The Human Tide

by Paul Morland

  Exactly when and why Chinese population growth took off is unclear, but it seems to have gathered momentum between the mid seventeenth and mid nineteenth centuries, at precisely the time Japan’s population was stagnating, with China’s population reaching around 430 million in 1850.55 This represents a growth rate of more than 1% over two centuries. It appears to have been achieved by means of an intensification of agriculture involving capital investment, irrigation and greater use of fertiliser, raising agricultural output and thus the population it could support, albeit at a very low standard of living.56 Estimates of the country’s population at various times, despite the existence of some records, are still uncertain, and some estimates of population growth set it at not much more than 0.5% for 1650–1929. Unlike the progress of Britain during the course of the nineteenth century, it was a growth rate achieved without rather than despite mass emigration. There was some Chinese emigration, particularly within Asia, but in 1940, even counting the Chinese in Manchuria as ‘overseas’, the total Chinese population outside China amounted to barely 20 million. This may have represented a significant presence relative to some of the places where the Chinese lived, such as Malaya, but was less than 5% of the domestic population in that era.57 Population growth seems to have slowed from the middle of the nineteenth century, perhaps to 0.25% between 1850 and 1947,58 at least in part the result of the bloody Taiping rebellion, responsible for the deaths of 20 million people.

  The data on the fertility and mortality underpinning this 200-year expansion followed by a century’s slowdown is obscure, but it is certain that throughout the period, at least by modern standards, both fertility and mortality rates were high. It was until recently generally believed that China was closer than Japan to the pre-modern norm assumed by Malthusians and by proponents of the demographic transition theory.59 However, even this has now been challenged, with some historians suggesting that the Chinese, like the Japanese, may have been managing, by means of a number of techniques including widespread infanticide, to keep their population below the maximal frontier and thus living standards above the Malthusian minimum.60

  The story of Chinese demographic change in the quarter-century or so of Mao’s era is one of the most dramatic extremes presided over by a regime with a highly inconsistent population policy. Marxist ideology argued that the size of a population was artificially constrained by the social system: once the people were freed from feudal or capitalistic bonds, the plenty of socialism would arrive and this would result in the population flourishing both in terms of the living standards of individuals and absolute numbers. In line with traditional Marxist anti-Malthusianism, Mao stated in 1949 that it was good for China to have a large population, that it would find ways to feed it and that ‘of all the things in the world, people are the most precious’.61

  Whether this triggered or merely accompanied a booming population, the fertility rate remained high, at close to six children per woman, while mortality fell and the population expanded rapidly. In 1950 the population grew at nearly 3%, a step change up from the annual population growth rates reviewed up to this point and testimony to the rising intensity of the human tide as it progressed beyond Europe and North America.62 In some circles this gave rise to alarm, particularly when the results of the 1952 census became available, showing more than 600 million people in China as compared with just 470 million in 1947.63 The numbers were almost certainly inaccurate, suggesting an implausible 5% annual increase in population, but nevertheless they radically changed the terms of the debate. The pro-natalist rhetoric was toned down, contraceptives became more available and a more ‘liberal’ view gave way to increasing birth control propaganda from 1957. In that year abortion was legalised.

  Policy changed again in 1958 when Mao insisted that ‘it is still good to have more people’ and population control came to be regarded as ‘rightist’.64 This was part of the lead up to the Great Leap Forward, which demographically as well as economically was precisely the opposite of what its name implied–it was a series of madcap schemes for rapid modernisation which set the country back. Whilst the population had indeed been leaping forward until that point, at least in terms of numbers, it probably went into reverse as grain production dropped by around 30% and famine ensued.65 Mao’s ruthlessness and lack of concern for human life was clear in his preparedness to fight a nuclear war if it would mean the triumph of the Communist camp. He wrote:

  Let us imagine how many people would die if war breaks out. There are 2.7 billion people in the world, and a third could be lost… I say that if the worst came to the worst and one half [of the world’s population] dies, there will still be one half left, but imperialism would be erased and the whole world would become socialist. After a few years, there would be 2.7 billion people again.66

  Within China agricultural policies were applied in the 1950s which in many ways resembled those that Stalin had imposed, specifically collectivisation and forced delivery of grain ‘surpluses’. Unsurprisingly, the results were the same. There was a clash between the vast forces of demographic momentum which had been driving up the size of the population and the mass starvation brought on by the Great Leap Forward. The fertility rate appears to have fallen from nearly six in 1958 to not much more than three just three years later, a symptom of and a response to the brutal conditions of the time rather than to a government population policy that was turning back to pro-natalism.67

  Once this period of economic mayhem was over, the fertility rate shot up again to five or six, and once again the authorities worried about population growth, which in the late 1960s was again approaching the 3% per annum mark. China’s buoyant underlying demography was a key to its rapid recovery from Mao’s ravages, but this was of little comfort to the millions who had starved as a result of them. A once lively countryside conveyed the depths of the disaster following the devastation: ‘an eerie, unnatural silence descended upon the countryside. The few pigs that had not been confiscated had died of hunger and disease. Chickens and ducks had long since been slaughtered.’ Even the wildlife was affected; there were

  no birds left in the trees, which had been stripped of their leaves and bark, their bare and bony spines standing stark against an empty sky. People were famished beyond speech. In this world plundered of every layer that might offer sustenance, down to bark and mud, corpses often ended up in shallow graves or simply by the roadside. A few people ate human flesh.68

  Horrendous though the Great Leap Forward and the later Cultural Revolution were, the loss of life they entailed could not and did not hold back the human tide. Just as with Stalin’s Russia two or three decades earlier, underlying demographic momentum was so great that the population kept growing. A little over half a billion in 1950, it rose to three-quarters of a billion by 1967. This was thanks to a fertility rate which stayed above six children per woman well into the 1960s and a life expectancy (i.e. a falling mortality rate) which was extended from under forty-five to over sixty in the two decades from 1950.69

  From 1970, however, things began to change. Life expectancy continued to lengthen but fertility rates fell to below three within in a decade.70 Indeed, the 1970s in China was a most extraordinary period, once again showing how the later the tide, the stronger both its flow and ebb. The halving from around six to around three children per woman had taken five times as long in pioneering Britain, and at least twice as long in Russia. It was achieved by a combination of social change–specifically an increase in urbanisation and female education–and political direction. In 1981, for example, the urban fertility rate was less than half that of rural areas, so an increasingly urban China was bound to have a falling fertility rate.71 Mao had engaged with and then toned down his pro-natalist rhetoric, and after his death contraceptives became more available after the chaotic years of the Cultural Revolution. Indeed, for anyone seeking to guess which direction China would take next, the modernisation of its family size and structure in the 1970s was a clue to the fact that something extrao
rdinary was about to happen, namely the entry of China into the world economy, its massive and rapid industrialisation and what can best be seen as the greatest act of modernisation that has ever occurred in human history and–given China’s size–is ever likely to.

  After Mao: One Child China

  A few years after Mao’s death in 1976, China aligned itself to an unambiguous policy of ‘modernisation’ of which population control was a key element. This was signalled by senior Communist Hu Yaobang, late party chairman and general secretary, who declared in 1978 that ‘the population problem is the most important problem’.72 Having ditched the Marxian view that socialism would create plenty and so obviate the need for restraint of numbers, the Communist Party now revived a view first put forward much earlier, that the planning of population should be seen as part of a rational planned economy. Vice Premier Chen Muhua insisted that it should be possible ‘to regulate the production of human beings so that the population growth corresponds to an increase in material things’.73 The slogan regarding family size changed from ‘Two Just Right’ to ‘One is Best’.74

  From 1979 to 2015 an explicit ‘One Child Policy’ was pursued, involving exhortation, monetary inducements and sanctions including potentially loss of home and job. The policy was codified in 1980 and implemented between 1980 and 1984.75 In some cases it involved direct coercion. Exceptions were made, for example for national minorities, and there have been periodic relaxations, such as the recent exemption where both parents are single children. Initially the policy was strongly resisted in the rural areas where, following the return of land to the peasants, it ran counter to people’s interests. The fertility rate in China today is somewhere between 1.2 and 1.5; in the capital Beijing it is barely 0.75.76

  Yet the great irony of the One Child Policy was that it was almost certainly not necessary. This can be demonstrated in two ways: first by reference to historical trends within China, and second by contrast to other countries. In 1981, as the One Child Policy was being implemented, China’s population passed 1 billion, a truly staggering number which both astonished and frightened many outside China and was clearly terrifying China’s own leadership. Yet at this point, fertility rates had tumbled already–from six to three children per woman in a decade. The trends were sharp and clear from 1970, so the implementation of the One Child Policy cannot be held responsible. Unsurprisingly, China’s population growth was slowing too. At 1.4% per annum it was still high, but half the nearly 3% that it had reached little more than a decade earlier. So it is clear that by its own dynamics, Chinese society was addressing the issue without the coercive intervention of the state.

  The second way of demonstrating that the One Child Policy was not necessary is by international comparisons. The actual trajectory of fertility in China was not so different to that of other countries in east and south-east Asia whose governments did not apply such draconian, top-down methods. In Taiwan, the rebel island province controlled by nationalist opponents of Mao, fertility had fallen to around three in the mid 1970s, a little ahead of the mainland (and not surprisingly; spared Mao’s excesses, Taiwan simply progressed towards modernity more quickly): by the late 1990s it had fallen to between one and a half and two, the same level as in the People’s Republic, again without any draconian top-down policies. In South Korea, where likewise a total fertility rate of three children per woman had been reached by the late 1970s, the fertility rate was one and a half by the late 1990s.77 Thus both Korea and Taiwan–and other Asian countries too–with around the same starting point as the People’s Republic at the point of the implementation of the One Child Policy–achieved similar or even greater falls in fertility rates without resorting to the levels of coercion the Chinese Communist Party felt were necessary. (Another valid comparator, the ethnic Chinese population of Malaysia, has a fertility rate of around one and a half children per woman, close to that of China’s, again achieved without draconian measures.78)

  If ever there was a lesson that the human tide is best managed by ordinary human beings themselves and not by their self-appointed engineers, it is here. Given education, some level of opportunity and access to contraceptives, most men and women, but particularly women, are capable of making decisions in their own interests which also match the requirements of society, at least in terms of reducing fertility. Adam Smith’s hidden hand works in demography as well as in economics: individuals left to their own devices, if informed and enabled to make their own decisions, will tend to make decisions in their own interests which are in the interests of society, at least when it comes to the need for falling fertility rates. But it is unsurprising that Smith’s Marxist ideological enemies, who were running China, did not recognise it. The policy can be thought of as a ‘great leap’ in population control, the demographic corollary of the earlier disastrous policies in agriculture and industry: ‘The approach was guided by the Leninist notion that if the party exerted enough effort, every problem could be solved.’79

  As ever when such top-down policies are implemented, it is important not to lose sight of the individual tragedies within the bigger statistical picture. Professionals have lost their jobs because of their insistence on having a second child.80 In a country which performs well over 20 million abortions every year, not all of them are voluntary. One Chinese woman who wanted a second child decided to go ahead, despite the serious ramifications for her family and the rights of the newborn to an education:

  [I]n March of 2014, a group of six to seven people from the Family Planning Committee forced their way into my home. They set two people to watch my house. Four others dragged me into a car that had been waiting at my door. My helpless mother followed me in another car to the hospital. In the hospital, on that same afternoon, the doctor injected the abortion drug oxytocin into my abdomen… Afterward, the doctor gave me another shot, saying that it was to stop the pain. But the pain did not stop. When they performed the operation to clean my womb, it was so unbelievably painful. Lying on that bed, I felt my body was cut open and broken. I kept crying. My baby didn’t have a chance to come into this world and call me ‘Mom’. My baby didn’t have a chance to make a single sound. My baby was deprived of life by the government…81

  The Chinese Rollercoaster

  With its huge size, rapid growth and then plummeting fertility, China’s population has been on an extraordinary journey since the foundation of the People’s Republic. Whatever the cruelties and inconsistencies of its policies, China has gone through the classic demographic sequence of falling mortality, rising population, then falling fertility and stabilising population. Life expectancy since 1950 has extended from under forty-five to over seventy-five, an increase of nearly six months every year, an achievement not much less impressive than and clearly related to the rapid growth of the Chinese economy and rise in living standards. It is difficult at this stage to take stock and understand what these changes mean for the future, but some themes can be observed: first ageing and its implications for the Chinese economy, second the structure of Chinese families, and third the point at which China will reach ‘peak population’. Beforehand, however, it bears stating the obvious: that China’s prominence in world affairs, including economic matters, is dependent on its gargantuan population size. Other countries have undergone economic growth as rapid, or almost as rapid, as China’s, either in the past or concurrently with China, but it is only because of China’s billion plus people that when the country moves, the world notices.

  China is ageing quickly, as would be expected from its falling fertility rates and lengthening life expectancy. The median Chinese citizen remained in his/her twenties throughout the first forty years or so of the People’s Republic, but in the first fifteen years of the twenty-first century the median age has risen by seven years.82 This is nearly three times the speed of ageing experienced in the UK and the US, and the trend will continue. Between 1975 and 2050 the number of Chinese over the age of sixty is forecast to rise sevenfold while the number of those
under fourteen years will more or less halve. Those aged over sixty as a share of the population will pass the share in the United States in around 2030.83

  China’s working-age population has already started to decline in absolute terms, not just as a percentage of the population. The Chinese population will continue to be extremely large at least for the rest of the twenty-first century, but we are already at the stage where one of the motors of Chinese economic growth–population growth feeding into a growing workforce–is close to shutting down. Future economic growth will need to come from greater workforce productivity, and it is questionable whether this alone can deliver the kind of growth rates that have come to be expected from the Chinese economy. It is unclear how China will cope with the pension challenges. The lack of state old-age provision is generally seen as the driver of the high Chinese household savings rate. This was one of the great motors of financial instability leading to the 2007/2008 crash as vast quantities of Chinese savings found their way direct, or through banks, into the hands of over-borrowed Western governments and consumers.

  Chinese families have not only aged and become more urban: they have also become more male. The One Child Policy coupled with increased availability of sex tests for foetuses and selective abortions has resulted in a sex imbalance of 120 boys to 100 girls.84 Often selective abortions occur because of family pressure in what is still a fairly patriarchal society, especially in the countryside. As one woman put it: ‘I can’t really blame [my in-laws]; their view was a common one. We have a saying, “The better sons you have, the better life we can have,” because men have more strength and can carry out more work.’85 Such preference for males has a number of effects. First, it creates a marriage problem for a later period which, given the overall size of China’s population, cannot be fully resolved by importing brides other than on a massive scale. Secondly, it increases the replacement level of fertility: if women are less than half the population, then each woman must on average have a higher number of children for the population as a whole to reproduce itself. Thus a total fertility rate of around one and a half for China (according to the UN; China’s own figures suggest 1.2) is further below replacement level than it would be for countries without a sex imbalance. Beyond the issue of the male to female ratio, China is also a country where siblings are increasingly rare and cousins too have become rarer, resulting in a single child being indulged by one set of parents and often by two sets of grandparents. This is not the place to consider the psychological implications and their social ramifications, but in this respect China is hardly unique, with plenty of other countries in east Asia and south and east Europe experiencing similar or even higher levels of single children. Given the additional factor of the sex imbalance, or perhaps for specifically historic reasons, it is perhaps no surprise that the term ‘Little Emperor’ is of Chinese provenance.