China pierde su corona demográfica: la población desciende por primera vez en décadas

A barber works the street in Beijing while the city ages around him. For the first time since the early 1960s, China's population shrank last year—a fact that landed on social media like a stone into still water. When the National Bureau of Statistics announced on January 17 that the country had lost 850,000 people over the previous twelve months, some online commentators reached for words heavy with resignation: "We are the last generation." The phrase carried particular weight in China. Just months earlier, during Shanghai's weeks-long lockdown to contain COVID-19, an angry resident had hurled those same words at a police officer who warned that pandemic rule violations would haunt his family for three generations. The video went viral. Now, as the demographic reality sank in, people remembered.

China's population stood at 1.412 billion at year's end—down from 1.4128 billion at the start. The last time the country experienced such a decline was 1962, when millions died in the famine that followed Mao Zedong's Great Leap Forward. This time, the cause was not mass starvation. On December 7, China abandoned its nearly three-year "zero-COVID" policy, unleashing a wave of infections and deaths. By mid-January, authorities reported almost 60,000 COVID-related deaths since the policy's end, though demographers suspected the true figure was far higher. Yet even before the pandemic's final chapter, experts had been predicting that 2022 would mark the beginning of China's population decline. The reason was simpler and more troubling: fewer people wanted children.

For years, China had watched its workforce shrink and its population gray. In 2016, alarmed by these trends, the government abandoned its one-child policy and allowed two children per family. By 2021, it moved to three children—less a mandate than a plea. Having more would not be punished. But the relaxation, accompanied by cash subsidies, tax breaks, and extended parental leave, barely moved the needle. Last year, 9.56 million babies were born, nearly 10 percent fewer than in 2021. The global fertility rate—the average number of children a woman is expected to have in her lifetime at current birth rates—had fallen from 1.7 a decade ago to below 1.2 by 2021, according to UN figures. To maintain a stable population, that rate needs to hover around 2.1.

The reasons young Chinese were turning away from parenthood were economic and cultural both. The most immediate was cost. A Beijing think tank called the YuWa Demographic Research Institute reported last year that raising children in China, measured against per capita GDP, was more expensive than in several wealthy nations, including the United States. Only South Korea—which now has the world's lowest fertility rate and whose population has begun to decline—was a harder place to have a child. The institute warned that China's falling birth rate could inflict "grave negative impact" on the country's capacity for innovation and its "overall national strength." In January, the southern city of Shenzhen offered couples who had a third child subsidies totaling 19,000 yuan (about $2,800) over the child's first three years. Official estimates suggested this would cover only 8 percent of actual costs. Real estate prices remained punishing. Young couples typically delayed marriage until they could afford a home. The number of marriages had been falling since 2014.

Beyond economics lay a deeper shift in values. Women were rejecting the gender inequality embedded in marriage. Online, resentment simmered at the government's implicit message that women should become baby-making machines. Some young people, men and women alike, called themselves "leeks"—a term suggesting their bitter awareness that society viewed them cynically as something to be harvested and exploited for national or corporate ends. "Marrying and having little leeks can only damage my personal development and reduce my quality of life," one commenter wrote on Weibo after the population decline was announced. The elderly, meanwhile, faced a different anxiety. About 35 million Chinese were eighty or older; by 2050, that number was expected to more than quadruple. China's social safety net remained threadbare. Without massive government spending on elder care, families would bear the burden. Those who had chosen not to have children now worried: who would care for them?

The United Nations predicted that India's population would surpass China's in April. Some believed it had already happened. For a country that had held the title of world's most populous nation for centuries, the loss would sting—especially for nationalists. They might well wonder whether India, long overshadowed by China's meteoric rise, could harness its still-growing working-age population to catch up and eventually rival Chinese power. The demographic reckoning had only just begun.