Transcript

Host: This is “On The Line,” and I’m Eric Felten.

China continues to enjoy remarkable economic expansion. China’s gross domestic product is growing by over eleven percent a year. The country is on track to surpass Germany and become the world’s third-largest economy sometime in 2008.

Many commentators have addressed the challenges facing China in its effort to continue the fast pace of growth -- the strain of maintaining political authoritarianism while opening up to free markets, the need to acquire energy to fuel all those new factories, the environmental consequences of poorly regulated industrialization. Each has been recognized as a potential threat to China’s economy and stability. But what about the consequences of China’s coercive population program?

In 1979, the Communist regime instituted a one-child policy to restrict the number of Chinese births. As a result, China’s overall population is aging. Will a graying workforce be able to maintain the dynamism of China’s economy? What are the long-term consequences for China’s economy and society of its one-child rule? I’ll ask my guests: Nicholas Eberstadt, a Resident Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute; and joining us from our studio in New York, Gordon Chang, author of the book: “The Coming Collapse of China.” Welcome. Thanks for joining us today.

Nick Eberstadt, why don’t we start by just talking about what is the one-child policy? How does that work? Why did it get started?

Eberstadt: The one-child policy’s origins are traced back to the very beginning of China’s so-called turn to reform after the death of Mao. You’ll recall that in December 1978, a new direction for policy was established under Teng Hsiao-p’ing. At that very same time, a policy was promulgated of involuntary population control, known as the “one-child policy” quite broadly. This new approach in China attempted to deliberately regulate by the State the size of families in all of China. The one-child norm, as it was called, was established as the desirable total number of children that parents would be allowed to have. There were various penalties and restrictions for anyone who attempted to violate this norm. In practice, it hasn’t always meant an average of one child per couple. Demographic data suggests that China’s average childbearing now may be at the level of about one point seven or one point six. But, clearly, this program has been implemented in an attempt to drive down birth rates far below where they would be ordinarily.

Host: Gordon Chang, are you there in New York?

Chang: I am.

Host: How important or how significant in China has the one-child program been for the relationship between the people of China and the government of China?

Chang: In June of this year, we saw population riots in Guangxi province, and it was over the one-child policy. People were extremely concerned about the coercive nature of it and the onerous fines that were imposed on families that had violated the policy. And so we saw in about forty townships across the province people rioting, people storming government offices, burning police vehicles, fighting with armed police. So you can see that although the one-child policy has gotten some acceptance, nonetheless, it is a cause of instability, and we’re going to see this in the future, because Chinese people just don’t like this policy, and you can understand why. There’s forced abortions, forced sterilization, and there’s even state-sanctioned murder when newborns are killed. So it’s something that people just find so repulsive.

Host: Nick Eberstadt, how has the population control affected this relation between the government and people in China with forced abortion, forced sterilization? Are these practices consistent with the rest of the relationship, if you will, that citizens in China have with their government?

Eberstadt: Outsiders have probably paid far too little attention to the coercive nature of China’s population policies when they try to evaluate the overall new direction in China since 1978. Outsiders, foreign observers, pay a great deal of attention to the economic liberalization and a more pragmatic approach to commercial and international policies, to some of the relaxation of previous Maoist strictures about all sorts of relations with international media and information. If one looked only at those, one would have a much more progressive image, let’s say, of China than when one looks at family policy. Family policy intrudes upon the very most personal and private areas of life, and China’s intrusions there are truly totalitarian. It evokes, at least in my mind, Lenin’s old adage, “We recognize nothing private.” There’s nothing more private than family life, and this is the area of greatest and most forceful intrusion.

Host: Gordon Chang, what’s your sense of the tension between the effort to liberalize economically and to crack down on the number of births that a given woman can have in China?

Chang: I think it’s very difficult because China is a modernizing society, and because of that, we see all the tendencies there that we’ve seen in other places in Asia. I think that essentially the one-child policy has had some effect in reducing births, but generally speaking, the Chinese people probably would have reduced their fertility anyway. They were doing so in the 1970s before the adoption of the one-child policy, when fertility dropped from about five to three, and as Nick just said, it’s now below two, certainly sub-replacement. But I think when you have a modernizing society which has all of the same attributes that you’d see anyplace else in the world, it’s just inconsistent with what Nick talked about, which is a fundamentally totalitarian approach to people. There’s this gap between the Chinese people and their government. It’s going to get wider as China becomes more like the rest of the world. And that’s going to be a problem, because the Communist party is not going to want to give up the one-child policy because it is a measure of social control. There is this large bureaucracy that now has a stake in maintaining a policy, even though it’s really inconsistent with a modern society.

Host: Nick Eberstadt, let’s talk a little bit about this issue of how population growth tends to decline as countries modernize, and how does China’s population trends fit with countries that are further along that development curve, whether it’s the U.S. or Europe or Russia?

Eberstadt: We’ve seen a remarkable march to sub-replacement fertility all around the world, and, in fact, at this point, at least half of the world’s population lives in countries where childbearing patterns, if continued indefinitely without migration, would lead to a peaking and then an indefinite decline -- sub-replacement fertility. The overwhelming majority of people in sub-replacement fertility societies now don’t live in rich countries, in Europe, Japan, North America. They live in the developing world. We’ve seen really rapid drops, as Gordon mentioned, in fertility in a lot of areas that have no coercive family-planning programs, really down to almost unimaginably low levels. In Hong Kong today, for example, with no coercive population program, the childbearing patterns would imply less than one birth per woman per lifetime; in Singapore, just about one birth per woman per lifetime; in South Korea, barely over one birth per woman per lifetime. In China today, in big metropolises like Beijing, Shanghai, Tianjin, we also see about one birth per woman per lifetime. So, these levels are so low, so unfamiliar in the modern experience, in a peacetime, non-disaster setting, that it’s very hard to see where things go from here. It’s still new.

Host: Let me ask Gordon Chang. What do you think the impact on economies and societies are going to be of birth rates that low?

Chang: You know, we really don’t know because we haven’t seen this, but if we look at China, there are some patterns that are extremely disturbing. As Nick has pointed out in other contexts, China’s birth-sex ratio is about one hundred and twenty-three males to a hundred females, where the average around the world is about one hundred and five males to a hundred females. But if you look at second births, because some second births are authorized, the ratio is one hundred and fifty males to a hundred females. This is just unprecedented -- one might even say hideous -- but we don’t know what the consequences of this will be, because the population changes in China which we’ve seen elsewhere are occurring faster in China, and they’re also occurring in a society that has yet to develop. So, there are a lot of things which are brand-new, and we’re all going to be watching, because there are some very important dates coming up for China. In about a decade, the working-age population will pretty much peak, and probably the population will peak in about twenty years, maybe twenty-five years from now. So, that’s going to be very interesting to watch how this society which is moving at a very fast speed in general -- but we also see population trends moving much faster than anyplace else in the world.

Host: Nick Eberstadt, the Chinese government had its own National Population and Family Planning Commission looking at the one-child policy, and it did recognize that this issue of female-to-male birth rates was going to be a problem for China, and one of the things that the commission report found was that by the year 2020, there were going to be something like 30 million young men aged twenty to forty-five, thirty more million men than women, so thus men who wouldn’t be able to get married because there aren’t enough women. What does that imply or what does that suggest is going to happen in China?

Eberstadt: I guess we’re getting to the science-fiction portion of the program. We don’t know what this is going to mean. It’s hard for me to spin out a plausible scenario in which there are positive implications from the growth of an essentially unmarriageable male population. Some of the things that we know will happen that, in effect, there will be a bride price, as there is now in a marriage market, in effect. The bride price will be established not in the countryside but in places like Beijing and Shanghai and Guangzhou and other centers of affluence. This means that the countryside is going to be even further denuded of women so that the existing imbalances will tend to be even more extreme in the poorest and most rural sectors of China. You don’t have to read very much Chinese history to understand the implications of this for possible social stability.

Host: Gordon Chang, what’s your sense of that?

Chang: I think Nick is absolutely right. We may not know what’s going on, but, clearly, this isn’t going to be good. Today we see a lot of bride swapping, people taking women from other countries. There’s this trafficking in women. There’s prostitution. There’s all of these social ills that are aggravated by the gender imbalance, and it’s going to get worse because, as you point out, the number of excess males is going to increase over time. So, this is a great social experiment. It’s probably going to have very bad consequences for China as a whole. Perhaps the only thing that can happen is we see some sort of migration of women into China or men out of China, and that can have consequences not only for China, but, of course, for the region as a whole. So, this is not going to be a good story. There are very few happy endings to this, but we do know that the consequences will be severe.

Host: Nick Eberstadt, let’s turn and talk a little bit about the strictly economic issues. Some people are saying that a declining population ought not be any problem for China’s economy as long as worker productivity continues to rise, and worker productivity has been growing at a fast pace. To what extent does China’s economy depend on there being a sort of large pool of labor, and does the one-child policy affect that at all?

Eberstadt: China’s economy will need a new growth formula over the next generation because the demographic situation over the previous twenty-five years, over the twenty-five years up to now, is not going to be there to support that same growth formula. What do I mean by that? As you already noted, China’s working-age population is going to peak and then decline as far as the eye can see. Not only is labor-force size going to peak, but there’s going to be a big change in labor-force composition. Traditionally, it’s the youngest people, the fifteen- to twenty-four-year-olds, who have the highest level of educational attainment in Chinese society and other places. There’s going to be a really sharp fall-off of these fifteen- to twenty-four-year-olds in the future. All of China’s labor-force growth and all of the growth that’s going to keep it from shrinking even more is going to come in the category of workers fifty and older. It’s far from ideal for a modernizing society. With zero labor-force growth, it’s also going to be much more difficult to keep savings at the remarkably high levels that China has had, so you’re not going to have the same labor-force growth, you’re probably not going to have the same growth in capital investment, and with both of those factors in play, productivity may also be affected. So you see a lot of downward pressure on economic performance in the future.

Host: Gordon Chang, what’s your sense of the stresses on economic performance for China with a declining population?

Chang: What we call the Chinese miracle has been based on low-cost labor. We’ve had this great migration of hundreds of millions of people from the Chinese countryside to the cities of the coast and especially in the south, where we have this manufacturing explosion. And the thing about it is that it just can’t continue, because China, at some point in the not-too-distant future, is going to run out of people to supply this great migration. Also, of course, just the natural laws of economics means that wage rates are going to continue to increase. We’ve seen this over the last two or three years. It’s going to accelerate as the pool of labor decreases. So, this model that China has had and used quite successfully in the reform era, since 1978, is going to be completely outmoded. They’re going to have to do something different. They’re going to have to do things which they haven’t done before. So, this is not just a continuation of sort of policies that they can sort of make do. They’ve really got to change the entire way the economy is based. And that’s very difficult for China, especially given the constraints that it’s acting under today.

Host: Gordon Chang, is China in a position to be able to see its economic growth slow significantly? What happens politically and socially if you don’t have this kind of rapid growth continuing?

Chang: Many people say, and I believe that it is true, that the legitimacy of the Communist party is largely dependent on providing economic growth, because they have ditched their ideology, which was the initial basis for the Communist party ruling China. It’s very difficult to have a one-party state in a modern society with an open economy, so I think that the Communist party is going to face very severe tests of legitimacy, and this is going to have a number of effects. I believe the Communist party will not be able to hold on, given the trends that we see. Population policy is one of them. It’s going to be very, very difficult for the Communist party to maintain its role in an open society.

Host: Nick Eberstadt, we have just a little more than a minute left, but one of the other issues that the population question has raised is you have a society in which there is not a large government-supported pension system or Social Security net for the elderly that has relied heavily on familial care of aging parents. How is that going to affect Chinese society and the way people live if there aren’t the children to support aging parents?

Eberstadt: Eric, you’re touching upon a terribly important question that I’m afraid outsiders and even government officials in China haven’t given nearly enough attention to. As we look towards the next generation, China’s family structure is going to be fraying very rapidly. By 2025, my estimates suggest: something like one in three women turning sixty, being more or less retirement age, will have no living son. That’s up from about only six or seven percent just a few years back. No less importantly, the continuation of the one-child policy for another generation will mean the emergence of a kind of a four-two-one structure in big areas of the country -- four grandparents, two parents, one child, a child who has no siblings, no uncles and aunts, no cousins, only ancestors. China’s a low-trust society, and in the past, the business model has relied very heavily on Guangxi, on family relationships. How does the business model for modern China work when people are increasingly just atomized individuals and nuclearized families?

Host: I’m afraid that’s going to have to be the last word for today. We’re out of time, but I’d like to thank my guests: Nicholas Eberstadt at the American Enterprise Institute; and joining us from our studio in New York, Gordon Chang, author of the book: “The Coming Collapse of China.” Before we go, I’d like to invite you to send us your questions or comments. You can reach us through our website at www.voanews.com/ontheline. For “On The Line,” I’m Eric Felten.