China claimed credit Tuesday for delaying by four years the birth of the world’s 6 billionth person, citing its controversial one-child policy as responsible for preventing the existence of an additional 300 million people on the planet.
Were it not for China’s policy, “the world’s population would have passed 6 billion four years ago,” Premier Zhu Rongji was quoted by official media as saying on the day the United Nations declared that a baby born in Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina, had officially become the world’s symbolic 6 billionth inhabitant.
Of those 6 billion people, more than 1 in 5 is Chinese. Officially, China’s population was 1.248 billion at the end of 1998. By the turn of the millennium, that figure will approach 1.3 billion, though the precise numbers are open to dispute.
What is not in question is that no society has ever experienced such a rapid decline in its birthrate as China. The birthrate has been halved since the late Deng Xiaoping sought to curb the growth of the world’s most populous country by announcing that Chinese couples would be allowed to have only one child, a demographic shift that took more than a century in most countries in Europe.
But China may find itself paying a price in the years ahead as its unprecedented experiment in reproductive engineering takes its toll in unforeseen ways on the structure of a largely rural and underdeveloped society, according to official Chinese statistics.
The most obvious consequence is the fastest growing rate of elderly citizens in the world. By 2000, there will be 129 million Chinese over the age of 60, about 10 percent of the population. Within 25 years, that is expected to jump to 278 million, and by 2050 there will be a staggering 379 million Chinese over 60, a quarter of the entire population and nearly 1.5 times more than the current population of the U.S.
Europe, Japan and the U.S. also will find themselves grappling with the social and economic implications of a rapidly graying population in the next century. But China is far behind the developed world in its capacity to support such large numbers of elderly people.
In Japan, where an estimated 15 percent of the population already is over 60, per capita incomes are more than $25,000 a year. The average Chinese earns $800 a year. The socialist welfare state is crumbling, and there is no social security system to support an elderly populace whose only permitted child may not be willing or able to help out.
The aging of China’s population is not disputed, because those who will reach the age of 60 by the middle of the next century already have been born.
Less clear is the broader impact on the first generation of those born under the one-child policy who are now coming of age. Introduced in 1980, the restriction has been applied unevenly across the country with widely varying results.
In the major cities, where the reproductive habits of urban workers are open to the scrutiny of Communist Party officials in state-run factories and local street committees, the one-child policy has been effective. Soaring economic growth rates have, in any case, deterred many citizens from diverting their energies from the pursuit of new opportunities to raise a child. And in recent years a growing number of urban couples are choosing to have no children.
In rural areas, where traditional attitudes emphasizing the importance of male heirs prevail, the rules permit couples whose first child is a girl to have a second try at a boy. The remoteness of some communities, along with the practice of levying fines for extra births, means some Chinese are still having large families. The estimated 100 million people who belong to ethnic minorities are exempt from the one-child policy.
That is why many Western and Chinese researchers dispute the official claim that China’s population growth rate has fallen to 0.953 percent, one of the lowest in the world.
Precise numbers aside, it is clear that the growth rate in China’s cities is slowing at a far greater rate than it is in rural areas.
Privately, Chinese government officials admit they are concerned by the implications of a policy that appears to be decreasing the overall proportion of urbanites, who tend to be wealthier and better educated. Over the past two years, the government has quietly been experimenting with new approaches to family planning that encourage a more voluntary approach.