a presumption that may no longer be taken for granted in a country whose lifestyles and mores are undergoing rapid change. “ [Ibid]
Within China today, most people have become accustomed to the notion of the country's inevitable rise in the decades ahead. However, the vulnerabilities of its aging population also cast much of China on a course of increasing peril. “ [Ibid]
Some demographers view a population decline as a positive things, saying it will reduce food and water shortages and curb pollution.
See Elderly
End of Labor Force Growth in China
If China ends up with too many old people and too few young workers it could slow economic growth. In the worst case the government and families will have to tap into savings to take care of the elderly, reducing funds for investments and driving up interest rates. As the working-age population shrinks, labor cost will rise. China’s aging population could undermine the advantages of low-cost labor by the middle of the 21st century. In 2007 China had six people in the workforce for every retiree but this ratio while fall to 2:1 by 2050.
Nicholas Eberstad wrote in Far Eastern Economic Review, ‘China's explosive economic growth between 1979 and 2008 was historically unprecedented in pace, duration, and scale. A repeat performance over the coming generation is most unlikely for one simple reason: the demographic inputs that facilitated this amazing first act are no longer available. [Source: Nicholas Eberstad, Far Eastern Economic Review, December 2009. Eberstadt holds the Henry Wendt Chair in political economy at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C., and is senior adviser to the National Bureau of Asian Research]
Over the 1980-2005 generation, China's working-age population—defined here as the 15- to 64-year-old group—grew by about 2 percent per annum. Yet over the coming generation, China's prospective manpower growth rate is zero. By the ‘medium variant’ projections of the United Nations Population Division (UNPD), the 15- to 64-year-old group will be roughly 25 million persons smaller in 2035 than it is today, and by 2035 it would be dropping at a tempo of about 0.7 percent per year. In fact, by the U.S. Census Bureau's reckonings, China's conventionally defined manpower will peak by 2016 and will thereafter commence an accelerating decline. Though these forecasts concern events far in the future, they are more than mere conjecture; virtually everyone who will be part of China's 15- to 64-year-old-group in the year 2024 is alive today. If current childbearing trajectories continue, by the UNPD's reckoning, each new generation will be at least 20 percent smaller than the one before it. “ [Ibid]
These numbers alone would augur ill for the continuation of rapid economic growth in China, but the situation is even more unfavorable when one considers the shifts in the composition of China's working-age population. In modern societies, it is the youngest cohorts of the labor force who have the best health, the highest levels of education, the most up-to-date technical skills—and thus the greatest potential to contribute to productivity. In China, however, this cohort has been shrinking for a generation, and stands to shrink still further, in both relative and absolute terms. In 1985, 15- to 29-year-olds accounted for 47 percent of China's working age population. Today that proportion is down to about 34 percent of the workforce. By Census Bureau projections, 20 years from now it will have fallen to just barely 26 percent of China's conventionally defined labor force. “ [Ibid]
The only reason China's working age population will not shrink more rapidly over the next few decades is because of an enormous coming wave of laborers in the 50- to 64-year-old age range. This group looks to swell by over 100 million between 2009 and 2029, growing from 22 percent of the working population to roughly 32 percent. The educational profile of this group is far more elementary than is generally appreciated: according to official Chinese census data, 47 percent of 50- to 64-year-olds have not completed primary schooling. “ [Ibid]
With this coming ‘age wave,’ the structure of China's labor force will be inverted. A generation ago, there were nearly three times as many younger workers as older workers. Today there are half again as many younger workers as older ones. Two decades from now, the Census Bureau projects 120 older prospective workers for every 100 younger ones (at which point the situation may then stabilize, depending upon fertility trends). It's not exactly an ideal transformation in the labor force structure if one is aiming to maintain rapid rates of economic growth. “ [Ibid]
The situation might be easier for economic planners to cope with if China were still a nation with an abundance of underemployed labor. But policy makers in Beijing can no longer count on these once huge reserves. Instead, leading Chinese economists—among them Professor Cai Fang, director of the Institute of Population and Labor Economics at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences—argue that the Chinese economy has already reached a turning point where those seemingly unlimited reserves of rural labor have actually been tapped out, and any future increase in demand for labor will only be supplied by increasing wages. “ [Ibid]
Slowed Population Growth and China’s Future Economy
Nicholas Eberstad wrote in Far Eastern Economic Review, ‘What will become of Chinese economic performance when this key element of the country's growth formula is radically altered? One can of course imagine compensating social adaptations, such as a more reliable rule of law or deeper affinities to friends. But if history is any guide, such social adaptations are often slow and halting, and there is no guarantee that they will emerge in time to remedy the loss of social capital that is taking place before our eyes. “ [Ibid]
In detailing China's looming demographic troubles, I do not mean to suggest that continued, even substantial, material progress is not in the cards for China in the decades ahead. The Chinese economy still has tremendous opportunities for further growth. At the same time, we should not underestimate the magnitude of the demographic difficulties with which China will have to contend in the years ahead. Unfortunately, those difficulties do not yet seem to have been adequately recognized, either by the international community or by Chinese leaders themselves. “ [Ibid]
There is more than a little irony in this situation for the masters of today's Chinese economic miracle. In their autocratic, but seemingly pragmatic quest to escape the poverty that burdened China in the past, they have helped conjure up demographic demons that will bedevil the country for decades to come. Deng Xiaoping is currently remembered for his steadfast opposition to Mao's disastrous Great Leap Forward. But history may ultimately remember Deng—and his successors—for unleashing a population control program whose toll on the Chinese people would put the Great Leap Forward in the shade. “ [Ibid]
Image Sources: Maps, University of Texas; Census poster, Landsberger Posters http://www.iisg.nl/~landsberger/; People by Age Group, BBC
Text Sources: New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Times of London, National Geographic, The New Yorker, Time, Newsweek, Reuters, AP, Lonely Planet Guides, Compton’s Encyclopedia and various books and other publications.
:س1: thnx for reading
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thanks 
