China's Shrinking Population

My letter was featured at the top of the Letters column in the 28 January edition of the Financial Times.  But it's their headline, not mine. In my opinion, China's shrinking population is a Big problem; it is not a crisis.

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China’s shrink­ing pop­u­la­tion isn’t a prob­lem

Your edit­or­ial offers some obvi­ous sug­ges­tions for rais­ing China’s extremely low fer­til­ity rate (“A bet­ter way to address China’s pop­u­la­tion decline”, FT View, Janu­ary 22).

The UN fore­cast show­ing China’s pop­u­la­tion shrink­ing to less than half of its cur­rent size of 1.4bn by 2100 is mind-blow­ing, but this is just an extra­pol­a­tion of cur­rent fer­til­ity and mor­tal­ity trends. It is not a crisis requir­ing dra­matic and imme­di­ate meas­ures.

While it is hard to see today how China will sta­bil­ise its pop­u­la­tion in the next 75 years, it was not pos­sible 75 years ago to ima­gine the world we live in now. There is a com­bin­a­tion of gov­ern­ment policies, human beha­viour and tech­no­logy that should be able to raise China’s fer­til­ity rate close to the 2.1 (chil­dren per woman) replace­ment level by 2100.

The prob­lem with your edit­or­ial is that it seems to regard the proper pop­u­la­tion size of China to be 1.4bn people. In a world where cli­mate change is an exist­en­tial crisis, China along with every other coun­try would bene­fit from set­ting a tar­get pop­u­la­tion size in the medium term that is smal­ler. This tar­get would be adjus­ted up or down every five or 10 years as each coun­try gets a bet­ter under­stand­ing of its sus­tain­able pop­u­la­tion size. In the case of China, for example, a case can be made that China will be more pros­per­ous and even more of a global super­power if its pop­u­la­tion size is sta­bil­ised around 1bn souls in 2100.

Lex Rief­fel

Former Scholar, Brook­ings Insti­tu­tion; Former Eco­nom­ist, US Treas­ury Depart­ment, Wash­ing­ton, DC, US