China’s demographic prospects to 2040 and their implications: an overview

2020 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 66-91
Author(s):  
Nicholas Eberstadt

China’s population prospects over the decades ahead are largely shaped by pro-longed sub-replacement childbearing, likely to have been in effect for half a century by 2040. China’s population is on track to peak in the coming decade and to decline at an accelerating pace thereafter. Between 2015 and 2040, China’s population aged 50 and older is on course to increase by roughly one-quarter of a billion people; the under-50 population is set to decline by a roughly comparable magnitude. China is set to experience an extraordinarily rapid surge of population aging, with especially explosive population growth for the 65-plus group, even as its working-age population (conventionally defined as the age 15–64 group) progressively shrinks. Additionally, a number of demographic changes underway now constitute “wild cards” for China’s future: including (1) the impending “marriage squeeze” due to abnormal sex ratios at birth from the one-child policy era; (2) the problem of mass urbanisation under a system that consigns migrants in urban areas to an officially inferior status; and (3) the revolutionary changes in the Chinese family structure, which portend a dramatic departure from previous arrangements on which Chinese society and economy depended.

2016 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 145
Author(s):  
Wabilia Husnah

In the Chinese tradition that is influenced by the Confusianism, women are seen to have lower positions than men. In such a social system, the One-Child policy initiated by Deng Xiaoping since 1979 as a program to control the population, underpin the inferiority perception upon Chinese women. This article aims analyze the effects of the China’s One Child Policy towards Chinese women’s lives. It is important to understand how Chinese Women live after their lives have been affected by this Policy, in a good or a bad way. The results show that One Child Policy has negative impacts on Chinese women’s lives. It does not only lead to discrimination views againts women, but also indirectly violate a Chinese woman’s social, cultural and economic rights. Criminal cases overshadow the Chinese women, ranging from torture, neglect of children, abortion, illegal adoption, human trafficking, kidnapping, and even prostitution. On the other hand, all criminal cases makes women become “rare “ and “special” objects in China. Ironically, the scarcity of women in China actually cause the higher bargaining power of women. Now in their lives, Chinese women can go to school, work, choosing a spouse, or even file for divorce. Women’s social status in Chinese society has increased now. It means that women also obtain the positive impact of One-Child Policy.Keywords: women, confucianism, the one child policyAbstrakDalam tradisi Tiongkok yang dipengaruhi oleh Konfusianisme, perempuan selalu memiliki posisi lebih rendah daripada laki-laki. Dalam sistem sosial seperti ini, Kebijakan Satu Anak yang diperkenalkan oleh Deng Xiaoping sejak 1979 sebagai program untuk mengontrol populasi, turut mendukung inferioritas wanita Tiongkok. Artikel ini mencoba menganalisis efek Kebijakan Satu Anak di Tiongkok kepada kehidupan perempuan. Sangat penting untuk memahami bagaimana perempuan Tiongkok menjalani hidupnya pascakehidupannya telah dipengaruhi oleh kebijakan ini, dengan cara yang baik maupun yang buruk. Artikel ini berkesimpulan bahwa Kebijakan Satu Anak memiliki dampak negatif dalam kehidupan perempuan. Kebijakan ini tidak hanya menyebabkan pandangan diskriminatif terhadap perempuan, namun juga secara tidak langsung melanggar hak asasi dalam kehidupan sosial, kultural, dan ekonomi perempuan Tiongkok. Kasus kriminal pun membayangi perempuan Tiongkok, mulai dari penyiksaan, pengabaian anak perempuan, aborsi, adopsi ilegal, penjualan manusia, penculikan, bahkan prostitusi.Di lain pihak, semua kasus kriminal ini telah membuat perempuan menjadi objek yang “langka” dan “spesial” di Tiongkok. Ironisnya, kelangkaan perempuan di Tiongkok menyebabkan nilai tawar perempuan menjadi lebih tinggi. Sekarang, dalam kehidupan mereka, perempuan Cina bisa pergi ke sekolah, bekerja, memilih pasangan hidup, bahkan menuntut cerai. Status sosial perempuan dalam masyarakat Tiongkok pun sudah meningkat sekarang. Ini berarti, perempuan Tiongkok juga telah mendapatkan efek positif dari Kebijakan Satu Anak.Kata kunci: perempuan, konfusianisme, kebijakan satu anak


2019 ◽  
Vol 15 (10) ◽  
pp. 84
Author(s):  
Qian Tang

Culturally, commercial surrogacy has come to be viewed and criticized as immoral. Thus, many prefer it to be outlawed in China. At the same time, “to carry on the bloodline of the family” and having more children are also culturally celebrated in Chinese society.  The two cultural traditions, together with the implementation and gradual revocation of the one-child policy in the 21st century, have led to a dilemma modern Chinese parents are facing: more and more couples feel morally obligated to have more children after the revocation of the one-child policy but are too old to naturally reproduce. With the vagueness of regulations around commercial surrogacy in China, more couples have resorted to surrogacy in the past decade, which currently functions in a grey market. Within the unregulated market, both moral and legal concerns emerge. Through analysis of public opinion, litigations, as well as court rulings on surrogacy in China, this paper asks the following question: To what extent does the societal attitude in China on surrogacy align with that of litigations and court rulings on surrogacy in China? This paper hopes to provide insight into the Chinese surrogacy markets and responses from different actors within the process of surrogacy, leading to broader questions such as: How can litigations in China on surrogacy be improved? How can we ensure rights of all actors in a transaction concerning surrogacy? Should surrogacy be permissible at all? These are relevant questions relating to the structural violence prevalent in the seemingly peaceful modern China and have an impact on the direction of future feminist studies.


Author(s):  
Mengqi Yang ◽  
Mark W. Rosenberg ◽  
Jie Li

China is facing serious population aging issues because of many unintended consequences of the economic reforms that began in the 1980s and with social policies such as the “one child” policy. Understanding the spatial distribution of the health status of older people has attracted more and more attention in many countries, including China. By employing descriptive analysis, this study uses data from the Chinese Population Censusand Statistical Year Bookto explore the health inequalities of older people at the national level. Based on the Getis-Ord Gi*, this study finds that the uneven spatial distribution of socio-economic status results in health inequalities for older people at the national level. The geographic distribution of life expectancy was correlated with a number of important demographic, socio-economic, and environmental variables. For further research, investigations should be conducted among individuals at micro-geographic scales.


2022 ◽  
pp. 097491012110670
Author(s):  
Yuan-Ho Hsu ◽  
Hiroshi Yoshida ◽  
Fengming Chen

The Chinese economy had an extraordinary average GDP growth rate of 8.50 percent from 1980 to 2018. However, the implementation of one-child policy in the late 1970s has depressed the total fertility rate to below the replacement rate since 1992. China thus experienced an increasing composition of older populations in the past three decades, which puts pressure on Chinese economic growth and makes its eye-catching economic growth potentially unsustainable. This study develops an overlapping generations (OLG) model to investigate the impacts of this demographic transition in the Chinese economy. This study conducts six policy reform exercises to examine measures that could improve the sustainability of fiscal and pension systems. The simulation results indicate that a mild tax increase on either wage income or consumption does not improve the fiscal stance but creates distortionary effects on saving and consumption behaviors. Of the pension reform measures considered, the combination of extending the mandatory retirement age and cutting the replacement ratio offers the most significant improvement to pension sustainability. However, increasing the contribution rate of the working-age population has the least effect on pension sustainability and a noticeable distortionary effect on the consumption ratio and saving rate.


Author(s):  
Martin K. Whyte

For centuries, China has had the world’s largest population, although it will soon lose that title to India. When Mao Zedong and his colleagues seized national power in 1949, they were not sure how many Chinese there were (the first modern census was not conducted until 1953), and Mao initially argued that having a large and rapidly increasing population was a blessing for China, rather than a curse. However, the challenges of managing such a large and poor country soon changed the official view, and during some intervals in the 1950s and 1960s, China carried out voluntary family planning campaigns to try to reduce the birth rate. However, those campaigns were largely ineffective, with the only notable decline in fertility during those decades produced by the Great Leap Forward–induced mass famine of 1959–1961, not family planning efforts. As of 1970 the projected number of babies the average Chinese mother would have in her lifetime (termed the total fertility rate [TFR]) was still close to six. (China’s cities, where less than 20 percent of the population lived at the time, is an exception to these generalizations, with the 1960s family planning campaign playing some role in reducing the urban TFR in 1970 to 3.2.) Early in the 1970s, when Mao was still in charge (he died in 1976), China made a dramatic shift from voluntary family planning to mandatory birth limits under the slogan, “later (marriage ages), longer (birth intervals), and fewer” (births—no more than two babies for urban families and three for rural families). The “later, longer, fewer” campaign was enforced very strictly, using many of the coercive measures that later became notorious during the one-child campaign, and China’s fertility rate fell dramatically, to less than three per mother by the end of the decade. Despite this success, in 1980 the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) launched an even more demanding and coercive campaign that attempted for the next thirty-five years to limit Chinese families to having only one child. The fertility rate actually went up in the early 1980s but then began to decline again, reaching subreplacement fertility (TFR = 2.1) by the early 1990s. Most experts estimate that China’s TFR fluctuated in the 1.4 to 1.6 range between 2000 and 2015, although some analysts have calculated higher figures, and others lower. The CCP in late 2015 decided to end the one-child limit, with Chinese families since January 1, 2016 allowed to have two children (but no more, at least as of 2019). Debates about the controversial one-child policy have spawned a large literature that examines many issues, including the reasons the CCP launched this campaign, how effective it was in reducing birth rates further, what human rights abuses resulted, how child-rearing and children have been affected, and in what ways Chinese society and the people of China have benefited or have been harmed by the demographic distortions produced by mandatory, state-enforced birth limits.


Author(s):  
William Jankowiak ◽  
Yuezhu Sun

Across different time periods and regions the Chinese family displays a variety of forms, functions, and relationship dynamics. The pre-1949-era Chinese family was an economic, political, and jural unit. This type of Chinese family was organized in accordance with patrilocal residence and patrilineal descent and based in patriarchal authority. Elderly males, especially fathers, had authority over the entire family. Socialist policies (1949–19?) that created the hukou system (household registration system) resulted in profound rural-urban differences. Urban areas become the centers of industry, commerce, and political governance, whereas rural areas, which, until the 1980s, made up 80 percent of Chinese society, engaged primarily in agriculture. Given these institutional changes, Chinese families began to diverge along urban-rural lines. The rural Chinese family continued to carry on more or less the patriarchal tradition whereby parents arranged marriages, women were the “inferior” gender, and daily life was largely improvised. In contrast, urban areas were divided into self-contained work units (danwei) that strived to combine residence with employment. In the work unit era (1950s–1990s) the urban family was organized in accordance with neolocal residence rules and the de facto practices of bilateral descent, or equally valuing the husband’s and wife’s families. Moreover, males’ authority, especially fathers’, was eliminated. In post-reform China (1980s–early 21st century), owing in part to China’s modernization policies, such as dismantling of the work unit and institution of the one-child policy, the Chinese family was gradually transformed. Research on the transformation is ongoing and, in the early 21st century, is in its initial stages. So far, no firm consensus has been reached. In China, family increasingly serves as an umbrella term for an array of connective relationships. The Chinese family evolves not only across historical periods; like all families, it also goes through different developmental stages, ranging from courtship, to marriage, to parenting, to eldercare. The sections follow the developmental sequence of the Chinese family, covering the time period from pre-reform to early-21st-century China.


2015 ◽  
Vol 221 ◽  
pp. 143-160 ◽  
Author(s):  
Miriam Driessen

AbstractBy shedding light on the concept of the fangnu (mortgage slave), this paper explains why young men from China migrate to Ethiopia. Young, educated, employed and ambitious, the fangnu is a modern type of slave who is said to have sold his freedom to the bank for the purpose of buying a house. For young men coming from a rural background, temporary migration offers a chance to earn the money so badly needed for a down payment or repayments on mortgage loans for their newly bought residential property. I argue that the fangnu is the child of a Chinese society characterized by high social mobility as well as a growing demographic imbalance owing to the one-child policy. In this context, a house – or in urban China, commonly an apartment in a high-rise building – is increasingly seen as a marker of status, especially in the marriage market. Although the Chinese do not demand a bride price, the hunfang (marriage house) has become the norm in urban Chinese society. Unable to rely on the financial support of their kin, young Chinese men from the countryside migrate to earn the starting capital needed to cope with the socio-economic pressures of settling in the city.


Spatium ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 23-31
Author(s):  
Marijana Pantic

The majority of European countries share challenges related to demographic change. A decline in the total population size and population aging have already spread from rural to some urban areas. The case of Serbia is no exception. The focus of this article is the parameters of demographic change analysed particularly for larger (cities) and smaller (towns) urban settlements - population size, birth rate, rate of natural increase, average age of first-time mothers, total fertility rate, share of the young and elderly population, average population age, and developing demographic trends. The paper also stresses the necessity to use other definitions for a ?city? than the one used in legislation or statistical reports, by showing the extent to which results might differ depending on the chosen definition. One of the definitions used in this paper relies on a slightly adapted division of settlements used in statistical reporting, while the other is based on the Law on Local Self-Government (2007), the Law on the Territorial Organization of the Republic of Serbia (2007) and functional urban areas defined by the Spatial Plan of the Republic of Serbia. Cities and towns are observed from the perspective of their spatial distribution; therefore, each parameter is considered at the settlement, regional and district level.


2020 ◽  
Vol 52 (2) ◽  
pp. 269-288 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel C. Mattingly

How do authoritarian states implement policies that curb individual freedom? In this article, I examine the implementation of the One Child Policy in China, which has had an enormous impact on Chinese society and yet has received little attention from political scientists. I argue that the success or failure of the policy hinged on using frontline bureaucrats to infiltrate society. Important theories suggest that bureaucratic penetration may increase bureaucrats' responsiveness to citizens and decrease implementation of the law. Drawing on a unique dataset and natural experiment, I show the opposite to be true in China: a one standard deviation increase in bureaucratic penetration lowers over-quota births by 2 to 7 percentage points. There is suggestive evidence that bureaucrats leverage their social embeddedness to control society. The article shows how frontline bureaucrats beyond the police, military, or ruling party are key agents of repression and political control.


2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (15) ◽  
pp. 6736
Author(s):  
Ong Heo ◽  
Yeowon Yoon ◽  
Jinung Do

When underground space requires excavation in areas below the water table, the foundation system suffers from buoyancy, which leads to the uplifting of the superstructure. A deep foundation system can be used; however, in cases where a hard layer is encountered, high driving forces and corresponding noises cause civil complaints in urban areas. Micropiles can be an effective alternative option, due to their high performance despite a short installation depth. Pressurized grouting is used with a packer to induce higher interfacial properties between micropile and soil. In this study, the field performance of micropiles installed using gravitational grouting or pressure-grouted using either a geotextile packer or rubber packer was comparatively evaluated by tension and creep tests. Micropiles were installed using pressure grouting in weak and fractured zones. As results, the pressure-grouted micropiles showed more stable and stronger behaviors than ones installed using the gravitational grouting. Moreover, the pressure-grouted micropile installed using the rubber packer showed better performance than the one using the geotextile packer.


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