Will China Shrink to 320 Million People?
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The newsletter is written by journalists with deep experience covering China. Didi Kirsten Tatlow, Senior Correspondent for International Affairs and Investigations, has reported extensively on Chinese politics, influence and security. John Feng, China Editor, is based in Taiwan and covers China’s domestic politics, foreign policy and the strategic competition between Beijing and Washington.
Below, for Newsweek Members, we are reproducing the latest edition of China Decoded in full:
Could there really be just 320 million Chinese by 2100?
It seems impossible. After all, aren’t there 1.4 billion Chinese today? That’s what the government says .
But no one in China believes government figures, and people outside China should not either. Not even the former Premier Li Keqiang, who earlier in his career as party secretary of Liaoning province, said that the government’s GDP number was “man-made” and that he studied practical things like electricity consumption to gauge real growth.
So, 320 million Chinese people in 74 years time?
That’s what Fuxian Yi, an independent Chinese demographer, is projecting in a new monograph in an independent Chinese journal, Contemporary China Review .
A brief word on this journal: it’s a rare voice emerging from a massively censored environment.
For sure, it’s not based in China. That would be impossible. But its 14-person editorial board is all-Chinese and the journal carries voices from inside China. It says it has “the support of independent Chinese intellectuals, scholars, and readers worldwide,” and “has remained committed to liberal values and to the defense of freedom of speech and expression in the Chinese-speaking world.” It’s edited and published in New York by Bouden House, a Chinese-language literary press that was established in 2018.
Back to Yi, who was recently appointed the journal’s deputy editor-in-chief. He’s a senior scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and an obstetrics and gynecology specialist who trained as a medical doctor in Hunan province before leaving for the U.S. many years ago.
I’ve known Yi for years, first interviewing him nearly a decade and a half ago in China, where he would visit from time to time to spread the word about his groundbreaking book, Big Country with an Empty Nest . The title said it all. Yi never bought the official population figures.
The whole situation was crazy anyway. China’s one child policy had been drawn up by a missile expert called Song Jian. You read that right: missiles.
Song used an engineering control-systems model to analyze a population boom in the late 1960s and 70s that was freaking out Communist Party leaders as they wondered how everyone could be fed and how they could hold on to power.
In 1980 he came up with a mechanistic projection that the population would exceed 4.2 billion by 2080, whereupon the government truly panicked and the one child policy was implemented.
It sounds so tame. Three words. But the policy was crudely controlling and the reality often bloody.
In the journal’s foreword, the policy is described as “a classic case of applying engineering logic to a complex social system. It continues: "The policy resulted in hundreds of millions of foregone births, while coercive practices during its implementation, including forced abortions and sterilizations, caused profound human suffering and contributed to China’s persistent low fertility and population aging.”
Those last two parts—low fertility and population aging—are the subject of Yi’s new monograph, China's Population Data Manipulation .
In a dictatorship, where truth-telling must be punished for power to be preserved, officials have an incentive to falsify figures.
Yi dug obsessively. He cross-validated official numbers against datasets such as school enrollment and graduation statistics, vaccinations, household registrations, and live birth and mortality data. He compared provincial demographic data with national data and disaggregated census records.
Yi argues that the official population is overstated by about 130 million, and, based on that and on current fertility trends—the population control policy was nixed a decade ago but fertility has not recovered—it could fall to about 320 million in 2100. It sounds absurdly low, but when you think that a person only lives for about 80 years, meaning that shrinkage can occur fast, it begins perhaps to make sense. Of course, I can’t say if Yi’s prediction will come true.
The United Nations agrees that China’s population will fall dramatically by 2100, though Yi says it too has gotten the figures wrong.
The U.N.’s World Population Prospects , a standard reference for policy and business analysis, has been obliged to adjust its estimates for China downwards over the years, from 1.06 billion (projected in 2019) to 633 million (projected in 2024.)
All of this is hugely important for the world. Did the overprojections fuel China’s overconfidence, and the rest of the world’s cringe, in the face of what was presented as “inevitable”—China’s triumphant rise to global dominance off of a bigger, more balanced population?
Certainly, a bigger population doesn’t automatically mean a more powerful country. But a seriously skewed one poses challenges.
“This means that China’s economic, social, defense, and foreign policies, as well as international investment decisions and foreign governments’ policies toward China, have all rested on flawed…
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