case study overpopulation in china

• Future Perfect

How China came to regret its one-child policy

Why the world’s most populous country (for now) is experiencing population decline.

by Bryan Walsh

More than 60 years ago, something rare happened in China: More people died than were born .

That estimated one-year drop in population was due to the Great Famine, perhaps the worst human-made catastrophe in history , resulting in the deaths of as many as 45 million people . Combined with a short but drastic drop in the birthrate , China shrank by roughly 700,000 people between 1960 and 1961. Once Chinese leader Mao abandoned the forced industrialization policies that led to the Great Famine, however, China’s fertility rate quickly rebounded and deaths fell, and today more than twice as many Chinese are alive as were in 1961.

But now, for the first time since that year, China’s population is again shrinking. And this time, it’s not likely to rebound — not soon, and perhaps not ever. On Tuesday, the Chinese government reported that 9.56 million people were born in China last year, while 10.41 million people had died. You don’t have to be a demographer to know what that means — all you need to do is subtract.

China may have already lost its position as the world’s most populous country to a still-surging India. While Covid played some role in those numbers — though how much is hard to say, given Beijing’s lack of transparency around the full toll of the pandemic — this isn’t like the early 1960s. China’s population drop isn’t the result of a single, acute crisis, but years of policy decisions and cultural and economic shifts that have led this nation of 1.4 billion people to where it is today: facing an aging and shrinking population for the foreseeable future.

This doesn’t mean that China as a country or as a world power is locked into irreversible decline. What’s happening in China is happening at varying speeds in most countries, as the world — with the exception of still-young regions like sub-Saharan Africa — completes the transition from high fertility to low, with two-thirds of the planet living in nations that do not have enough children to replace their population through reproduction alone.

Many of these demographic forces are positive, the result of economic growth that has given people, especially women, the freedom to live the life they want, including one with fewer or even no children. But it does mean — as Wang Feng, a sociologist at the University of California Irvine who specializes in Chinese demographics, told the New York Times — “in the long run, we are going to see a China the world has never seen.”

As much as China’s aging and eventual shrinking was a demographic inevitability as it became richer and more modern, the particular speed at which that transition is occurring, and the particular challenges that pace will present, are Beijing’s own doing.

Demographic regrets

In 2015, the Chinese government did something it almost never does: It admitted it made a mistake, at least implicitly.

The ruling Communist Party announced that it was ending its historic and coercive one-child policy, allowing all married couples to have up to two children.

The one-child policy had helped lead to the mother of all demographic dividends, the term for the economist boost created when a country’s birth and death rates both decline . Between 1980 and 2015, China’s working-age population grew from 594 million to a little over 1 billion . China’s dependency ratio — the total young and elderly population relative to the working-age population — fell from over 68 percent in 1980 to less than 38 percent in 2015, which meant more workers for every non-working person.

Having more young workers who had fewer young or old dependents to care for was the fuel in China’s economic rocket engine . But no fuel burns forever, and over the past decade, hundreds of millions of Chinese have hit retirement age , with a plummeting number of young people to replace them. So the slogans went from “Having only one child is good” to “One is too few, while two are just right.”

How did the Chinese people react? Not by having more children. By 2021, China’s total fertility rate (that is, the number of expected births per woman over the course of their reproductive lifetime) had fallen to just 1.15 , nearly a full child below the replacement rate of 2.1. (That’s two to replace each parent, plus a slight extra to make up for children who might die before they reach adulthood — demographics is a dismal science .) For the people of China, if not the government, it seems two was not just right.

Total births in China have now fallen for six straight years, and the United Nations’ middle-of-the-road projections find that by the end of the century, the country’s total population will have fallen below 800 million people, a level it hasn’t been since the late 1960s . Unlike then, when the median Chinese was in their highly productive early 20s , that smaller China will be far older.

That’s not, on its face, a bad thing — population aging is a result not just of fewer babies, but of people surviving infancy and childhood at higher rates and living longer lives. ( Life expectancy in China has risen from a shocking 33 year s in 1960 to 78 today — higher, in fact, than the far richer US .) But with fewer young workers and more elderly dependents, it will be far more difficult to keep China’s economic engine humming. Chinese economic growth in the last three months of the year fell to just 2.9 percent , its lowest record level since Mao’s death in 1976. That was largely a result of the double whammy of months of Covid lockdowns followed by widespread outbreaks when those restrictions were suddenly lifted, but it also presages a broader and longer-term slowdown.

Why China’s aging challenge is so grave

Just about every developed country, the US very much included, will need to grapple with the effects of an aging population, but China faces particular challenges.

For all its power and aggregate wealth — it is by most accounts the world’s second-largest economy — on a per capita basis, it’s still a middle-income country at best . To reach anything like a per capita parity with a country like the UK, let alone the US, would require years more of high-powered economic growth that will be increasingly difficult to pull off in an aging nation. In the end, China could get old before it gets rich .

And if China can’t grow faster, the elderly will bear the brunt of the cost. A 2013 study estimated that nearly a quarter of China’s seniors live below the poverty line , and the country — like many others in East Asia, including richer nations like Japan and South Korea — has little in the way of old-age support . That was less of a problem when older adults could count on being taken care of by their children, but decades of the one-child policy has left an inverted pyramid known as “4-2-1,” with four grandparents and two parents depending on one child.

As more and more young Chinese choose to go without children altogether — pursuing the “double income, no kids” lifestyle — more and more elderly Chinese will have no familial support whatsoever, with one survey projecting 79 million childless older adults in China by 2050. And those trends will reinforce each other — younger Chinese are already citing the burden of caring for elderly parents as one reason to have fewer or no children.

It’s worth repeating that this state of affairs was, for the most part, inevitable. The fertility transition — the drastic drop in fertility as countries become richer — is as close to an iron law as demography has. There is no foreseeable situation where China could have developed as it has if its mid-1960s fertility rates of six to seven children per woman had continued, and much of that drop was due to improvements in infant mortality that gave parents confidence their children would live to adulthood.

But while the ultimate destination of a demographic transition may be largely set, how fast you get there matters a lot — and years of the one-child policy, well past the point at which it made economic or demographic sense, have hurt China’s ability to manage that transition.

More out of less

Beyond ending the one-child policy, the Chinese government has begun offering financial inducements to couples to have more children, following in the footsteps of other countries that have faced demographic deficits.

Shanghai will give mothers 60 days of additional parental leave, while Shenzhen has joined other Chinese cities in giving subsidies — $1,476 in its case — to couples who have a third child. But don’t expect these moves to make a major difference in birth rates. While such financial incentives might prompt couples to have a child earlier than they had planned, there’s little evidence the programs can convince a childless couple to have a kid, or lastingly increase birthrates.

Instead, China will need to focus on increasing worker productivity and the benefits of automation, while improving its social safety net, in order to manage its demographic transition as smoothly as possible. It won’t be easy — while it’s advancing rapidly in AI and its manufacturing know-how is top-notch, one of China’s biggest advantages is still its large pool of young workers. That pool is drying up, though, while the country lacks the resources of already old neighbors like Japan that could help support its growing elderly population.

But a worse outcome might be if China’s authoritarian government tries to compel its citizens to have more children with the same heavy hand it once used to prevent them from doing just that. Already, growing discrimination against China’s LGBTQ citizens is being framed as a response to the country’s supposed demographic crisis .

A better future would be one where Beijing does everything it can to support the demographic choices its citizens want to make — and, in doing so, provides a more solid foundation for those Chinese who actively want to have more children. That will take plenty of work. The rising costs of having a family, the Darwinian competition for educational resources and jobs, and the lingering effects of years of harsh Covid crackdowns have left China’s young people in a state of existential crisis . As one young Shanghai protester told coronavirus workers in a video that went viral last year, “we are the last generation.” It’s up to the Chinese government to ensure that’s not the case.

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China’s Population Destiny: The Looming Crisis

Subscribe to the china bulletin, feng wang feng wang former brookings expert, professor - sociology, university of california, irvine, professor - fudan university in shanghai.

September 30, 2010

• 18 min read

Content from the Brookings-Tsinghua Public Policy Center is now archived . Since October 1, 2020, Brookings has maintained a limited partnership with Tsinghua University School of Public Policy and Management that is intended to facilitate jointly organized dialogues, meetings, and/or events.

Observers of China’s rise, when assessing the implications for global peace and prosperity, have largely focused their attention on the country’s economy, on its energy and resource needs, on the environmental consequences of its rapid expansion, and on the nation’s military buildup and strategic ambitions. Yet, underlying all these dazzling changes and monumental concerns is a driving force that has been seriously underappreciated: China’s changing demography.

With 1.33 billion people, China today remains the world’s most populous country. In a little more than a decade, however, it will for the first time in its long history give up this title, to India. But, even more important, China’s demographic landscape has in recent decades been thoroughly redrawn by unprecedented population changes. These changes will in the future drive the country’s economic and social dynamics, and will redefine its position in the global economy and the society of nations. Taken together, the changes portend a gathering crisis.

One number best characterizes China’s demographics today: 160 million. First, the  country has more than 160 million internal migrants who, in the process of seeking better lives, have supplied abundant labor for the nation’s booming economy. Second, more than 160 million Chinese are 60 years old or older. Third, more than 160 million

Chinese families have only one child, a product in part of the country’s three-decade-old policy limiting couples to one child each. (The total populations of countries like Japan and Russia do not reach 160 million; Bangladesh’s population is roughly equal to that number.)

But the relative size of these three Chinese population groups of 160 million will soon change. As a result of the country’s low fertility rates since the early 1990s, China has already begun experiencing what will become a sustained decline in new entrants into its labor force and in the number of young migrants. The era of uninterrupted supplies of young, cheap Chinese labor is over. The size of the country’s population aged 60 and above, on the other hand, will increase dramatically, growing by 100 million in just 15 years (from 200 million in 2015 to over 300 million by 2030). The number of families with only one child, which is also on a continued rise, only underscores the challenge of supporting the growing numbers of elderly Chinese.

Why should one care about these demographic changes, and why should the overused label “crisis” be attached to such slow-moving developments? The aging of China’s population represents a crisis because its arrival is imminent and inevitable, because its ramifications are huge and long-lasting, and because its effects will be hard to reverse.

Political legitimacy in China over the past three decades has been built around fast economic growth, which in turn has relied on a cheap and willing young labor force. An aging labor force will compel changes in this economic model and may make political rule more difficult. An aging population will force national reallocations of resources  and priorities, as more funds flow to health care and pensions.

Indeed, increased spending obligations created by the aging of the population will not only shift resources away from investment and production; they will also test the government’s ability to meet rising demands for benefits and services. In combination, a declining labor supply and increased public and private spending obligations will result in an economic growth model and a society that have not been seen in China before. Japan’s economic stagnation, closely related to the aging of its population, serves as a ready reference.

China’s demographic changes will also have far-reaching implications for the world economy, which has relied on China as a global factory for the past two decades and more. The changes may also affect international peace and security. An aging population is likely to lead to a more peaceful society. But at the same time, the projected 20 to 30 million Chinese men who will not be able to find wives, due to the country’s decades-long imbalanced sex ratio at birth, may constitute a large group of unhappy, dissatisfied people. Claims that these future bachelors will harbor criminal intentions and a propensity to form invading forces against China’s neighbors are unsubstantiated and overblown. Still, the fact that such a large number of Chinese men will not be able to marry is clearly a serious social concern, and the issue should not be neglected.

What also makes China’s demographic future a looming crisis is that, so far, the changes have largely taken place under the radar. This is so in part because China still has the world’s largest population and its population is still growing. It is also due in part to a continued tendency in China and elsewhere to believe that overpopulation is the root cause of all problems. Hence China’s hesitation, even reluctance, to phase out its one child policy—an important cause of the country’s demographic challenges.

Something little understood by the outside world, and indeed to the Chinese government and public, is that today’s demographic changes mark only the beginning of a crisis that will be increasingly difficult to mitigate if action is not taken soon.

China has entered a new demographic era. Its mortality rate has dropped to a level not very different from that of the developed countries. It fertility has dropped to a level lower than that of many developed countries, including the United States, Britain, and France—indeed, it is among the lowest in the world. And China has witnessed the largest flow of internal migrants in world history, resulting in an urbanization process that is of comparable historical proportions. These forces combined have created a population that is rapidly aging and rapidly urbanizing.

China’s mortality over the past three decades has been on a path of continuous decline. Despite concerns over the collapse of the rural collective public health care system in the 1980s and increasing incidents and reports of air pollution, food poisoning, and public health crises (such as the SARS epidemic in 2003), the Chinese population’s overall health has continued to improve with the spread of affluence. The latest numbers based on nationally representative surveys put life expectancy at birth at 74.5 years for females and 70.7 for males, levels that approach those of the world’s more developed countries. Longer life expectancy means more old people in the population and an increasing demand for services and expenditures related to health care. But more important than increased life expectancy in defining China’s new demographic era—and determining

China’s demographic future— is declining fertility. For nearly two decades, the average number of children a couple is expected to produce has been less than 2, recently falling as low as approximately 1.5. Such a number is below the replacement level (the level required for a population to maintain its size in the long run).

China’s low fertility, however, is a fact that has been established as real only relatively recently, in part because of problems associated with deterioration in the country’s birth registration and statistical data collection system, and in part because of the government’s reluctance to acknowledge declining fertility. The current period of fertility decline began quietly and remained unnoticed for almost a decade. When the first signs that fertility had dropped below the replacement level were reported in the early 1990s, they were quickly dismissed in the context of what was believed to be widespread underreporting of births.

By the turn of the twenty-first century, China’s demographic transition could no longer be doubted. Today the national fertility level is around 1.5 and possibly lower. In the country’s more developed regions, fertility has been even lower for more than a decade—barely above 1 child per couple, a level that rivals the lowest fertility rates in the world.

The ripple effects of fertility decline have begun to emerge everywhere in China these days. In 1995, primary schools nationwide enrolled 25.3 million new students. By 2008, that number had shrunk by one-third, to only 16.7 million. In 1990, China had over 750,000 primary schools. By 2008, due to the combined effects of fertility decline and educational reforms, the number of primary schools nationwide had fallen to about 300,000. In a country where getting into a university has always been a matter of intense competition and anxiety, the number of applicants to universities has begun to decline in the past couple of years.

The challenges posed by these demographic changes will be more daunting in China than in other countries that have experienced mortality and fertility declines. The reason for this does not lie in the size of China’s population, but in the speed with which the People’s Republic has completed its transition from high to low birth and death rates. China has achieved in 50 years—increasing life expectancy from the 40s to over 70—what it took many European countries a century to accomplish. In 2000, when the ratio of income levels in the United States and China was still about 10 to 1, female life expectancy in China was only about five years below that of the United States (75 versus 80). China, in other words, completed its mortality-decline transition while per capita income was still at a very low level.

Major fertility reduction in China took even less time. In just one decade, from 1970 to 1980, the total fertility rate (TFR) was more than halved, from 5.8 to 2.3, a record unmatched elsewhere. (TFR extrapolates an average woman’s fertility over her lifetime from a society’s fertility rate in a given year.) In contrast to Western European countries, where it took 75 years or longer to reduce TFR from around 5 to the replacement level, in China a similar decline took less than two decades. As a result, in 2008, China’s rate of population growth was only 5 per thousand, down from over 14 per thousand in 1990 and 25 per thousand in 1970. Such a compressed process of demographic transition means that, compared with other countries in the world, China will have far less time to prepare its social and economic infrastructure to deal with the effects of a rapidly aging opulation.

And for the People’s Republic the challenge is all the more difficult because the country is undergoing an economic upheaval at the same time that its population is rapidly changing. While China continues to transform itself from an agrarian to an industrial and post-industrial society and from a planned to a market-based economy, it not only will need, for example, to provide health care and pensions for a rapidly growing elderly population that has been covered under government-sponsored programs. It also will need to figure out how to expand the scope of coverage to those who were not covered under the old system.

Reversal of fortunes

China’s astonishing economic expansion over the past two decades took place within a highly, almost uniquely favorable demographic context. But the country is at the end of reaping economic gains from a favorable population age structure.

Economic growth relies on a number of basic factors. Aside from institutional arrangements, these include capital, technology, markets, and labor. In China’s case, foreign direct investment, especially from overseas Chinese, brought not only capital but also technology and management know-how. Foreign consumer demand, especially in the United States (fueled first by the dot-com boom and then by the housing and stock market boom), supplied a ready market for China’s export industries. But capital, technology, and overseas markets alone would not have made China a global factory in the last two decades of the twentieth century. The country’s economic boom relied on another crucial factor: a young and productive labor force.

Such a labor force, a non-repeatable historical phenomenon resulting from a rapid demographic transition, was fortuitously present as the Chinese economy was about to take off. The large birth cohorts of the 1960s and 1970s were at their peak productive ages when the boom began. This good fortune, measured as a demographic dividend, is estimated to have accounted for 15 to 25 percent of China’s economic growth between 1980 and 2000.

The term “demographic dividend” refers to gains (or losses) in per capita income brought about by changes in a population’s age structure. It is expressed as the ratio of the growth rate of effective producers to the growth rate of effective consumers. It resembles but is not the same as the commonly used “dependency ratio,” which is the ratio of the dependent-age population (such as 0–14 years old and 60 and above) to the productive-age population (such as 15–59 or 20–59). The demographic dividend, unlike the dependency ratio, takes into account people in the productive age cohort who are not contributing to income generation (for example, because they are unemployed) as well as those within the dependent age range who generate income (such as from after-retirement earnings).

For the most part, China has exhausted its demographic fortune as measured by the demographic dividend—that is, by the changing support ratio between effective producers and effective consumers. Between 1982 and 2000, China enjoyed an average annual rate of growth in the support ratio of 1.28 percent. Using the World Bank’s figure of per capita annual income growth during this same period, 8.4 percent, we find that the demographic dividend accounted for 15 percent of China’s economic growth. Today, the net gain due to favorable demographic conditions has been reduced to only one-fifth of the average level maintained from 1982 to 2000.

By 2013 China’s demographic dividend growth rate will turn negative: That is, the growth rate of net consumers will exceed the growth rate of net producers. Starting in 2013, such a negative growth rate will reduce the country’s economic growth rate by at least half a percentage point per year. Between 2013 and 2050, China will not fare demographically much better than Japan or Taiwan, and will fare much worse than the United States and France.

As a result of China’s very low fertility over the past two decades, the abundance of young, inexpensive labor is soon to be history. The number of workers aged 20 to 29 will stay about the same for the next few years, but a precipitous drop will begin in the middle of the coming decade. Over a 10-year period, between 2016 and 2026, the size of the population in this age range will be reduced by about one-quarter, to 150 million from 200 million. For Chinese aged 20 to 24, that decline will come sooner and will be more drastic: Over the next decade, their number will be reduced by nearly 50 percent, to 68 million from 125 million.

Such a drastic decline in the young labor force will usher in, for the first time in recent Chinese history, successive shrinking cohorts of labor force entrants. It will also have profound consequences for labor productivity, since the youngest workers are the most recently educated and the most innovative.

As the young population declines, domestic demand for consumption may weaken as well, since young people are also the most active consumers of everything from wedding banquets to new cars and housing units. And because China is a major player in the global economy, the impact of the country’s demographic changes will not be limited by its borders.

Fragile families, fragile society

So far, observers of China’s demographic changes have focused most of their attention on consequences at the aggregate or societal level: the size of the labor force, of the elderly population, and of the number of men who will not be able to marry. Worries at this level of analysis generally relate to the country’s future economic growth and social stability. But the challenges that China will face as a result of its changing demographics go far beyond economic growth and other aggregate concerns.

China’s unprecedented population control policy, the one-child policy, turned 30 this year. It has forcefully altered the family and kin structure of hundreds of millions of Chinese families. And families, in addition to their other functions, are first and foremost the primary source of support for dependents, the young and the elderly.

Because the population control policy has been in place for so long, many Chinese couples, especially in the more affluent urban areas, have had only one child. Current government policy still requires nearly two-thirds of all families to have no more than one child per couple. Although policy implementation has varied over time and across different regions, almost all urban Chinese couples have observed the one-child rule for the past three decades. With the current birth control policy in place amid continued low levels of fertility, by the middle of the current century, half of Chinese women aged 60 are projected to have had only one child. This is a development unprecedented in both China’s and the world’s history.

Although the full extent of the one-child policy’s societal consequences will not be known until later, it is safe to predict that the social costs that China will need to pay, especially in terms of family support for aging parents, will be exceedingly high. In no small part due to implementation of the one-child policy, China by 2005 had accumulated nearly 160 million only children aged 0 to 30. That number has further grown in the past five years. These figures imply that over 40 percent of Chinese households have only one child.

That such a huge share of Chinese families have only one child, despite the fact that many parents would have liked to have more, presents serious economic and social risks for individuals, and for the whole society. Fragile families mean a fragile society. The tragic deaths of thousands of only children in the earthquake of May 2008 in Sichuan province highlighted the potential for extreme misfortune.

More generally, ever more Chinese parents in the future will not be able to count on their children in their old age. And many parents will face a most unfortunate reality: outliving their children and therefore dying alone. Given the current mortality schedule, the likelihood that an 80-year-old Chinese man will see his 55-year-old son die before he does is 6 percent. Because women live longer, the likelihood that an 80-year-old woman will outlive her 55-year-old son is 17 percent.

Due to these odds, and the large numbers of Chinese parents who have only one child, the sheer number of elderly people living without any children is significant and growing. This creates grim prospects for many Chinese who hope in old age to rely on their children for emotional and physical if not financial support.

Prospects and policy options

Because of China’s continued mortality decline, and especially its sustained fertility decline to below replacement levels, the country has effectively entered an era of population decline. China’s current TFR of 1.5 implies that, in the long run, each future generation will be 25 percent smaller than the one preceding it. China’s population is still growing, albeit very slowly, because the country still has a relatively young age structure, which produces more births than deaths, even though on average each couple has fewer than two children. Had it not been for China’s relatively young age structure, the population would have begun declining in the early 1990s, almost two decades ago. The current growth, in other words, is a result of population momentum.

The same force of momentum will work in the opposite direction soon. Given current mortality and fertility rates, and with a population age structure that is growing increasingly older, the number of deaths will soon exceed the number of births. China’s population is likely to peak less than 15 years from now, below a maximum of 1.4 billion. After that will come a prolonged, even indefinite, population decline and a period of accelerated aging.

Even if China can restore fertility to replacement level within 10 years after the country reaches its population peak, population will still exhibit a decline nearly half a century long, with a net population loss of over 200 million, if not more. The median age of the Chinese population, at its peak, could be as high as 50 years.

China is by no means unique in experiencing below-replacement fertility. In the past decade, below-replacement fertility has become a new global reality. Whereas in some parts of the world high fertility rates continue to pose severe challenges to women and children’s health, for more than half of the world’s population, below replacement fertility is now the norm.

In Europe, North America, and East Asia, prolonged below-replacement fertility has already set in motion a negative population growth momentum. In the most extreme cases, such as Italy and Japan, population could be reduced by half in as few as 40 years or so if current rates of reproduction persist. A gradual but substantial reduction in population, especially with a concomitant aging of populations in the world’s richest countries, constitutes an unprecedented shift that is redefining the global demographic, economic, and political landscape.

What makes China unique, however, is that it still has a state policy, unique in human history, that restricts the majority of Chinese families to one child per couple. At the time the policy was announced 30 years ago, it provoked great controversy both within and outside China; over the years it has extracted great sacrifices from Chinese families and individuals, especially from women. And although the policy was designed as an emergency measure to slow down China’s population growth, and was intended to last for only one generation, the government has not yet shown the willingness, or courage, to phase it out.

China’s slow recognition and inaction in the face of its impending demographic crisis—inaction that persists despite appeals by almost all the country’s population experts to phase out the one child policy quickly—reflect policy makers’ lack of understanding of the changing demographic reality. Inertia also results from the resistance of the country’s birth-control bureaucracy, which formally employs half a million people.

This exemplifies a characteristic feature of China’s regime—relegating difficult, long-term, structural challenges to the back burner, while giving priority to short-term crisis management and concerns about stability. The looming demographic crisis will largely define China in the twenty-first century. Given that demographic changes take time to develop, and that their ramifications are not only massive but also long-lasting, China’s inaction has already proved costly—and will only grow more so the longer it persists.

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How Severe Are China’s Demographic Challenges?

For centuries, China boasted the largest population of any country, giving it significant global heft. That is changing as China’s population shrinks and ages at a faster rate than almost any other country. In 2022, China’s population dropped for the first time in decades, and in 2023 India surpassed China to become the world’s most populous nation. China’s changing demographics pose major, prolonged challenges for the country and its leaders. China has for decades reaped the economic dividends that came with having a young workforce to fuel China’s emergence as a global industrial powerhouse. Now, the number of Chinese retirees will soon skyrocket, reducing the size of China’s workforce and putting pressure on China’s social safety net and healthcare system.

The Drivers of China’s Changing Demographics

China’s population grew at a breakneck pace during the mid-twentieth century, swelling nearly 50 percent between 1950 and 1970. Driven by fears of the extraordinary challenges of effectively governing a rapidly expanding population, the Chinese government began to institute population control measures in the 1970s. The “ later, longer, fewer ” (晚稀少) campaign, which was initiated in 1973, raised the legal age of marriage to 23 for women and 25 for men, encouraged at least a three-year period between births, and limited births to two children. Those who did not adhere to the new regulations faced penalties. This policy proved successful. Between 1970 and 1980, China’s fertility rate (the number of births per woman) plummeted from 6.1 to 2.7.

The government followed up the “later, longer, fewer” campaign with the one-child policy. Launched nationwide in 1980, the policy strictly limited urban couples to a single child. The policy was later relaxed in the mid-1980s to allow ethnic minorities and rural families to have two children if the first child was a girl.

The draconian policy engendered international criticism and was routinely condemned by human rights groups, which argued that the frequent practices of forced abortion and sterilization were human rights violations. An Amnesty International China researcher described these practices as “torture” and contended that “the state has no business regulating how many children people have.”  Human Rights Watch  asserts that Chinese family planning policies “continue to impose severe restrictions on women’s reproductive freedoms,” and rights activists pressed the UN to take decisive moves against it.

While forced abortions and sterilizations were officially banned, they nonetheless became frequent occurrences as local officials tried to enforce birthrate targets set by the  central government . This resulted in a dramatic gender imbalance that originated in strong cultural and social preference for male children, which tarnished how China was viewed on the global stage. Despite outlawing fetal sex determination in the late 1980s, evidence indicates that it was common for parents to either give up their female children to adoption agencies or have  gender-selective abortions . In 2021, there were roughly 30 million more men than women in China, and a study estimates that there are over  62 million “missing” women —females who would be alive without gender discrimination. This gap may become a factor contributing to social instability. A 2007 study found a large and statistically significant link between the gender-ratio imbalance for 16-to-24-year-olds and male crime rates in China. 1

In order for a population to maintain its size, the total fertility rate must be around 2.1 children per woman . As a result of decades of population control measures, fertility rates in China fell well below that threshold. By the 1990s, China’s fertility rate dropped to 1.5 births per woman and as of 2020, it fell to a historically low 1.3 births per woman.

Chinese leaders responded to China’s plummeting fertility rates by easing the one-child policy. Starting in 2013, any parents who themselves were only-children were permitted to have a second child . In 2016, the government extended this policy to all couples, formally ending the one-child policy.

These policies have not alleviated the problem. When the government eased the one-child policy in 2013, officials predicted an additional 2 million births in 2014, but only 470,000 more people were born in 2014 than 2013. Similarly, despite recent government encouragement to have three children, China’s birth rate continues to fall. Between 2010 and 2020, China’s average household size fell from 3.1 to 2.6 persons.

Soaring housing prices and an overall increase in the cost of living have made childrearing financially daunting for many. In 2019, it was reported that the average cost of raising a child to age 18 in China was nearly seven times the country’s GDP per capita. The Covid-19 pandemic and China’s zero-Covid policies worsened the situation. Reports surfaced in 2022 that strict Covid-19 lockdowns limited hospital access, even for expecting mothers, further dissuading some from wanting to have children during the pandemic.

The Challenges Facing Chinese Society

China has long relied on its young, mobile workforce to form the backbone of its economy, but current demographic trends could hamper China’s economic growth and create challenging social problems. China’s difficulties will be compounded by the rapid aging of its society.

After peaking at over 1.42 billion in 2021, current forecasts project that China’s population will shrink by over 100 million people by 2050. By the end of the century, China’s population may dwindle to less than 800 million, with more dire scenarios putting the figure at less than 500 million.

China’s future population will also be older. Healthcare in China has transformed dramatically over recent decades. Mao Zedong’s famous “barefoot doctors” program trained hundreds of thousands of young Chinese to provide affordable basic care to China’s rural population . More recently, China’s rapid economic development has fueled higher spending on healthcare. In 2000, healthcare spending in China totaled just $55 billion, but by 2021 that figure had soared to nearly $1.2 trillion. This has dramatically improved life expectancy in China from just 44 years in 1960 to 77 in 2020 .

Greater life expectancy, combined with lower fertility rates, has resulted in a rapidly aging society, and the problem will only intensify. Some estimates predict China’s old-age dependency ratio (the ratio of people over age 65 to the number of people aged 15-64) to reach nearly 52 percent by mid-century. This would mean that for every two working-age individuals there will be one person aged over 65. By the 2080s, that figure could climb to almost 90 percent.

For a country whose economy remains reliant on affordable sources of labor to drive its manufacturing sector, China’s aging working population presents a serious economic problem. These shifts will lead to reduced productivity , and as China’s large surplus labor pool begins to dwindle, manufacturing wages will increase and the sector will decrease in profitability.

The aging of China’s population will also have deep social consequences. Traditionally, most Chinese children care for their parents through old age, as demonstrated in the Chinese expression “raise children to provide for old age” (养儿防老). As China’s working-age population shrinks in proportion to the elderly population, the burden of supporting retirees will grow.

Chinese officials are cognizant of the country’s mounting demographic crisis. Ning Jizhe, the director of China’s National Bureau of Statistics, stated , “The economic structure and technological development need to be adjusted and adapted” to accommodate the shrinking working-age population. President Xi Jinping has weighed in as well, acknowledging that China faces “the pressure of a large population and the challenges brought about by the transformation of the population structure.”

Many provincial and local governments are implementing incentives for families to have a second or third child. In Jinan, Shandong Province, families will receive childcare subsidies of 600 RMB ($86) per month for three years for a second or third child born after January 1, 2023. Other cities have chosen to provide one-time subsidies. In Hangzhou, families are eligible for 5,000 RMB ($720) for a second child and 20,000 RMB ($2880) for a third child.

The central government is also taking steps to develop the country’s limited social welfare system and improve China’s senior-care capabilities . The 14th Five Year Plan —a key document that lays out goals and policies for the following five years—emphasizes the need for a “long-term population development strategy.” The plan calls for establishing policies to encourage families to have more children through improved parental leave policies and childcare facilities and greater resources during pregnancy and childbirth. It also states the country will improve elderly care by adding nursing beds to 1,000 public elder care facilities and enhance training for geriatric nurses.

China "faces the pressure of a large population and the challenges brought about by the transformation of the population structure." Xi Jinping

Similarly, in 2022, the State Council released a plan to “expand the supply of elderly care services [and] improve the health support mechanisms for the elderly.” As part of its efforts, the government has said that the retirement age will slowly be raised by 2025, but it has provided few details. Currently, most men retire at age 60 while women working office jobs retire at 55 and women working blue-collar jobs retire at 50.

Yet Chinese leaders face strong opposition to increasing the retirement age or adjusting pension policies within China. In February 2023, thousands of people protested outside government offices in Wuhan after the city slashed medical benefits for retirees from RMB 260 per month to less than RMB 100. Similar protests erupted across the country in the cities of Dalian and Guangzhou. The medical benefits went to the chopping block as part of broader cost-cutting measures to curb local government debt, which has piled up amid strict zero-Covid policies, a housing market slump, and slowing economic growth. As China’s population ages, policymakers will face a tough juggling act of supporting retirees under resource constraints and competing interests.

How China’s Demographic Challenges Compare

Analyzing China’s shifting demographics through comparison with other countries highlights the extent of China’s aging problem. Having an aging population is a common demographic problem in developed countries, where birthrates have steadily declined with  higher levels of income, healthcare, and education . Countries such as Japan and Germany have had decades to adjust as their populations have aged gradually. China, on the other hand, has begun the aging process at an earlier stage of development and at a more accelerated pace than most countries have experienced.

India, which like China is a highly populous developing country, offers an important point of reference. Click through the graphic below to see how each country’s population will age between 2020 and 2070.

As China ages more rapidly than India in the coming decades, it is possible that India will reap a “demographic dividend,” where the proportion of the working population in India will  increase relative to China . This could lead to a shift in manufacturing jobs from China to India,  a sector in which India has  traditionally lagged .

To address its aging population, China could look to the strategies utilized by developed countries to manage their own aging societies, including Japan, Germany, and the United States. While China’s fertility rate is comparable to these countries (1.3 in China and Japan, 1.5 in Germany, and 1.6 in the United States), China has little experience in providing social services to aging populations . Countries such as Germany, Japan, and South Korea have developed long-term social insurance systems designed to provide benefits to older populations.

Japan’s system, which has been particularly successful, provides care to all people over 65. The national pension system is funded by mandatory fixed premiums paid by those between the ages of 20 and 60, as well as local and national taxes . In 2001, faced with a massive incoming wave of retirees, Germany passed a major pension reform, reducing pay-as-you-go benefits while encouraging private pension options . The introduction of a voluntary private pension program has shifted Germany’s pension plan to be more of a contribution-first system, where people who contributed more to the pension program can exact more when they reach retirement.

One crucial disadvantage facing China is its negligible immigration rate. The United States and many European countries have been aided by positive net migration , which helps to offset low birth rates and replenish the working age population. Since 1960, the United States has averaged net inflow of over 1,000,000 migrants into the country each year while China has averaged a net loss of over 265,000 migrants each year. In 2020 China was home to just 1 million migrants—about 0.1 percent of its population.

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Key facts about China’s declining population

Next year, China will no longer be the most populous country in the world, ceding the title to India, according to projections by the United Nations . China has had the largest population in the world since at least 1950 , when the UN started keeping records. But it is now projected to experience an absolute decline in its population beginning as early as 2023.

This Pew Research Center analysis is primarily based on the World Population Prospects 2022 report by the United Nations. The estimates produced by the UN are based on “all available sources of data on population size and levels of fertility, mortality and international migration” and do not include the areas separately listed by the UN as “China, Hong Kong SAR”; “China, Macau SAR”; or “China, Taiwan Province of China.”

Because future levels of fertility and mortality are inherently uncertain, the UN uses probabilistic methods to account for both the past experiences of a given country and the past experience of other countries under similar conditions. The medium scenario projection is the median of many thousands of simulations. The low and high scenarios make different assumptions about fertility: In the high scenario, total fertility is 0.5 births above the total fertility in the medium scenario; in the low scenario, it is 0.5 births below the medium scenario.

Other sources of information for this analysis are available through the links included in the text.

Here are key facts about China’s population and its projected changes in the coming decades, based on data from the UN and other sources:

Although China will lose its title as the world’s most populous country, the UN still estimates its population at 1.426 billion people in 2022 . This is larger than the entire population of Europe (744 million) and the Americas (1.04 billion). It’s also roughly equivalent to the population of all the nations in Africa (1.427 billion).

Related: Global population projected to exceed 8 billion in 2022; half live in just seven countries

The UN forecasts that China’s population will decline from 1.426 billion this year to 1.313 billion by 2050 and below 800 million by 2100. That’s according to the UN’s “ medium variant ,” or middle-of-the-road projection. The large population decline is projected even though it assumes that China’s total fertility rate will rise from 1.18 children per woman in 2022 to 1.48 in 2100.

Using the UN’s “high variant” scenario – in which the total fertility rate in China is projected to be 0.5 births per woman above that of the medium variant scenario – the country’s population is still projected to fall to 1.153 billion by 2100. And in the UN’s “low variant” scenario – where the total fertility rate is projected to be 0.5 births below that of the medium variant scenario – China’s population is projected to fall to as low as 488 million by 2100.

For comparison purposes, the U.S. population of 337 million in 2021 is expected to grow to 394 million by 2100 in the UN’s medium variant scenario. The UN’s high variant scenario projects a population of 543 million Americans by then, while in its low scenario, the U.S. population would shrink to 281 million.

Other groups and academics differ somewhat from the UN in their forecasts of China’s population, but nearly all still predict a decline. Some demographers, for example, think the country’s population might have already peaked in 2021 or even earlier . These other estimates sometimes rely less on official Chinese population data (which researchers say is inflated because of financial incentives for local governments ) and instead use other data, such as the number of mandatory vaccines administered to newborns in China. Still, regardless of the precise timing of China’s population peak or the magnitude of its projected decline, there is near-universal consensus that the nation’s population is on a trajectory of decline.

China’s 2022 total fertility rate is estimated to be 1.18 children per woman – down substantially from earlier decades and significantly below the “ replacement rate ” of 2.1 children per woman . This is despite the relaxation of the country’s well-known one-child policy, which was introduced in 1980 but amended to allow two children beginning in 2016 and three children beginning in 2021 .

Notably, fertility rates in China were already falling prior to the introduction of the one-child policy, as they often fall alongside economic development and urbanization. And aside from a brief one-year increase following the allowance of a second child, fertility rates have continued to fall in China.

The YuWa Population Research Institute, a Beijing-based think tank, has concluded that China is among the most expensive places to raise a child and that these economic concerns – rather than governmental policies – are tied to women not wanting to have more children these days.

In addition to having fewer children overall, women in China are choosing to have children later in life. Since 2000, the mean childbearing age in China has increased by three years, rising from 26 to 29. By comparison, the mean childbearing age has gone up by just one year across all middle-income countries (which China is part of).

The mean age of first marriage has increased alongside the childbearing age in China. Based on data from China’s 2020 census , the mean age of first marriage for women in 2020 was 28, up from 24 in 2010. Some have cited China’s zero-COVID policy as a contributing factor to delayed motherhood.

China is among the countries with the most skewed sex ratio at birth, according to a recent Pew Research Center study of UN data. In fact, China accounted for 51% of the world’s “missing” females between 1970 and 2020, due to sex-selective abortion or neglect, according to a 2020 UN report .

While China continues to have a skewed sex ratio at birth – 112 male births per 100 female births, as of 2021 – this is down slightly from a high of 118 male births per 100 female births between 2002 and 2008. Still, as of 2021, China had a huge overall sex imbalance of around 30 million more men than women. China also has among the highest abortion rates per 1,000 women ages 15 to 49 of any country, according to estimates from the Guttmacher Institute .

China has a rapidly aging population. According to Chinese state media , China is already approaching a “moderately aging” scenario, in which 20% of its population is ages 60 and older. By 2035, that percentage is expected to rise to 30%, or more than 400 million people.

By 2100, China also appears poised to roughly double its “ dependency ratio ” – the proportion of its population that is outside working age (either ages 0 to 14 or ages 65 and older), compared with the proportion that is working age (15 to 64). This is even true in the UN’s “low variant” projection. In fact, based on the UN’s middle-of-the-road estimate, there will be more Chinese people outside the working-age population than in it – a dependency ratio of 101.1 – by the year 2079.

More people migrate out of China per year than into it, further decreasing the population. Since at least 1950, when the UN began compiling statistics, China has had a net negative number of migrants – meaning more people are leaving the country than arriving. In 2021, for example, the country experienced an estimated net out-migration of 200,000 people. Still, this is down from a higher point in the early 1990s, when around 750,000 or more people per year were leaving China. As part of its medium variant projections, the UN forecasts that China will continue to experience net negative migration through at least 2100, with estimates hovering around 310,000 people leaving the country per year.

CORRECTION (Dec. 15, 2022): A previous version of the chart “China has long had more male than female births, but its skewed sex ratio is projected to change” misplaced the line indicating the start of China’s two-child policy in 2016. The chart has been replaced. This change does not substantively affect the findings of this report.

• Birth Rate & Fertility

Laura Silver is an associate director focusing on global attitudes at Pew Research Center .

Christine Huang is a research associate focusing on global attitudes at Pew Research Center .

Few East Asian adults believe women have an obligation to society to have children

A growing share of americans say they’ve had fertility treatments or know someone who has, key facts as india surpasses china as the world’s most populous country, global population skews male, but un projects parity between sexes by 2050, india’s sex ratio at birth begins to normalize, most popular.

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• Published: 18 May 2022

Spatial and temporal distribution of population in urban agglomerations changes in China

• Yanming Lyu 1 &
• Fangye Jiang 1  

Scientific Reports volume  12 , Article number:  8315 ( 2022 ) Cite this article

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The spatial distribution of the urban agglomeration population has changed increasingly in rapid urbanization. It affects the urban economy, environment, transportation, and so on. Therefore, it is of great significance to understand the changes in the spatial distribution of population in urban agglomerations. This study used methods such as population center of gravity migration and Gini coefficient to explore changes in the spatial distribution of urban populations. The study found that the population center of the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei urban agglomeration first migrated toward Beijing and then away from Beijing. During this process, the Gini coefficient increased from 0.62 to 0.64 and then decreased to 0.58, indicating that the population balance of the urban agglomeration firstly increased and then decreased. This result is consistent with the conclusion that we have established a simulated urban agglomeration for theoretical derivation. That is: in the early stage of urban agglomeration development, the population migrated to the central city; as the population of the central city became saturated, the urban agglomeration developed to a mature stage, and the population began to migrate to the peripheral cities. In this process, the population distribution center of urban agglomeration gradually shifted from central towns to peripheral towns. The degree of equilibrium in the spatial distribution of population has undergone an inverted u-shaped transition from non-equilibrium to equilibrium.

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Introduction.

The population size is the total number of permanent residents living in a specific area in a certain period. It is closely related to urbanization level 1 , 2 , urban economics 3 , urban technological innovation 4 , urban environment 5 , resources 6 , 7 , and transportation 8 , 9 . Population size can promote urban technological innovation and improve urban economic development 10 , 11 , 12 , 13 . However, excessive population growth may also lead to environmental pollution 14 , resource overconsumption 7 , traffic congestion 15 , 16 , social-economic inequality 14 , 17 , urban form, and structure constitute inequality 18 . Thus, it is necessary to pay more attention to urbanization's changing urban population size.

The changing process of urban population size generally includes two periods 1 . At the first stage, the scale of the urban population increased significantly. At the second stage, the urban population tends to saturate and grow slowly 19 . Athens, Greece is in line with this law of population size changes t, from 1950 to 2000, it had been a linear growth, and the growth rate was relatively high, from 2001 to 2020, the development of the permanent population tends to be slow 19 . It shows a prominent characteristic of two-stage change.

Urbanization, economic development, public service level, life quality, and preferential local policies have impacted urban population growth 2 , 20 . In recent years, the urban spatial structures and economic characteristics have taken noticeable changes 21 , influencing the urban choice intention of residents and enterprises 2 , 22 . After satisfying basic needs, people pursued high-quality public services, excellent infrastructure, quality of life, and more robust local preferential policies. These factors have also affected the direction and speed of urban population migration 23 . Taken fast-growing China for example, the population of surrounding cities has rapidly flowed into megacities, resulting in many social problems (e.g. Traffic congestion, environmental pollution, high house price), and the population of the megacities is approaching saturation. In recent years, China's population transfer to small and medium-sized cities has increased, which has driven the spatial flow and exchange of factors such as social economy, urban transportation, regional culture and other elements in small and medium-sized cities and play a vital role in accelerating economic development, promoting urbanization and industrialization, and optimizing the geographical allocation of labor resources 22 .

It is also found that the dynamic change process of urban population size appears the characteristics of group development. In urban population growth and rapid economic development, cities are adjacent in space and cooperate in function, thus forming urban agglomeration 24 , 25 . In urban agglomerations, there are usually one or more central cities with a higher level of economic development and several peripheral towns with a relatively low level of economic growth 26 . More individuals pour into the central cities in urban agglomeration development due to their higher developed economy, modernization, pursuing high-density, multi-purpose development, and energy-saving transportation systems. The accumulation of the population in major cities promotes trade and economic development, with positive externalities, including improved division of labor, improving public facilities 10 , and increasing employment opportunities 27 . However, during urban agglomeration development, it has also led to more urban problems 6 , including the increase in population density 28 , urban congestion 29 , high living costs, and environmental deterioration 29 . More and more people are migrating to surrounding cities 6 , and "sleeping cities" have emerged in some places where residents sleep in one place at night and work in different urban areas during the day) 1 .

The above discussed the general change process of population size of cities and urban agglomerations. However, there are few studies on the fundamental laws of the population in urban agglomerations 1 . Failure to fully understand the mechanism of population change in urban agglomerations is likely to lead to ineffective government control of excessive population migration. If this situation continues, it may lead to economic, environmental, transportation, and other social problems. Therefore, it is necessary to explore the fundamental laws of population changes in urban agglomerations, reveal the mechanism of population migration, reasonably predict the direction of population migration in urban agglomerations, and provide corresponding suggestions and countermeasures for urban agglomerations and cities at different levels of development. The remainder of this paper is carried out at the following. In “ Theoretical basis and research problem ”section describes the theoretical basis and problem formulation; in “ Theoretical deduction ” section explores changing population changing law of urban agglomeration; in Empirical implementation ” section conducts empirical research; in Discussion ” section is research discussion; in Conclusion ” section draws the research conclusion of this paper.

Theoretical basis and research problem

Theoretical basis.

Traditional economic geography theory shows that location choice affects the spatial distribution of population. The choice of agricultural location leads to a circular crop planting. Especially, crop prices and land costs are positively correlated with proximity to the city center, thus maintaining the overall utility balance 30 . Industrial enterprises choose the location where labor and transportation costs are the least to maximize the utility 31 . In pursuing profit maximization, business and service industries have formed a center-periphery structure 32 . These theories demonstrate individuals migrate among different cities to obtain higher net utility, including wages, the quality of life, the level of medical care, and education.

Many scholars have studied the spatial distribution of the population by location selection based on traditional theories. One scholar pointed out that location selection is essential in causing population migration. A large number of people gathering will increase the cohesion and attractiveness of the region, causing more people to migrate there generate positive feedback on the flow of people 26 . Scholars found that immigrants with higher education levels are more likely to stay in the core area, provide more excellent value to the site, and further attract the inflow of talent 33 , the influx of immigrants hurts the land utilization and land cover have an impact 34 . The repeated transfer of population to core areas will lead to overpopulation, which will cause great pressure on resources and the environment 35 . Each stage of population location selection will cause changes in the spatial distribution of the population 34 . Individual location selection leads to different urban population scales. Especially in the early stage of urban agglomerations, the population size of central cities grew more prominently than that of surrounding cities. At the mature stage of urban agglomerations, the population size of surrounding cities increased more significantly than that of central cities 26 , 36 .

Urban self-organization and spatial equilibrium affect the spatial distribution of the population. Under the spatial self-organization mechanism and spatial equilibrium, enterprises and individuals migrate among cities to pursue higher net utility values. This migration will not stop until the net utility value of cities is approximately equal. In this state, individuals and enterprises had no desire to migrate, and urban population spatial distribution achieved equilibrium 15 , 37 . That is to say, a common mechanism guides the development between cities. Through the analysis of urban development and urban form, some scholars have found that the expansion of cities is similar, and they follow the influence of spatial self-organization and spatial equilibrium and develop towards a more homogeneous urban form 8 . Some scholars have also put forward other evidence, they found that the existence and development of the city is the result of the interaction of centripetal force and centrifugal force, which can reflect that the internal system of the town is affected by the self-organization and spatial equilibrium of the city 38 . Other scholars describe the changes in the internal system of cities as intense social interaction, and the diverse social and economic activities are the embodiment of spatial self-organization and spatial equilibrium 12 . The influencing mechanism of population distribution is shown in Fig.  1 .

Influencing mechanism of population distribution.

The mechanism of aggregation and diffusion is a deeper reason that affects the spatial distribution of the population 25 . The mechanism of population agglomeration drives the spatial growth of urban agglomerations. The spatial differences and imbalances in economic development between cities have become more prominent, forming the "Matthew Effect", which affects the spatial distribution of population. The population diffusion mechanism promotes the relative spatial balance of resources, economy, factors, and enterprises, conducive to narrowing the gap in urban economic levels within urban agglomerations and promoting collaborative economic development. Existing research points out that agglomeration and diffusion are the primary stimuli and regional development processes. Through the agglomeration and diffusion of various elements such as technology, capital, talents, and information, an interactive relationship between urban and rural areas is established, promoting changes in the spatial distribution of population 25 , 39 .

It is also found that the interaction between agglomeration and diffusion is an important mechanism involved in the urban population spatial distribution 25 . The aggregation and diffusion mechanisms perform differently at each stage of urban agglomeration development. The agglomeration mechanism is more evident in the early stages of urban agglomeration development. At this time, the central city has rich in natural resources and attracts people to gather. The diffusion mechanism becomes more effective in the mature period of urban agglomerations. Rising costs in central cities drive people out. Also, the agglomeration mechanism and diffusion mechanism have a certain inertia. Once aggregation (or diffusion) occurs, it will continue to develop in the inherent direction, with changes in content, scale, level, and speed. When agglomeration diseconomy (or diffusion diseconomy) occurs, the trend of accumulation (or distribution) can be curbed—the interaction changes from aggregation-based to diffusion-based (or from diffusion-based to aggregation-based). However, the original accumulation (or distribution) will not disappear, and it will still exist in the form of diffusion (or aggregation).

We set up a virtual urban agglomeration to derive the law of population size distribution of urban agglomeration. As shown in Fig.  2 , the urban virtual agglomeration includes m central cities and n peripheral cities according to their level of economic development ( m  <  n ). It is assumed that housing costs and living costs are the same in central and peripheral cities in the early period of urban agglomeration, in the mature stage of urban agglomeration, the housing cost of central cities is much higher than in surrounding cities, and the living cost is the same 6 , 40 .

The virtual map of urban agglomeration. (ArcGIS10.2,URL: https://developers.arcgis.com/ ).

The α city of the central city and the β , γ , δ cities of the peripheral cities are selected, as shown in Fig.  3 . Individuals and companies move between cities to maximize their utility. Population flows occur between central cities, peripheral cities, and central and peripheral cities. Urban agglomerations achieve spatial population balance through population flow.

Population migrates among cities.

We used the following assumptions in the reasoning process to deduce the law of spatial distribution of urban population.

A rational person pursues the maximization of net income. Specifically, we only considered economic factors in the process of individuals selecting locations. This assumption simplifies the factors that affect the location selection of the population and ignores the influence of other factors (e.g. behavioral characteristics).

The choice of population location is adjusted rapidly with the adjustment of population size. We ignored the influence of population density and built-up area on location selection.

The cost of living in different cities in the same urban agglomeration is the same. In other words, the population location factors that except income and housing factors in the same urban agglomeration should be homogenized.

The housing cost of cities in the urban agglomeration is positively correlated with development. The higher the level of urban development, the higher the cost of housing. This assumption simplifies the difference in housing costs caused by cities at different development levels. It is conducive to analyzing population location selection from housing cost differences.

Theoretical deduction

The changing trend of spatial population distribution in urban agglomerations.

We took any central city α and any peripheral city β to analyze the spatial distribution characteristics of urban agglomerations under different development levels. The meaning of each letter is as follows: E is the net utility value, W is the per capita income level, C is the cost, \({\varvec{C}}_{1}\) is the cost of living, \({\varvec{C}}_{2}\) is the cost of housing, s is the initial state, r is the critical state, and l is the final state.

In the initial state of city agglomeration development, the per capita income level of central cities is higher than that of peripheral cities 21 , and the housing costs and living costs of central cities are the same as those of peripheral towns 40 , 41 , 42 .

Under the initial state of city agglomeration development, \(W_{\alpha s}\)  >  \(W_{\beta s}\) , \(C_{1\alpha s}\)  =  \(C_{1\beta s}\) , \(C_{2\alpha s}\)  =  \(C_{2\beta s}\) , so \(E_{\alpha s}\)  >  \(E_{\beta s}\) . The net utility value of central cities is greater than that of peripheral cities. From condition 1, the population gathers in the central town 38 , 43 .

In mature urban agglomerations, the per capita income of central cities is higher than that of peripheral cities. The cost of housing in central cities is much greater than the cost of living in surrounding cities, and the cost of living in central cities is the same as that of the surrounding towns 40 , 42 .

In the final state, \(W_{\alpha l}\)  >  \(W_{\beta l}\) , \(C_{1\alpha l} = C_{1\beta l}\) , \(C_{2\alpha l}\)  >  >  \(C_{2\beta l}\) , so \(E_{\alpha l}\)  <  \(E_{\beta l}\) , the conclusion is that in the later period of the city agglomeration, the net utility value of peripheral cities is greater than that of central cities. Thus, according to Condition 1, the population began to gather in peripheral cities 36 , 44 . The above reasoning process leads to the first conclusion:

Conclusion 1: In the early stage of urban agglomeration development, the population tends to gather in central cities. In the mature period of urban agglomeration, the population is concentrated in peripheral cities.

The changing trend of urban agglomeration population gravity center

From the above chapter, cities within urban agglomeration will experience varying population migration due to different development levels. We choose the population center of gravity indicator to visually express the population flow changes. The population center of gravity refers to the point at which the moment of population distribution on the spatial plane reaches equilibrium, usually used to measure the equilibrium of population distribution in the region 45 . By studying the movement trajectory of the population center of gravity, we explain the characteristics and causes of the spatial change of population distribution , and provide a decision-making basis for formulating population development policies and social and economic development plans. We took the permanent population data of municipal districts as weights and weighted the spatial units to get the population center of gravity. The calculation method is as follows:

where, \(X_{i}\) and \(Y_{i}\) represent the longitude and latitude coordinates of the ith spatial unit, respectively, and \(M_{i}\) represents the population size of a city in the spatial unit.

It is assumed that there is a central city and a peripheral city in the urban agglomeration, where the location of the central city is ( \(X_{1}\) , \(Y_{1}\) ) and the population size is \(M_{1 }\) .The location of the peripheral cities is ( \(X_{2}\) , \(Y_{2}\) ), and the population size is \(M_{2}\) .The population center of gravity position of this urban agglomeration is (X, Y).

To judge the change in the population center of gravity in the early urban agglomeration, we assume that the population of the central city \(M_{2}\) remains unchanged, find the derivation of \(M_{1}\) . \({\text{ M}}_{1} > 0,\) \({\text{M}}_{2}\)  > 0.

If \({\text{X}}_{1}\)  >  \({\text{X}}_{2}\) (the central city is to the east of the peripheral city), \(\frac{{{\text{d}}_{{\text{x}}} }}{{{\text{d}}_{{{\text{M}}2}} }}\)  > 0. The longitude of the population gravity center increases (moving eastward), that is, toward the central cities. If \({\text{X}}_{1}\)  <  \({\text{X}}_{2}\) (the central city is to the west of the peripheral city), \(\frac{{{\text{d}}_{{\text{x}}} }}{{{\text{d}}_{{{\text{M}}2}} }}\)  < 0. The longitude of the population gravity center decrease (moving westward), that is, toward the central cities.

In conclusion, when the peripheral city population remains unchanged, the population size of the central city increases (when the population size of the central city increases more than that of the peripheral city increases), the population gravity center's longitude moves toward the central city population.

If \({\text{Y}}_{1}\)  >  \({\text{Y}}_{2}\) (the central city is to the north of the peripheral city), \(\frac{{{\text{d}}_{{\text{Y}}} }}{{{\text{d}}_{{{\text{M}}2}} }}\)  > 0. The latitude of the population gravity center increases (moving north), that is, toward the central cities. If \({\text{Y}}_{1}\)  <  \({\text{Y}}_{2}\) (the central city is to the south of the outer city), \(\frac{{{\text{d}}_{{\text{Y}}} }}{{{\text{d}}_{{{\text{M}}2}} }}\)  < 0. The latitude of the population gravity center decrease (moving south), that is, toward the central cities.

In conclusion, when the population of peripheral cities remains unchanged, but the population size of central cities increases (or when the population size of central cities increases more than that of peripheral cities), the population gravity center moves to the central cities in latitude.

To judge the change of population center of gravity in the mature urban agglomeration, we assume that the population of the central city \(M_{1}\) remains unchanged, find the derivation of \({ }M_{2} \cdot M_{1} > 0,\) \(M_{2}\)  > 0.

If \({\text{X}}_{1}\)  >  \({\text{X}}_{2}\) (the central city is to the east of the outer city), \(\frac{{{\text{d}}_{{\text{x}}} }}{{{\text{d}}_{{{\text{M}}2}} }}\)  < 0. The longitude of the population gravity center decrease (moving westward), that is, toward the peripheral cities. If \({\text{X}}_{1}\)  <  \({\text{X}}_{2}\) (the central city is to the west of the outer city), \(\frac{{{\text{d}}_{{\text{x}}} }}{{{\text{d}}_{{{\text{M}}2}} }}\)  > 0. The longitude of the population center of gravity increase (moving eastward), that is, toward the peripheral cities.

To sum up, when the population of the central city remains unchanged, and the population size of the peripheral city increases (or when the increase in the population size of the surrounding cities is more significant than the increase in the population size of the central cities), the longitude of the population gravity center moves to the peripheral cities.

If \(Y_{1}\)  >  \(Y_{2}\) (the central city is to the north of the outer city), \(\frac{{{\text{d}}_{{\text{Y}}} }}{{{\text{d}}_{{{\text{M}}2}} }}\)  < 0. The center of gravity of the population decreases latitude (moving southward), moving toward the outer cities. If \(Y_{1}\)  <  \(Y_{2}\) (the central city is to the south of the outer city), \(\frac{{{\text{d}}_{{\text{Y}}} }}{{{\text{d}}_{{{\text{M}}2}} }}\)  > 0, the center of gravity of the population increases latitude (moving northward), moving toward the outer cities.

In conclusion, when the population size of the central city remains unchanged, and the population size of the peripheral city increases (the increase of the population size of the peripheral city is greater than that of the central city), the latitude of the population gravity center moves to the peripheral cities. The above reasoning process leads to the second conclusion:

Conclusion 2: The latitude and longitude changes of the population gravity center reveal the characteristics of the spatial distribution of the population in the urban agglomeration. In the initial stage of urban agglomerations, the population size of the central city increased more than that of the surrounding cities, and the population gravity center shifted to the central city. In the mature period of urban agglomeration development, the population growth of surrounding cities is greater than that of central cities, and the population gravity center shifts to surrounding cities.

Changing in equilibrium degree of spatial population distribution in urban agglomerations

Based on four hypotheses and existing research, this paper demonstrated the equilibrium changes of the spatial population distribution of urban agglomerations at different development levels. In the initial state of urban agglomeration development, the productivity level is low, the economy is underdeveloped, the urbanization level is relatively low, and the city's population is generally in a low-level equilibrium state 46 . Some cities develop rapidly through external stimulation or long-term accumulation 47 . Various favorable factors have driven the population to shift to advantageous cities, and central cities have gradually formed 48 , 49 . The formation of central cities in urban agglomerations broke the balance of the original urban agglomeration population spatial structure. Specifically, the population gap between central and other cities continues to widen. The concentration of population in central cities has caused congestion in central cities, further increasing land costs. A series of urban problems have emerged, ultimately reducing the net utility value of central cities 6 . The net utility value of the central city is gradually more minor than the net utility value of the peripheral cities. According to Condition 1, the population begins to migrate to the surrounding towns, the population gap between the central city and the peripheral cities is gradually reduced, and the spatial population distribution of the urban agglomeration tends to be balanced.

Population spatial balance in urban agglomerations is a complex process of urban self-regulation caused by people's pursuit of utility maximization 20 . The direction of population migration is related to the relative gap between cities at different development levels in urban agglomerations. The population flows in cities with high development levels and immense net utility value, ultimately affecting the spatial equilibrium of people in urban areas agglomerations 8 , 26 . The above reasoning process leads to the third conclusion:

Conclusion 3: In the early stage of urban agglomeration development, the degree of spatial population equilibrium gradually decreases with the development of urban agglomeration. When urban agglomerations reach the mature stage, the degree of spatial equilibrium of the population increases gradually with the development of urban agglomerations.

Empirical implementation

Sample selection.

We choose the Beijing–Tianjin–Hebei Urban Agglomeration (denoted as BTHUA) population data from 2005 to 2018 as the research object. The BTHUA comprises 13 cities, including Beijing, Tianjin, Langfang, Tangshan, Qinhuangdao, Chengde, Zhangjiakou, Baoding, Shijiazhuang, Xingtai, Handan, Hengshui, and Cangzhou. Among them, the central city is Beijing.

We chose BTHUA as our study object is suitable. BTHUA is one of the critical population agglomerations in China. By the end of 2018, 112.7 million permanent residents accounted for 8.08 percent of the country's total population. A large sample size can avoid bias caused by a small sample size. As the capital of China, Beijing is a political, cultural, and economic center that has attracted a large number of migrants in recent decades. The ability of central and peripheral cities is significantly different, which can better reflect the population flow in the development of urban agglomerations 35 . The BTHUA has improved the quality of economic growth and the overall development level of the urban agglomeration through cooperation and complementarity, representing a certain degree.

Data sources

Since the urban population is not easy to obtain, we use the resident population of the prefecture-level municipal districts to replace the urban population for calculation. This paper chooses the permanent population as the research object, mainly referring to the registered and floating folks who have lived in cities for more than half a year 50 , 51 , 52 . Permanent resident population overcomes population mobility to some extent and can fully reflect the spatial characteristics of the people in the regular operation of a city 53 . There are no data on the permanent population in the municipal area, but data on the municipal area's GDP and per capita GDP. The permanent urban population is obtained through the quotient of the above two data. This article collects the GDP and per capita GDP data of 13 cities in China from 2005 to 2018 in the China City Statistical Yearbook.

Empirical tests and results

The changing trend of spatial population distribution in bthua.

We collected the population data of each city in the urban agglomeration to analyze the changes in the population size of each level, as shown in Table 1 . The total population of the BTHUA continues to grow, and the population growth rate is relatively stable in the short to medium term. The population size of central and peripheral cities also increased, but the proportional trend changed. Specifically, the proportion of the population in the central cities of the urban agglomeration dropped from 41.27 to 35.94%, and the population size of the outer towns increased the proportion of urban agglomerations from 58.73 to 64.06%.

The changing trend of the population gravity center at BTHUA

We took BTHUA as an example to verify the results of the derivation of the population gravity center in 3.2 simulated urban agglomerations. We calculated the latitude and longitude of the BTHUA population center of gravity from 2005 to 2018 according to the population gravity center formula in Eq. ( 5 ). The result is shown in Fig.  4 . The latitude and longitude of the BTHAU population center of gravity showed an overall downward trend. Specifically, the latitude and longitude changes were manifested as fluctuations from 2005 to 2012 and a decline from 2012 to 2018.

Longitude and latitude changes of population gravity center in BTHUA.

We used GIS technology to draw the BTHUA permanent population gravity center distribution map from 2005 to 2018 and visually describe the BTHUA population gravity center trend. We connected the annual population gravity center to form a trajectory of the population center of gravity change. From the migration of the population gravity center in Figs. 5 and 6 , we can see that from 2005 to 2012, the population center of BTHUA was located in Langfang from 2005 to 2012; but BTHUA's population gravity center shifted to the central city. From 2012 to 2016, the population center of BTHUA moved to the southwest, and from 2016 to 2018, the center of population moved to the west, all are far away from the central city. To sum up, the population center of the BTHUA is to first migrate to the central cities and then to the peripheral cities.

The change tracking of the population gravity center in BTHUA. It mainly shows the migration of the BTHUA population gravity center in the past 14 years (more details in the supplementary document ).

Study on the changing track of the population gravity center in BTHUA. It mainly shows the specific location of the population gravity center at BTHUA.

The equilibrium change trend of spatial population distribution in BTHUA

We calculated the population Gini coefficient of BTHUA to judge the balanced change in the BTHUA population spatial distribution. The population Gini coefficient describes the spatial distribution pattern of population size, profoundly explores the law of population size spatial distribution, creates a suitable environment for the healthy growth of population size, and promotes the rational public allocation of facility resources. The population Gini coefficient is calculated as follows 54 :

where n indicates the number of cities contained in the urban agglomerations, S is the total urban population of the whole urban agglomerations, and T is the sum of the absolute value of the difference in population size between cities in the urban agglomeration. G   ∈   23 , the closer G is to 0, the more dispersed the urban population distribution and the lower the spatial aggregation of urban agglomerations, and the closer G is to 1, the more concentrated the urban scale 54 . We calculated the Gini coefficient using the BHTAU data, and the results are shown in Fig.  7 .

Changes in Gini Coefficient of population size in BTHUA.

We constructed a regression equation of the Gini coefficient over time (years), which vividly reflected the equilibrium changes in the population size of urban agglomerations. As shown in Fig.  7 , the Gini coefficient of the BTHUA population size shows an "inverted U-shaped" change. From 2005 to 2013, the Gini coefficient fluctuates wildly, but the overall trend increases. The general direction of the Gini coefficient from 2013 to 2018 is to decrease. Specifically, the Gini coefficient of population size declines rapidly from 2013 to 2016 and slowly falls from 2016 to 2018.

The degree of population equilibrium is related to the population Gini coefficient. When the population gravity center migrates to the central city, the population size gap is more prominent, that is, the degree of population balance is poor, and the Gini coefficient increases at this time; when the population gravity center migrates to peripheral cities, the population size gap between cities becomes smaller, that is, the population balance degree is higher, and the Gini coefficient becomes smaller. Specifically, from 2005 to 2012, the population center of gravity gradually approached BTHUA's central city, Beijing, indicating that the population of the central city has increased dramatically, the population gap between cities in the urban agglomeration has increased, the degree of equilibrium is low, and the Gini coefficient is relatively large. From 2013 to 2018, the population center of BTHUA moved to the southwest and gradually moved away from the central city. At this stage, the population gap has narrowed, the population distribution of urban agglomerations has tended to be balanced, and the Gini coefficient has declined.

The urban population of different development levels in urban agglomerations has different trends

As is shown in Table 1 , the population size of the central city has experienced a first increase and then a decline. In contrast, the population size of the peripheral cities has experienced an early fall, and a later rise and conclusion 1 has been verified. The results of this research are consistent with Egidi, who found that the size of the urban population is related to the speed of population migration by establishing a theoretical model of urban growth 17 . It also supplements Kim's research conclusions, who took the urban population of the United States as an example and found that the population increased both in suburbs and central. However, the growth trends had significant differences 55 . This law is also verified by Polinesi, who used Greek cities as an example to establish a partial regression model and found that population growth is internally affected by cities with different levels of development 19 .

The difference from previous studies is that we deduce the changing law of the spatial distribution of population in urban agglomerations to demonstrate the factors that affect this law. The factors affecting the spatial distribution of population include public service factors such as education and medical care, social factors such as interpersonal relationships, social culture, climate, temperature, and other natural environmental factors, etc., which affect personal income and costs. If a city's per capita net income is higher than its neighbors, people will flock to that city. Therefore, increasing the net utility of residents in surrounding cities is an effective measure to alleviate the population problem in large cities. The influencing factors mentioned above are the only way to increase the net utility value of residents, such as raising wages, lowering the cost of living, improving infrastructure, improving education, etc.

This paper judged the direction of population migration through theoretical derivation and improved the content of existing literature on population migration. Taking cities within urban agglomerations as the unit, this paper also deduces the population migration and its change process in each stage of urban agglomerations life cycle, which is beneficial for the government to implement different planning and guidance for urban agglomerations with varying levels of development and improve decision-making efficiency.

The population center of gravity in the urban agglomeration first moves to the central city and then to the outer cities

As is shown in Figs. 5 and 6 , the population centers of BTHAU from 2005 to 2018 are connected in chronological order to establish the spatial relationship of cities between urban agglomerations. The results show that the population center first shifts to central and peripheral cities. This study not only validates Conclusion 2 but also validates the studies of other scholars. For example, This conclusion verifies that You ‘s proposal of population migration to large cities with a high degree of urbanization and commercialization 33 . And this conclusion also verifies Lemoine-Rodriguez‘s decision that in the process of sustainable urban development, surrounding cities show the most remarkable vitality in the expansion and change of urban morphology and become the key to sustainable urban development (Lemoine-Rodríguez 8 ).Urban agglomerations at different stages of development are affected by policy, environment, economy, and other factors, which lead to varying trends of population change. It's worth saying that our demographic shift was inspired by the work of Ivan Turok, who divides the development process of urban agglomerations into two stages, one in the early development stage of the urban agglomeration, and the other is the maturity of the urban agglomeration. Our research has also confirmed that the development of urban agglomerations has phases and has certain laws 6 .

It can be seen from the above description that BTHAU is currently in the mature stage of urban agglomerations, and the central city is driving the development of surrounding cities. This discovery will help implement the central City and BTHAU's mid—and long-term development plans under the new development model and strive to achieve the tenth Five-year Plan and the 2035 development goals. Urban agglomerations have the homogeneity of development, and the development process of BHTUA has reference significance for other urban agglomerations in the early stages of development.

The spatial distribution of population in urban agglomerations tends to be balanced and then unbalanced

As shown in Fig.  7 , the population Gini coefficient of the BTHUA exhibits an "inverted U"-shaped change. The inverted "U" curve shows that as the level of urban development increases, the spatial distribution of the population presents an imbalance first and then tends to the trend of balance. This result verifies the rationality of Conclusion3. This conclusion is similar to Williamson's inverted U-shaped theory. Williamson’' 's inverted U-shaped curve reveals the relationship between the degree of regional imbalance and the level of economic development. As the economy grows, the income gap first widens and then narrows 56 . Our research reveals the relationship between population imbalance and urban development. As the level of urban development increases, the population Gini coefficient shows a change that first expands and then shrinks. Williamson and our inverted "U" curves have in common that they both represent the relationship between the degree of equilibrium of an indicator and economic development. The longitude and latitude changes of the population center in Fig.  4 are also inverted "U" shapes, corresponding to the changing trend of the Gini coefficient, which also shows the reliability of this study to a certain extent.

According to 5.2, we know that BTHAU is in the mature stage of urban agglomeration development, and we guessed that it is the function of self-organization, aggregation, and diffusion mechanism within urban agglomeration, which promotes cities in urban agglomeration to maximize their utility and achieve sustainable development of urban agglomeration population. The above statement also reminds the government and policymakers that urban agglomerations have internal mechanisms to promote their development. We should guide the development of urban agglomerations based on respecting objective facts.

Policy implication

An urban agglomeration is a semi-organic system that attracts and diffuses capital and information for development and expansion in urban agglomerations, combined population, resources, environment, society, and economy 26 . The government plays a vital role in the development of urban clusters. Under the government's guidance, the future development of the urban agglomeration will evolve into an integrated community of economy and destiny with integrated regional industrial layout, infrastructure construction, market construction, urban and rural planning and construction, environmental protection, and ecological construction. To achieve this high level of integration, the central city and peripheral cities will share a joint master plan, urban–rural development, transportation network, information flow, marketization, technological development, environmental protection, and remediation. Our research is oriented to various stages of urban agglomeration development, so we propose corresponding suggestions based on each step.

From the perspective of guiding the coordinated development of cities, when the overall economic development level of urban agglomerations is low, the government should vigorously develop central cities, improve the general level of central urban areas, encourage industrial upgrading and industrial transfer, and improve the development level of urban agglomerations; When the overall economic development level of the cluster is relatively high, the gap between cities is rather large. Policies should encourage central cities to give full play to their urban efficiency and development advantages, exert agglomeration and radiation effects, promote the development of surrounding cities, and narrow the gap between the centre and surrounding towns. From the perspective of spatial self-organization, each city in the urban agglomeration has a division of labor and cooperation with complementary advantages to promote the development of the entire urban agglomeration. The spatial population distribution of the urban agglomeration conforms to objective reality and follows certain laws. The government should reasonably guide the population distribution on respecting the law.

In the research process, there are still some problems that have not been solved, such as the built-up area is closely related to the population, but we ignore the impact of the built-up area on the people to simplify the model, which affects the actual value of the study to a certain extent. Specifically, rapid land use and land cover changes are rooted in urban population growth. As a land manager, the government should pay attention to the relationship between the population size of urban agglomerations and the area of built-up areas, grasp the development trend of the population size of urban agglomerations under the comprehensive framework of the economy, environment, and society, and formulate reasonable policies. In addition to ignoring the built-up area, the four assumptions also ignore public service factors such as education and medical care, social factors such as interpersonal relationships, social culture, climate, temperature and other natural environment factors, and population location factors. The influencing factors are also influenced by policies. Policy managers should identify the social macro environment and actively make judgments. In these relatively open and closely-connected places, the dynamic interaction of the population will promote the dynamic process of regional integration, resulting in social and cultural benefits and ensure that the value created by population diversity serves the wider public interest.

The urban population scale has different development trends under different development levels. The population center of urban agglomeration migrates first to the central city and then to the peripheral city. In this process, the distribution of the urban population scale goes through two stages equilibrium to imbalance. This paper provides an empirical basis for the sustainable development of global urban agglomerations. Specifically, the spatial distribution of urban agglomerations is demonstrated from theoretical derivation and empirical analysis, which increases the universality of the study; Analyzing the change of population size in urban agglomeration from the perspective of time and space increases the completeness of the study. However, this paper still has the following deficiencies. In terms of theoretical derivation, the study of urban population spatial distribution based on the four premises has certain limitations. In the empirical analysis, we use the resident population of prefecture-level cities and municipal districts to replace the urban population. There is a particular uncertainty in the data, leading to deviations between the predicted and actual values. Using the population center of gravity method to judge the spatial distribution of the population may not be comprehensive enough. In the future, we can gradually relax the assumptions, increase the validity of data, and use more scientific methods to explore more rigorous changes in the population size of urban agglomerations ( Supplementary Information ).

Data availability

All data generated or analyzed during this study are included in this published article. These datasets were derived from the following public domain resources: http://tjj.beijing.gov.cn/ , http://stats.tj.gov.cn/ , http://tjj.hebei.gov.cn/ .

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Conceptualization: Y.L.; Methodology: F.J.; Investigation: F.J., Y.L.; Data curation: F.J. and Y.L.; Writing original draft preparation: F.J.; Writing review and editing: Y.L. All authors reviewed the manuscript.

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Lyu, Y., Jiang, F. Spatial and temporal distribution of population in urban agglomerations changes in China. Sci Rep 12 , 8315 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-022-12274-6

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China census: Data shows slowest population growth in decades

China's population grew at its slowest pace in decades, according to government data released on Tuesday.

The average annual growth rate was 0.53% over the past 10 years, down from a rate of 0.57% between 2000 and 2010 - bringing the population to 1.41bn.

The results add pressure on Beijing to boost measures for couples to have more babies and avert a population decline.

The results were announced in a once-a-decade census, which was originally expected to be released in April.

The census was conducted in late 2020 where some seven million census takers had gone door-to-door to collect information from Chinese households.

Given the sheer number of people surveyed, it is considered the most comprehensive resource on China's population, which is important for future planning.

'Jaw-dropping' world fertility rate crash expected

• Mothers, your country needs you!

The nations with big (and small) population issues

What do we know about china's birth rate.

Ning Jizhe, head of the National Bureau of Statistics revealed that 12 million babies were born last year - a significant decrease from the 18 million newborns in 2016.

However he added that it was "still a considerable number".

Mr Ning added that a lower fertility rate is a natural result of China's social and economic development.

As countries become more developed, birth rates tend to fall due to education or other priorities such as careers.

Its neighbouring countries Japan and South Korea, for example, have also seen birth rates fall to record lows in recent years despite various government incentives for couples to have more children.

Last year, South Korea recorded more deaths than births for the first time in history, raising fresh alarm in a country which already has the world's lowest birth rate.

Shrinking populations are problematic due to the inverted age structure, with more old people than the young.

When that happens, there won't be enough workers in the future to support the elderly, and there may be an increased demand for health and social care.

Hasn't China already been trying to improve this?

Yes. In 2016, the government ended a controversial one-child policy and allowed couples to have two children.

But the reform failed to reverse the country's falling birth rate despite a two-year increase immediately afterwards.

Ms Yue Su, principal economist from The Economist Intelligence Unit, said: "While the second-child policy had a positive impact on the birth rate, it proved short-term in nature."

There had been expectations that China might scrap the family planning policy altogether along with the new census results, but this did not happen.

A report by the Financial Times in April also quoted people familiar with the matter as saying the census would reveal a population decline.

This did not happen with the 2020 report but experts have told various media outlets that it could still happen over the next few years.

"It will in 2021 or 2022, or very soon," Huang Wenzhang, a demography expert at the Centre for China and Globalisation told Reuters.

China's population trends have over the years been largely shaped by the one-child policy, which was introduced in 1979 to slow population growth.

Families that violated the rules faced fines, loss of employment and sometimes forced abortions.

What else have we learnt?

China's working-age population - which it defines as people aged between 16 and 59 - has also declined by 40 million as compared to the last census in 2010. But chief methodologist Zeng Yuping said that the total size "remains big" with 880 million.

"We still have an abundant labour force," he said.

However, economist Ms Yue warned that going forward, continued drops in the labour force "will place a cap on China's potential economic growth."

She added: "The demographic dividend that propelled the country's economic rise over recent decades is set to dissipate quickly."

After a few extra weeks in which officials were reportedly working to "prepare" the numbers and help to "set the agenda" the bottom line is the number of Chinese in China is growing - just.

Most of that is people getting older - and staying older. There was a small increase in the number of under 14s, a vindication of the decision to end the one-child policy in 2015, according to the government's census chief.

But state media is already talking about the population beginning to fall next year.

This is not a demographic change unique to China, but with the biggest population in the world and an economy that it's trying to make more reliant on domestic consumption, this is a particularly salient issue.

China's Communist leaders have already said retirement age will need to go up to deal with those demands and costs. This could mean more work to come for the country's workers.

Experts warned that any impact on China's population, such as a decline, could have a vast effect on other parts of the world.

Dr Yi Fuxian, a scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said: "China's economy has grown very quickly, and many industries in the world rely on China. The scope of the impact of a population decline would be very wide."

Additional reporting by the BBC's Yip Wai Yee

Chinese birth rate lowest in communist era

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Overpopulation and urban sustainable development—population carrying capacity in Shanghai based on probability-satisfaction evaluation method

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• Yingying Zhang 1 ,
• Yigang Wei 1 , 2 &
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With the rapid and widespread urbanization, a large number of people pour into cities, which bring a series of urban diseases and directly threaten the sustainable development of the destination city. It is particularly important to reasonably measure the population carrying capacity to promote the sustainable development of cities. Therefore, based on Shanghai’s municipal data from 1985 to 2017, this paper used the probability-satisfaction method to predict the urban population carrying capacity of Shanghai in 2020. Several important findings are derived: First, there is a general pattern that the urban population carrying capacity increases as the probability-satisfaction level decreases; second, the sensitive degrees of the population carrying capacity of different constraining factors vary. The sensitive degrees of the city’s GDP, fiscal revenues and paved road areas are lower than those of other constraining factors; third, currently the number of medical practitioners, the paved road areas and the volume of waste emission are the three most important constraining factors in Shanghai. Fourth, results of the multifactor analysis reveal that when the probability-satisfaction level is equal to the ideal level, the overall population carrying capacity of Shanghai is between 17.55 million and 23.52 million; when the probability-satisfaction level research the acceptable level, the overall population carrying capacity of Shanghai is between 20.35 million and 30.12 million people. Therefore, by 2020, the Shanghai government needs to formulate well-considering population management plan according to actual resources conditions in order to achieve balanced and sustainable urban development.

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Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful for the financial support from the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant (No. 71904009), MOE (Ministry of Education in China) Project of Humanities and Social Sciences (No. 18YJC840041) and the First-class Discipline Construction Project of Central University of Finance and Economics “Research on Innovation of Public Sector Strategy and Performance Management Theory in the New Era” (No. CUFE2019-005). Besides, the authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for insightful comments that helped us improve the quality of the paper.

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Zhang, Y., Wei, Y. & Zhang, J. Overpopulation and urban sustainable development—population carrying capacity in Shanghai based on probability-satisfaction evaluation method. Environ Dev Sustain 23 , 3318–3337 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10668-020-00720-2

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DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/s10668-020-00720-2

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China's Population Policy at the Crossroads: Social Impacts and Prospects

Quanbao jiang.

Institute for Population and Development Studies School of Public Policy and Administration Xi'an Jiaotong University Xi'an, Shaanxi Province, 710049, China

Institute for Population and Development Studies School of Public Policy and Administration Xi'an Jiaotong University Xi'an, Shaanxi Province, 710049, China nc.ude.utjx@ilhzhs Tel. /Fax: +86–29–8266–5032

Marcus W. Feldman

Morrison Institute for Population and Resource Studies Stanford University Stanford, CA 94305, USA ude.drofnats@namdlefm

China's total fertility rate fell below replacement level in the 1990s. From the 1970s the fertility rate declined dramatically, mainly as a consequence of the national population policy whose aim has been to limit birth numbers, control population growth and boost economic growth. Having achieved such a low fertility rate, how will China's population policy evolve in the future? This paper first reviews the history of China's population policy since 1970 in terms of three stages: 1970-1979; 1980-1999; and after 2000. We explore the impacts of China's population policy, including relief of pressure on China's environment and resources, fertility decline, the unexpectedly high male-biased sex ratio at birth (SRB), the coming shortage of labor force, and the rapid aging of the population. We also investigate ethical issues raised by the implementation of the policy and its results. Finally we introduce the controversy over potential adjustment of the policy, acknowledging the problems faced by western countries with low fertility and countermeasures they have taken. We offer some suggestions that might be appropriate in the Chinese context.

INTRODUCTION

Since the 1970s, China's total fertility rate has decreased dramatically. After a period of fluctuation around replacement level in the 1980s, it dropped below replacement level in the 1990s. The transition of fertility in China since the 1970s has been a demographic revolution. Analysis of the 2000 census reveals that by 2000 the total fertility rate of China had dropped to 1.4-1.6 ( Morgan et al., 2009 ). Preliminary results of the 2010 census reveal that the total fertility rate is 1.18, well below the replacement level ( PCO, 2012 ). The dramatic decline in fertility rate is at least to a certain extent attributable to China's population policy, which is known as the one child policy. From the original strict control of population growth, to stabilization of a low fertility level in the 2010s, and to “upholding and improving” the current population policy, China's population policy has undergone a series of changes, which have also affected the nation's economy and social development.

After 1949, China instituted some regulations concerning population policy, but the number of children per woman was not controlled. In the early 1950s, the policy against abortion was in fact pronatalist, as a result of which, the total population increased rapidly ( White, 2006 ). However, in the 1970s, the government recognized the impact that the rapid population growth was having on the economy and began to develop systematic policy responses. After the CPC Central Committee delivered An Open Letter to All Members of the Communist Party and Communist Youth League-on the Issue of Controlling the Population Growth in 1980, the government succeeded in dramatically decreasing the fertility level. The strict population policy during the subsequent 30 years, and the low fertility level for the past 20 years, have had broad effects on the nation's economy and social development, as well producing such unforeseen side-effects as the high male-biased sex ratio at birth (SRB) and rapid aging.

China's population policy has instigated considerable controversy, especially since fertility dropped below replacement, and many scholars suggest that the population policy needs to be adjusted. Now with the reshuffling of China's ministries and the merging of China's Population and Family Planning Commission into the new Public Health and Family Planning Commission, China's population policy has stirred up further debate. In this paper the development of the population policy is reviewed, and the impact of the population policy on society is discussed. We analyze the implementation of the population policy and related ethical issues and explore controversies over potential adjustment of this policy as well as the experience of other low fertility countries and the countermeasures they have taken. We conclude with some suggestions related to the nation's demographic and economic sustainability.

EVOLUTION OF CHINA's POPULATION POLICY

Following the foundation of the PRC in 1949, the Chinese government's policy and propaganda encouraged families to have several children ( White, 2006 ). The first census results, issued on November 1 st , 1954, showed that the population had increased very quickly. In this phase, both The Instructions on the Issue of Population Control issued by the central government in 1955 and A Report on the Recommendations of Developing Economy in the Second Five-year Plan proposed at the eighth Peoples’ Congress suggested that control of fertility was necessary ( Yang, 2003 ). However, as Mao Zedong reversed his attitude toward fertility policy, scholars such as Ma Yinchu, who advocated birth control and expressed opinions as to how birth control might be achieved, were considered as anti-Party, anti-socialist, and right-wing during the Anti-Rightist Campaign. As a result, development of a population policy was halted ( White, 2006 ).

In December 1962, the CPC Central Committee and State Council issued The Instructions on the Serious Promotion of Family Planning, which required that birth control in urban and densely populated rural areas be promoted ( Yang, 2003 ). Some densely populated provinces and cities dispatched small teams of family planning cadres to the countryside, factories, and residential areas to carry out activities supporting birth control ( Yang, 1987 ). In February 1965, the Family Planning Commission of the State Council held a “field experience-sharing” conference in Wendeng County of Shandong Province, and the slogan “one is not less, two are perfect and three are more” emerged. Population policies during the 1950s and 1960s were affected by the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, during which there was a hiatus in family planning activities ( Chang, 1992 ).

The subsequent development of China's population policy occurred in three phases: 1970-1979, during which population control was not very strict; 1980-1999, during which a policy of strict population control was implemented; after 2000, during which the policy has been to maintain a low birth rate.

The First Phase

In 1970, China's Central Political Bureau realized that population growth and its control had to be tightly integrated into economic planning ( Scharping, 2003 ). In July 1973, the State Council re-organized the leading teams administering family planning and many local governments began to re-organize or establish family planning divisions in order to promote planned childbearing in cities as well as in suburban areas all over China ( Yang, 2003 ). In December 1973, The State Council Leading Group Office of Family Planning held a national family planning “work reporting” meeting in Beijing, which promulgated the “later, longer, fewer” family planning policy. “Later” represented control of childbearing age; “longer” stood for control of childbearing intervals; and “fewer” meant control of family size. To be specific, a couple was allowed to have two children at most ( Yang, 2003 ). In 1978, the CPC Central Committee approved A Report on the First Meeting of Family Planning of State Council Leading Group, which required that divisions above the county level had to establish family planning offices, and each Commune had to appoint full-time family planning officers. The requirement in 1978 that family planning offices should be built in divisions above the county formed the administrative basis for the strict population policy of the 1980s. In addition, policies concerning urban housing, rural food rations, and private land allocation, for example, had to be aligned with family planning policies ( Yang, 2003 ).

The Second Phase

In the late 1970s, Deng Xiaoping set a goal of quadrupling annual per capita income by 2000, and emphasized the potential contribution of limiting population growth to that goal ( Greenhalgh and Winkler, 2005 ). In 1980, the CPC Central Committee delivered An Open Letter to All Members of the Communist Party and Communist Youth League-on the Issue of Controlling the Population Growth, which stated that couples should have only one child, referred to as “one-child-per-couple”, or “one-child” policy for short. The Letter asked all party members and cadres, especially leaders at all levels, to respond to the call of the State, to set an example to the people, to promote the policy, and to aggressively push ahead with family planning work.

In urban areas, admission to nursery schools, enrollment in schools, medical care, recruitment in factories, housing, and social welfare, etc. were allocated by the government. As a result, it was easier for urban administrations to accept the state's restriction and over 90% of families in the urban areas were persuaded to have only one child ( Kane and Choi, 1999 ). Those who agreed to have one child would receive a “one-child certificate” that entitled them to receive government awards, including cash, more convenient access to public nurseries, more educational opportunities for their children, subsidies for medical care, better housing and additional food ( Wang, 1996 ; White, 2006 ). In rural areas, large families with many songs were the favored family structure. Since farmers had no savings or pensions, in their old age they had to rely on children for support, which produced opposition to the one-child policy ( Kane and Choi 1999 ). This resistance to the one-child policy in rural areas in China led to less strict implementation. In 1984, demographic statistics indicated a looser implementation of the policy compared with the early 1980s ( Hesketh and Zhu, 1997 ). Subsequent modifications of the policy gradually gave rise to the current policy, namely one-child in the urban areas and a “1.5 children policy” (rural couples whose first child was a girl were permitted to have another child) in most rural areas, with even fewer restrictions in minority areas and in other special situations ( Gu et al., 2007 ). As Greenhalgh (2008) points out, “China's one-child-per-couple policy is one of the most troubling social policies of modern times” and “was out of touch with Chinese realities”.

The foundation for such a policy is Malthus's theory; the nation did not have enough land or natural resources to support the growing population. In the 1970s, after Mao Zedong demolished sociology and demography in China, there were few qualified demographers 1 . The Chinese missile scientist Song Jian employed equations to model population control on a fictional island. He projected that the total population would peak at 4 billion in 2080, although without any basis in reliable data. According to his projection, China's population could reach 1.5 billion by 2020, which was viewed as a disaster that could be avoided only by quickly adopting a one-child policy ( Greenhalgh and Winkler, 2005 ). The 2000 population target that would allow Deng's economic goal to be attained was about 1.2 billion, which also required a one-child policy ( Greenhalgh and Winkler, 2005 ). Deng Xiaoping was worried that population growth would affect the implementation of economic reform policies and felt that for China's economic development and improvement of living standards, population growth had to be controlled. Song's astonishing projection wowed Chinese leaders, propelling them toward the one child policy ( Hvistendahl, 2010 ). Actually in the An Open Letter to All Members of the Communist Party and Communist Youth League-on the Issue of Controlling the Population Growth issued in 1980, the government was already aware of a total fertility rate of 2.2, slightly above the replacement level, and of a projected peak of 1.5 billion for the population around 2020 (as stated ‘in forty years’ from 1980). But in order to accelerate economic development, the one-child policy was instituted. Even in 2006, China's population size, the first target of population policy, was projected to peak at 1.5 billion with a total fertility rate of 1.8 by the National Population Strategy , but the preliminary results of the 2010 census indicate a size of only 1.339 billion (for mainland China). It is projected to peak at 1.4 billion at most, and will then steeply decline ( United States Census bureau, 2009 ). The potential negative growth momentum following the decline has not garnered much attention.

The Third Phase

In 2000, the CPC Central Committee and State Council issued A Decision on Strengthening Population and Family Planning Work and Stabilizing a Low Fertility Rate, which stated that after the successful transformation to low fertility, the first priority of work in the population and family planning administration was to maintain the low birth rate and to improve the population “quality”. In 2002, China began to carry out Population and Family Planning Law of the People's Republic of China that codified the policy and previous regulations, and transformed the family planning policy from Party demands to the status of law. Either in principle or in implementation, these reforms have not been completed, but they represented a major improvement over the previous situation and allowed for formal planning of a future population policy ( Winckler, 2002 ). In general, reduction of population growth as well as promotion and implementation of the one-child rule became the responsibility of each province, which would be in charge of making its own policies. In January 2006, the national population and family planning conference announced that the 'Eleventh Five' period was crucial for stabilizing low birth rates to address population issues and to continue the nation's socio-economic development. Once again the importance of stabilizing low birth rate was stressed. However, both State Councilor Hua Jianmin of the Population and Reproductive Policy Forum of the State Council on August 30, 2004, and director Zhang Weiqing of the Population Experts Conference on January 24, 2006, stressed the importance of intensified research on fertility policy ( Gu, 2010 ).

An important feature of China's current population policy is that the formulation and implementation of the policy is localized. Under instruction from the central government, the planning and operation of the policy is under the control of local governments, especially provincial governments. In order to meet the social, economic and cultural conditions of different regions, local governments are relatively flexible when carrying out the national policy. If the present policy were to be rigorously implemented, the average number of children per woman would be 1.465 ( Gu et al., 2007 ).

In March 2013, China decided to reshuffle its ministries, removing the Population and Family Planning Commission and merging it into the new Public Health and Family Planning Commission. Despite the official announcement of continuation and consistency in the implementation of the current population policy, the removal of the Population and Family Planning Commission may indicate a potential modification of the policy in the near future.

SOCIAL IMPACTS

China's population policy has clearly played a major role in decreasing the fertility level; however, it has also had many side effects ( Wu et al., 2008 ). Already in the middle 1980s, far-sighted demographers predicted that if the one-child policy were to achieve complete success, these side effects would become much more serious ( Bongaarts and Greenhalgh, 1985 ; Greenhalgh and Bongaarts, 1987 ). The 1980 Open Letter refuted concerns about some side effects, such as possible shortfalls in manpower, rapid population aging, and distortions in sex ratios ( Greenhalgh and Winkler, 2005 ). However, after 30 years of implementation, with elimination of 100 million to 400 million births according to different estimates ( Cai, 2010 ), the one-child policy, initiated during Deng's administration, has created vast social difficulties and human suffering ( Greenhalgh and Winkler, 2005 ).

Relief of the Population Pressures on the Environment and Economy

Before we introduce side effects, we do acknowledge that the policy did have positive effects. The purpose of China's population policy has been to reduce family size, in order to increase per capita GDP and other measures of economic development. In rural areas, more and more people understand that more children represent a heavier burden. It is argued that China's family planning policy has averted the births of hundreds of millions of people, relieving pressures on resources of local communities, of the nation, as well as on the environment ( Kane and Choi, 1999 ).

The low fertility level has relieved some of the pressure on peoples’ livelihood, on education, on job hunting and on medical care, and in turn has saved the nation and families the resources that would have had to be expended on education. The primary beneficiaries of the population policy have been mothers and children: for children, especially girls in one-child families, can receive more of the family's resources since there is no competition from brothers; for mothers, frequency of childbearing is reduced, which reduces maternal morbidity and mortality. Also, women have more time to work, become more independent, and elevate their social standing ( Hesketh and Zhu, 1997 ).

Decreased fertility plays a positive role in economic growth in the early stages of the demographic transition. Low fertility can effectively change the investment model of human capital; it can improve the development and quality of human capital. The early stages of a low fertility regime stimulate the demographic dividend that facilitates economic development. Analysis of China has shown that since reform and opening up, the contribution of the decline in the dependency ratio to the savings rate is around 7.5%, which has contributed more than 25 percent of the country's economic growth. If we take the future demographic dividend into consideration, the population transition may contribute 1/3 to China's economic development ( Wang et al., 2004 ).

Decline of the Fertility Level

There was a spontaneous decline of fertility in the late 1960s and early 1970s, even earlier in some areas. In the mid-1970s, population policy accelerated the decline of fertility ( Wu, 1986 ). But this fertility decline should not be attributed solely to the administrative population policy; at least part of the decline resulted from economic development ( Tien, 1984 ). Even the relationship between state population policy and socio-demographic change remains unclear; it is generally believed that the birth control program and socioeconomic development exerted equal influence in the 1970s and 1980s, but that the program's influence declined in the 1990s and 2000s ( Greenhalgh and Winkler, 2005 ). Changes in the total fertility rate are tracked in Figure 1

Total fertility rate in China: 1950-2008. Data sources: data for 1950-1989 are from Sun and Jin (1994) ; data for 1990-2008 are from Guo (2010) .

It is agreed that from the early 1990s, the total fertility rate was below replacement level, even though no official estimate was issued. The National Population and Family Planning Commission (NPFPC) claimed a total fertility rate of 1.8, unchanged for quite a long time. From the 1990 census to the 2000 census, China's population grew 11.7% (1.07 per cent annually). From the 2000 census to the 2010 census, preliminary results indicate that the total population grew 5.8% (0.57 per cent annually), from 1.27 billion to 1.34 billion, in which case the total fertility rate would have fallen below 1.5 children per couple ( Hvistendahl, 2011 ).

Investigations in different areas in China have shown that increasing emphasis has been placed on socio-economic development in bringing down the fertility level ( Cai, 2010 ). A survey of desired fertility and fertility behavior showed the popularity of the low fertility behavior pattern. No one in the survey preferred more than two children and the average ideal number was 1.34. The low fertility rate in China is no longer the result of the government's birth control policy, but is due a change in people's desired fertility and childbearing behavior ( Cai et al., 2010 ). After many years of implementation of the policy and with socio-economic development, people's fertility attitude and behavior have changed; their desired fertility is close to that set by the policy ( Gu et al., 2007 ). Because of the commercialization and monetization of daily life caused by economic emancipation, rising education costs and the higher cost of child rearing, China's fertility rate would remain below replacement level even if the government were to give up the current birth policy ( Merli and Morgan, 2010 ). In 2020, the total fertility rate is projected to fall below 1.4 ( Morgan et al., 2009 ), and China may fall into the category of lowest low fertility-a total fertility rate of 1.3 or below ( Hvistendahl, 2011 ). China has had a low fertility for about 20 years, and now it is time to be alert to the low fertility trap that has affected Europe and South Korea ( Lutz et al., 2006 ; Lutz, 2008 ), because it is quite difficult to reverse the downward trend once it falls below 1.5 ( McDonald, 2006 ), even though some demographers are optimistic of a future return to a higher fertility level after a certain point of development ( Myrskylä et al., 2009 ; Tuljapurkar, 2009 ).

China's population and family planning commission “euphorically claims that its birth planning policy is a great success and boasts that the policy has prevented 400 million additional births” ( Cai, 2010 ). With a total fertility rate of 1.5, the population size for a generation will decline by 25 percent compared with the preceding generation. Such a decline in births has had some effect on elementary schools. In 2009, there were 280,200 elementary schools, 16.37 million new enrollments, and 100.71 million students in all. In contrast, in 2000 there were 553,600 elementary schools, 19.46 million new enrollments, and 130.13 million students in all 2 .

Sex Ratio at Birth and Bare Branches

China's sex ratio at birth (SRB) stirred debate as early as the release of the 1982 census results, and the SRB has increased steadily with the decline in the fertility rate.

This phenomenon is not exclusive to China with its strict family planning policy; it has also happened in countries where there is a less stringent population policy or even without such policy, such as in Taiwan, South Korea, or India. As a result, some argue that it is not attributable to China's population policy. However, in 2000 the sex ratio at birth in areas of China that carry out a one-child policy was 111.6; in areas that allow two children it was 109.0; in areas with a one and a half children policy it was 124.7; which is 15.7 percentage points higher than that in the two-children policy areas, suggesting a direct relationship ( Gu et al., 2007 ).

Recently optimism about China's SRB is centered on an apparent decline. Based on data from census and intercensal samples, some researchers claim that a decrease in SRB in China is on the way or has already happened, as in South Korea ( Das Gupta et al., 2009 ; Guilmoto, 2009 ). Whether the SRB will decline or continue to increase, or remain at a high level, around 120, is currently uncertain. The SRB for 2000 was 116.9, from the census short from, while that from the long form was 119.9, a statistic cited more often but less reliable ( Goodkind, 2011 ). The SRB from preliminary results of 2010 census stands at 118.6, a rise compared with the more reliable estimate of 116.9 from the 2000 census.

The increasing SRB has led to an unbalanced sex structure in the population and the phenomenon of “missing women”. As a consequence, many men cannot find a mate, and after 2010, China will experience a male marriage squeeze that will last several decades ( Tuljapurkar et al., 1995 ). There are quite a lot of factors contributing to the marriage squeeze, such as SRB, migration, gender differentials in mortality, changes in birth cohort sizes over time, and age gaps between spouses ( Beiles, 1994 ). But for the population as a whole, the most basic factors are the numbers of marriageable males and females. This, according to Goodkind (2006) , is not only due to the sex ratio imbalance but also to the changing age structure ( Goodkind 2006 ). Without decomposing the influences of age structure and gender structure on the marriage squeeze, Jiang et al. (2011) , with an adjusted sex ratio of potential marriage partners, finds that the proportion of excess males fluctuate around 16 percent from 2015 to 2045, and annually there are one million more excess males.

With women choosing to migrate in order to make better marriages, surplus males, labeled as “bare branches”, are more concentrated in poor areas. In many poverty-stricken remote rural areas of several provinces, the numbers of bare branches have increased and “bare-branch villages” have formed ( Jiang and Sánchez Barricarte 2013 ). A bare-branch class, consisting of 40 million to 50 million males, will come into being at the lowest strata of Chinese society ( Chen 2006 ). These bare branches, already at a disadvantage and having little stake in the generally accepted system, may be readily inclined to take collective action to improve their own situation and status, with violence and crimes if necessary ( Hudson and den Boer, 2004 ).

Coming Shortage of Labour Force

Very low fertility leads to serious future labor shortages, especially a shortage of young skilled workers at a time when populations are aging rapidly ( McDonald, 2006 ). China's family planning policy is claimed to have averted the increase in population of some hundreds of millions of people, and at the same time has eliminated hundreds of millions of potential laborers. In the short term, the fall in the fertility rate has lowered the youth dependency ratio and increased the working-age share of total population, thus raising income per capita. China's dramatic decline in fertility and number of births has realized the window of opportunity--the so called demographic dividend. The benefit of this demographic dividend is estimated to have accounted for 15 to 25 percent of China's economic growth between 1980 and 2000 ( Wang, 2011 ). However, China has largely exhausted its demographic dividend, as the labor supply has changed. If the labor force participation rate remains the same, at an annual economic growth rate of 8% there will be a gap between the total demand and supply of labor. In 2003, the shortage of migrant workers began to affect China's southeastern coastal areas; in 2004, this was felt mainly in the Pearl River Delta in Guangdong Province and Fuzhou and Xiamen in Fujian Province. In 2005, the shortage began to spread to the Yangtze River Delta and the northern coast. Even Hunan and Jiangxi, which are big provinces that export a lot of labor, suffered from recruitment difficulties. The shortage of migrant workers indicates that surplus labor in the rural areas of China is becoming limited ( Wang et al., 2006 ).

China's comparative advantage is still embodied in labor-intensive low-end commodities; timely and sufficient supply of a skilled labor force is vital if China is to sustain its economic growth ( Cai and Wang, 2006 ). Recently, especially since the 2008 global economic crisis, China's real economy has remained stagnant, and the development pattern relying on input of cheap labor now has encountered great difficulty, as the era of abundant supply of inexpensive labor that enabled China to become the world's largest manufacturing center in the last two decades will soon be exhausted. The trends in population structure and demand for and supply of labor require an economic transition from an inputs-driven growth pattern to a productivity-driven one ( Cai and Wang, 2010 ). However, due to lack of substantial promotion of the human capital, such a transition is not yet in sight. On the contrary, with the economic crisis and recession and increasing labor costs, many factories have closed down. As a result, massive urban unemployment tends to stir up social unrest and raise the possibility of political destabilization ( Solinger, 2007 ; Cai and Chan, 2009 ).

Although the rapid aging of China's population is partly related to increased life expectancy, the decline in births under the family planning policy has resulted in a decrease in the child population and subsequently in the working-age population, which is a more important factor ( Wu et al., 2008 ). The demographic shift is not only the result of socioeconomic development, but also an important result of implemenatation of the rigid family-planning program; these have made the transition not only the world's largest, but also the world's fastest ( Cai, 2007 ).

The aging of its population is one of China's most crucial problems; it will affect the standard of living, the pattern of savings and the ability of the government to implement comprehensive social security. Rapid increase in the proportion of the elderly will lead to a shortage of old age support and care in the future ( Wang and Mason, 2007 ). With the one-child family, there is a 4-2-1 family structure, i.e. a family consists of paternal and maternal grandparents, a couple and one child. In the absence of formal social insurance, this places tremendous pressure on the family. This new family structure is a serious challenge to the government's financial planning for the future demographic structure of the country ( Flaherty et al., 2007 ).

An additional insecurity for the elderly population is the possibility of losing an only child. With the full implementation of China's birth control policy and the continuing low fertility, the total number of single children shows continuous and rapid growth. Yang and Wang (2007) estimate the number of only children between the ages of 0 and 17 reached 95.47 million by the end of 2000, and in 2005, the number of only children aged 0 to 30 is estimated at 158.41 million ( Wang, 2011 ). Using China's life tables from the 2000 census, our estimate of Chinese male's (usually the household head) possibility of losing their child when the former enter old age is shown in Figure 3 . At 60, a father faces a probability of over six percent of losing his child, and at 90, it is over ten percent. This will leave many parents with no living child when they enter old age.

Cumulative probability of losing a child.

On June 5th 2012, over 80 parents who lost their only child gathered at the National Family and Birth Planning Commission of P.R.C. expressing their vulnerability after losing their only child, and their hope for financial reimbursement from governments, and more importantly, the hope of establishing a corresponding department to which those who complied with the national family planning policy but now unfortunately have lost their only child could turn to when needed 3 .

Not having a living child will cause psychological pressure, but even worse is the economic burden. China's decline in its labor pool, and the aging process, are occurring much faster than expected. How will China support its old age security systems as the old age dependency ratio increases steeply?

In rural China, the majority of older adults who had lived as peasants or worked in certain informal sectors when they were young and continued to work when older until becoming unable to do so, have had little access to social security ( Randel et al., 1999 ). Recently, China has begun to establish social security retirement systems in rural areas. However, in the foreseeable future, such systems will not cover all of the rural population, and the pension that these rural residents receive will be far from sufficient to support them in their old age, especially with inflation as high as it is now. Even in the cities, the old-age social security system fails to cover all older people; furthermore, nursing institutions for older adults are inadequate.

Aging puts pressure on government finances through the growing burden of pensions, but eventually also on the labor force that has to support the rising number of pensioners. The financial health of the system, which is largely financed through payroll taxes paid by current workers in a pay-as-you-go manner, is sensitive to the ratio of dependents to workers. The government has several choices to make both ends meet, such as raising the retirement age or reducing the benefits of retirees. But such measures have produced protests and social unrest in other societies 4 . One possible way is to raise the tax rate on the working age population, but if the old-age dependency ratio increases by a factor of six, such a measure would not be enough to bridge the financial gap. Even worse, China's social security retirement system operates with empty personal accounts. In the 1990s, the potential pension liability was already 1,917.6 billion RMB, taking up 46 to 69 percent of GDP ( World Bank, 1997 ). Now the potential pension liability is generally estimated at 3,000 billion RMB ( Wang, 2008 ). As the aging process accelerates, solvency of the old age security systems is in great doubt and may drag down the whole economy, causing social disharmony and instability.

Extinction of Racial and Cultural Diversity

Since the strict implementation of population policy, China's total fertility rate has dropped steeply ( Figure 1 ). Many studies point out that the TFR is affected by many factors, such as delayed childbearing, and hence distorts and underestimates the actual fertility level exaggerating the fertility decline ( Bongaarts and Feeney, 1998 ; Lutz et al., 2003 ). Even so, China's actual fertility decline is astonishing. Unfortunately, this remarkable decline in fertility appears to have affected small ethnic groups. Although families from small, endangered ethic groups in remote regions are permitted to have two or more children, for some ethnic groups no limitation was imposed ( Gu et al., 2007 ). The lack of social welfare for these groups in rural China is a disincentive to have large families, exacerbating the population decline and leading to more rapid population decreases for these groups, which may soon face the risk of extinction ( Cao and Wang, 2010 ).

According to the China Statistics Bureau, 48 of the 55 minority ethnic groups have attained below-replacement level fertility of 2.1 children per couple. Their problem will be exacerbated by distorted sex ratios and rural-to-urban migration ( Cao and Wang, 2010 ), especially the marriage migration of marriageable females. Recently, a township of Yao ethnic people in southern Guizhou province issued a notice saying that young Yao males who marry non-Yao brides will be awarded 1,000 to 3,000 yuan, because about 50 percent of Yao females married out and many of the remaining males are forced to stay single. The Yao people, abiding by the tradition of not marrying non-Yao females, have to adopt non-Yao females 5 .

ETHICAL ISSUES

China's one-child policy addresses the macro concerns of population and economics, but neglects the social impact on individual families. The extremely strict fertility policy places too much emphasis on the national interest, and too little on the interest of the family. In addition, the economic incentives and penalties associated from the beginning with the fertility policy have meant huge losses for those families with births outside the program ( Nie and Wyman, 2005 ). Family planning staffs are encouraged to apply both incentives and penalties: rewards go to young couples who adhere strictly to the policy requirements, while those who do not comply with the policy are punished ( Short et al., 2000 ). Some feminists have expressed concern about the side-effects of contraception on women's health, and have questioned the ethical validity of population goals and material incentives in the government's fertility policy ( Blanc and Tsui, 2005 ).

The ambitious population goals of the central government are often taken extremely seriously by local officials whose aim is to demonstrate their organizational capacity and political commitment. Under pressure to achieve specific short-term goals, direct enforcement measures have been key tools in the policy implementation in many places ( White, 1994 ). If a woman gives birth, she is forced to use an IUD and if she has two children, she is often required to undergo sterilization. To achieve the fertility target, some women are forced to have an abortion and the family planning staff usually encourages couples who have used up their fertility quota or have more than one child to accept sterilization. Although some studies have emphasized that sterilization is voluntary, others have found that, in order to achieve their targets, family planning cadres who are under great pressure have forced women to be sterilized ( Short et al., 2000 ).

In rural areas, the household contract responsibility system was completed in the early 1980s and the disintegration of the collective economy made the work of rural family planning cadres more difficult. They loosened the strict control on farmers that they had under the collective economy. The power balance between cadres and farmers was altered with the change in economic structure. Farmers were no longer as vulnerable as they had been, and when they felt mistreated, they were now prepared to vent their anger or hostility on cadres. This situation has changed the implementation of one-child policy and as a result of rising tension between cadres and the people, some family planning cadres were even worried about their personal safety ( Greenhalgh, 1990 ; White, 1994 ).

In 1991, the government introduced the “one-vote veto” policy which connected family planning achievements to the cadre's promotion chances. The first rank of cadres in the party and government would “take personal charge of family planning work and take overall responsibility”, and the target management responsibility system was also introduced. If the population control program goals were not met, local department cadres and their party and government leaders were not able to participate in program appraisal, receive awards and promotions or other benefits. Conflict developed between local stresses in enforcing the law and meeting performance criteria. As a result, false population statistics were produced to avoid confrontation and to give the impression of excellent performance and achievements. This not only encouraged local leaders to falsely report low fertility rates in their administrative units, but incited other false data reports, which led to the collapse of the birth registration system ( Scharping, 2003 ). In order to pass “examinations”, local leaders would delay reports on new births in their areas, or even conceal or omit some sector of the local population, especially girl babies and unplanned births ( Zhang and Zhao, 2006 ). To match the set quotas, local cadres manipulated the data while the higher cadres had no motive to find flaws in the data; therefore, the false data would be reported upward through the bureaucratic hierarchy ( Bongaarts and Greenhalgh, 1985 ).

Many Chinese have a strong preference for sons and when the number and sex of children are in conflict and if there is a possibility of prenatal gender determination, farmers will choose the gender of their children at small psychological cost. The fertility policy has strengthened realized son preference which has increased the rate of abortion and concomitantly increased the risk to women's health (Chu, 2001). In fact, the government's 1.5-child policy is actually telling farmers that the value of a girl is not as great as that of a boy. The 1.5-child policy has stimulated son preference and prenatal sex identification, which have produced seriously abnormal sex ratios ( Zeng, 2007 ). In addition, girl babies have a higher mortality rate and even female baby infanticide occurs under extreme conditions. This phenomenon is rooted in the traditional son preference, but exacerbated by the one-child policy ( Hesketh and Zhu, 1997 ).

A one-child family faces the risk of losing its only child. Suppose there are 150 million one-child families. Then the number of these that lose their child is huge even with China's relatively low mortality rates, and will become a serious social problem. Other harmful effects of the one-child policy relate to the population's age structure, relations within families, social and psychological characteristics of only children and widespread gender inequality. However, these problems are just the tip of an iceberg. The one-child policy has changed the social structure of the Chinese people and has ruined the ability of families to support their aged members. In addition, it has prevented creation of an industrialization miracle such as occurred in Japan after the Second World War. Some of these problems were in the culture before, but if the one-child policy were to achieve complete success, the problems described above would become much more serious ( Bongaarts and Greenhalgh, 1985 ).

PROSPECTS FOR FUTURE POPULATION POLICIES

Debate on current policy.

China is the only country that has a strict birth control policy and people have debated this policy and its high social and political cost from the very beginning of its implementation. Some Chinese social scientists were strongly against the policy on the grounds that it would cause micro-individual frustration of fertility aspirations and macro-demographic distortions of age structure ( Greenhalgh and Winkler, 2005 ). Many Western scholars believe that there are too many problems caused by the one-child policy and that an easily accepted replacement policy that will reduce the potential problems due to the one-child policy should be sought. They advocate the two-child and birth spacing policy as a replacement policy for the current strict fertility policy, which could also achieve the Chinese government's population goals ( Bongaarts and Greenhalgh, 1985 ; Greenhalgh and Bongaarts, 1987 ). Zeng and Vaupel (1989) and Vaupel and Zeng (1991) concluded that two children with delayed childbirth would be the best replacement for the one-child policy and would avoid the problems of rapid growth of the total population and of the elderly sector. Unfortunately these proposed replacement policies have not been considered.

At the present time, China's population planners face new challenges and choices. Should the current fertility policy be modified and when and how to modify it have become hot topics in academic circles. Professor Cheng Enfu, an economist and a deputy to the People's Congress and the president of the Marxist department of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS), advocates that the current fertility policy should become an even stricter one-child policy. He proposes rigorous implementation of the one-child policy, which is “one child for urban and rural areas; two children for special families; three children is seriously prohibited; and families with no children should be rewarded”.

Li Xiaoping, from the Institute of Population and Labor Economics of the CASS, is against to any two-child policy reforms; he advocates that great efforts should be made to encourage more families to have only one child in order to accelerate attainment of zero population growth.

On the other hand, more scholars suggest a less strict policy. In 2004, many demographers in China signed and submitted Suggestions on Alteration of China's Population Policy to the National Population and Family Planning Commission. They proposed a gradual adjustment program, and in 2009, they resubmitted the proposal ( Gu, 2010 ). In March 2007, during the National People's Congress and CPPCC, Ye Tingfang, a CPPCC National Committee member and Chinese Academy of Social Sciences researcher, submitted a proposal together with other members that appealed for abolition of one-child policy as soon as possible; the president of the Chinese People's University, Ji Baocheng, a member of NPC, submitted suggestions four years consecutively in 2008, 2009, 2010, and 2011, that the population policy should be changed to “one child is encouraged, two children are allowed, three children are forbidden and no child is rewarded”; in March 2010, at the third session of the CPPCC National Committee, CPPCC National Committee members, Wang Ming, a professor at Tsinghua University, Liu Dajun, a professor at Shangdong University, and others proposed that the one-child-policy-dominated family planning policy has accomplished its goals, and one child should be advocated and two children permitted. In March 2011, they submitted a similar proposal. In March 2011, the Phoenix TV Station held an oral debate entitled Will China's Population Boom if the Population Policy is Terminated, in which some deputies of the National People's Congress and scholars participated. The majority of scholars insist that in order to mitigate the negative effect that the decline in fertility level might exert on economic and social development, the population policy should be altered.

As far as the government is concerned, the significance of maintaining low fertility was emphasized once again both in Decisions on Reinforcing Population and Family Planning Policy and Stabilizing Low Fertility Level issued by the Central Committee of the CPC and the State Council in 2000, and in Decisions on the overall Reinforcement in Population and Family Planning and the Resolution of Population Problem issued in 2006. On March 1, 2011, when the director of the National Population and Family Planning Committee inspected family planning work in Huizhou City, Guangdong Province, she gave instructions that the low fertility level should be stabilized and should not be relaxed 6 . On April 26, 2011, President Hu Jintao addressed the collective study conference of the Political Bureau of CPC Central Committee and stated that the current family planning policy should be stabilized and improved. But how to improve it remains ambiguous. In March 2013, the Population and Family Planning Commission was removed as an independent ministry, and it remains to be seen what will happen to the current population policy.

Lessons learned from other Countries

We can learn from the experience of other low fertility countries that have experienced corresponding social and economic problems. The fertility level in Russia was above replacement the late 1980s, but it has dropped to around 1.3 at present. This decline, due to factors that have been specific to the nature of reform in Russia's political system, has led to a population crisis that is recognized nationally and internationally. Russian President Putin pointed out in the State of the Union in 2000 that the population in Russia was declining annually and if this trend were to continue, the existence of Russian people would be endangered. In order to encourage childbearing, at the beginning of the 21 st century, the Putin government issued a new population policy and established a series of measures that encourage childbearing. He asked the government to set up a Social Population Problems Committee to study and formulate population policy. To date, however these policies have had no obvious effect.

Decline in fertility in Europe has been mainly due to cultural changes in desired family structure. In 2005, among 41 countries whose data were available, 11 had total fertility level below 1.3, 20 were below 1.4, 28 were below 1.5 and 35 were below 1.8 (Frejka et al., 2008). Rapid aging and decline of population size is a great threat to economies, labor markets, social welfare systems and infrastructure in European society ( Sobotka, 2007 ). Continued low fertility will lead in the long run to a significant drop in the relative size of the working-age population. Without substantial adjustments in labor force participation or migration policies, the potential negative repercussions on the European economy are large ( Bloom et al., 2009 ). In 40 years, the working-age population in European countries will decrease by 40%, economic growth in Europe will suffer a dramatic decline, and the social welfare systems will break down because of the increased dependency ratios ( Longman, 2004 ). The Green Paper of the European Commission in 2005 noted that low fertility is a major challenge, and the need to shift to population growth is one of the three most important problems facing the EU ( Sobotka, 2007 ).

Japan began to implement a fertility policy to control population growth in the 1950s. Initially, the decrease in its fertility was due to this policy, but with the development of its economy, the fertility decline began to reflect people's changed desired number of children. Long-term low fertility in Japan has led to negative population growth since 2005. If fertility were to remain constant at the current level, each successive generation would decline at a rate of approximately 40 percent ( Ogawa, 2007 ). This sharp decrease in population will cause problems for its industrial economy and social welfare systems. The Japanese government is worried that the decrease in fertility will decrease the vitality of the Japanese economy and that it will be difficult for the country to support its social security system ( Ogawa and Retherford, 1997 ). When Japan's fertility rate dropped to 1.57 in 1989, there were dramatic reactions. From that time, the Japanese government began to encourage increased fertility, but many years of great effort by the government has not led to a clear increase in Japan's total fertility rate.

The Republic of Korea carried out a population policy to control population growth in the 1960s, with a family planning program that was considered to be one of the most successful in the world. Fertility reached replacement level in 1983 and by 2005 the total fertility rate was 1.08. Having realized the seriousness of low fertility problems, Korea implemented Laws on Low Fertility and Population Aging in May 2005 and set up the Low Fertility Level and Population Aging Committee with the president as the chairman. The committee consisted of 20 relevant ministers and experts who were in charge of evaluating important political issues concerning low fertility and population aging ( Cho, 2005 ). In the afternoon of June 9 th , 2009, more than 1,000 people from the South Korean government, religious, economic, and social organizations, including President Li Mingbo and major government department leaders, gathered in Seoul to discuss the problem of how to encourage childbearing. Although Korea has adopted many measures, scholars do not believe that such policy alternatives are able to solve the problem.

Our Proposal

Low fertility rate is becoming a global phenomenon, and the downward trend in fertility is no longer confined to developed countries, but has extended to developing countries. For more than 20 years, the fertility rate of China has been below replacement level, and as the country goes through an accelerated aging phase, in the near future there will be negative population growth. The one-child policy has been implemented continuously for the past 30 years, but policy makers have not considered that the number of children desired by the average family has also changed during this time ( Cai et al., 2010 ).

The government does not want to loosen restrictions in its birth policy because it is worried about the possibility that the fertility rate will rebound once they stop birth control. But will the fertility rate of China reach replacement level with an unrestricted policy? The one-child policy and the 1.5-child policy in rural areas have been implemented for one generation, which is sufficient time to allow personal preferences regarding children to develop in line with national policy. Because of the commercialization and monetization of daily life caused by economic emancipation, rising education costs and the higher cost of child rearing, China's fertility rate would remain below replacement level even if the government were to give up the current birth policy ( Merli and Morgan, 2010 ). Scholars who advocate easing the current birth policy warn that once a low fertility norm is generally accepted, even encouragement of increased fertility will not change the trend to low fertility as can be seen from the countries mentioned above ( Peng, 2007 ). A survey on desired fertility and fertility behavior showed the popularity of low fertility behavior pattern in Jiangsu, a prosperous southern province ( Cai et al., 2010 ). No one in the survey preferred more than two children and the average ideal number was 1.34. This number is reported according to the current birth policy that permits two girls in one family. And similarly low fertility intention and behavior has been observed in some other national and regional surveys ( Yang, 2011 ). Low fertility behavior and the related fertility policy show that the low fertility rate in China is no longer the result of the government's birth control policy, but is due to a change in people's desired fertility and childbearing behavior ( Cai et al., 2010 ). After many years of implementation of the policy and socio-economic development, people's fertility attitudes and behaviors have changed; their desired fertility is close to that set by the policy ( Gu et al., 2007 ). Preliminary results of the 2010 census indicate the proportion of Chinese aged 14 and under has fallen to 16.6%, compared with 22.9% in the 2000 census, and the total fertility rate fallen below 1.5 children per couple ( Hvistendahl, 2011 ). The fertility policy has become a part of people's normal fertility behavior ( Nie and Wyman, 2005 ). Actually, the one-child policy is already obsolete ( Hvistendahl, 2010 ).

This suggests that modification of the fertility policy is inevitable. There are three proposed modifications. The first is a slight modification and natural transition. If one or two members of a couple are from a one-child family, the couple should be permitted to have two children and the current 1.5-child policy in rural areas would not change. Actually, if two spouses are both only children, then currently the couple is permitted to have two children. The second is to release or abolish the fertility interval that is part of the 1.5-child policy and change gradually to a two-child policy. The third is a gradual transition to a general two-child policy in urban and rural areas ( Zeng, 2007 ). These options are flexible and adaptable, and by taking advantage of the newly developed environment in China, we propose that the birth policy should be a universal two-child policy in both urban and rural areas in the coming years and any institutional birth control be removed in coming decades.

CONCLUSIONS

The one-child policy is perhaps the most ambitious family planning policy in the world. It connects population growth control and economic modernization. The Chinese government stands firmly behind controlling population growth and plays a leading role in the implementation of the policy. In implementing the population policy, education is a priority, while incentives and penalties play an important role. The particularly strict one-child policy in China has been widely criticized around the world, including by some international allies, and has damaged China's international image ( Zeng, 2007 ).

At the beginning of the implementation of the fertility policy in China, the government encouraged the one-child family with economic and administrative incentives, punishing couples who had more children and cadres who didn't meet the fertility targets. This reduced the benefits of the program, and because of the implementation of a veto, if a cadre couldn't achieve the fertility goals, he would suffer from the pressure of lower wages or dismissal ( Rutherford et al., 2005 ). As a result, the policies were resisted strongly in rural areas during the early period of the policy implementation. In order to ease the conflict, in 1984, the Government loosened the policy and introduced the 1.5-child policy: if the first child is a girl, the couple is allowed to have a second ( Zeng, 2007 ). The current fertility policy requires about 63% of families to have only one child ( Gu et al., 2007 ).

The original purpose of the population policy was to control population growth and to promote economic development, and the policy has fulfilled those tasks. China's 2010 census reveals that the total population grew 5.8% since 2000, from 1.27 billion to 1.34 billion, compared with a rate of 11.7%, almost double, from 1990 census to 2000 census ( Hvistendahl, 2011 ). The population policy has led to economic growth and has played a positive role in alleviating environmental and economic pressures. It also has helped children's education and women's health and has improved women's social status. However, these benefits have had a high social and political cost; for example, the high sex ratio, sex imbalance in the marriage market and rapid aging. These are far worse than originally expected and have become serious social problems.

The policies also have ethical problems, such as the relation between population goals and material incentives, enforced abortions, the strained relationship between cadres and the people during the implementation period, the data system failure because of false data, and abortion for sex selection. All of these problems influence social development. The one-child policy has changed the fabric of Chinese culture.

Although China is not yet ready to give up its current birth policy, administrative control of personal decisions will generate an increasing array of problems. Less restrictive policies are realistic alternatives whose consequences are likely to be socially and economically positive for the nation. Does the current fertility policy need modification? When and how should it be modified? Many scholars estimate that the current fertility rate is between 1.4 and 1.6, and may drop to 1.4 in 2020 ( Morgan et al., 2009 ). From international experience, when the fertility rate is below 1.5, it is very difficult to affect the trend to low fertility. White (2006) refers to China's birth planning as the “longest campaign” in her book China's Longest Campaign-Birth Planning in the People's Republic, 1949-2005, and Jiang (2012) points out in his review of White's (2006) book that “China has been obsessed with campaigns, and one may speculate whether the birth planning campaign will be followed by a long pro-natalist campaign in the foreseeable future”.

SRB from 1980 through 2010. Data sources; data before 2000 come from Li et al.(2006) , Data after 2000 come from the annual one per thousand sample survey and the 2010 census.

1 http://cn.wsj.com/gb/20110429/bch102327.asp

2 Data from annual Communique of the Ministry of Education

3 http://news.ifeng.com/shendu/ndzk/detail_2012_07/17/16083719_0.shtml

4 http://news.163.com/photoview/00AO0001/10791.html#p=6G28U1H400AO0001

5 http://news.sina.com.cn/s/2010-11-17/021821482405.shtml

6 http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/dfpd/guangdong/2011-03-03/content_1914769.html

Contributor Information

Quanbao Jiang, Institute for Population and Development Studies School of Public Policy and Administration Xi'an Jiaotong University Xi'an, Shaanxi Province, 710049, China.

Shuzhuo Li, Institute for Population and Development Studies School of Public Policy and Administration Xi'an Jiaotong University Xi'an, Shaanxi Province, 710049, China nc.ude.utjx@ilhzhs Tel. /Fax: +86–29–8266–5032.

Marcus W. Feldman, Morrison Institute for Population and Resource Studies Stanford University Stanford, CA 94305, USA ude.drofnats@namdlefm .

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China demographic crisis looms as population growth slips to slowest ever

• Medium Text
• Mainland China population rose 5.38% in decade to 2020 -census
• 2020 population 1.41 billion vs 1.34 billion in 2010 -census
• Growth slowed ever since 1-child policy adopted in late 1970s
• Slowest growth since modern census-taking began in 1950s
• Surprise jump in youth population to 17.95% of 2020 total

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Israeli special forces have recovered an Israeli hostage from a tunnel in the southern Gaza Strip in "a complex rescue operation", the military said on Tuesday, more than 10 months after he was abducted by Hamas-led gunmen on Oct. 7.

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Uneven population distribution: Case Study 1: China

The subject guide, a. china: introduction, b. china's population density.

• areas with population densities of more than 250 people per square kilometre
• megacites: Shanghai, Beijing, Chongqing, Guizhou, Shenzhen, Chengdu, Xian, Wuhan (annotate each of these with their populations)
• the Hu Huanyong line; find out what this line represents and explain this in your annotations

C. Physical factors affecting population density in China

• How does relief connect to areas of low and high density? What densities are found in areas of lowland and how does this compare to mountainous areas. Remember to name the areas/provinces you refer to in your answer. Explain the connections you identify.
• How do the patterns of precipitation and temperatures connect to variations in population density?

D. Human factors affecting population density: economic development

• To what extent can you see a connection between the wealth of provinces in China and their population density?

• Use the data in the spreadsheet below to draw a scattergraph showing population density against GDP.
• Identify and describe the pattern shown. What are the overall trends? Quote data to support what you say. 
• Which provinces are anomalies? Suggest reasons.
• Now use Spearman's Rank Correlation Coefficient to investigate the strength of the correlation between the two sets of data.
• What are your overall conclusions? Explain.

Additional reading

• Geography Course Companion  (Nagle and Cook) - pp3391-393
• Planet Geography  (Codrington) - pp

Growing Populations, Changing Landscapes: Studies from India, China, and the United States (2001)

Chapter: chinese case studies: an introduction, chinese case studies: an introduction.

Zhao Shidong Institute of Geographic Science and Natural Resources, Chinese Academy of Sciences

With the rapid development of China's economy over the last decades, its land use patterns have changed significantly, especially since the central government's adoption of socioeconomic reform policies, beginning in the late 1970s. Across China, the speed and scale of land use change have varied because of the country's diverse natural and socioeconomic conditions. In order to understand the process and the mechanism of land use change, and then provide a solid basis for the future sustainable planning of land use in China's many different regions, the Chinese research team chose the Jitai Basin, a typical rural area, and the Pearl River Delta, characterized by rapid urbanization, as its study sites (see map , p. 178).

JITAI BASIN

The Jitai Basin, located in Jiangxi Province in south-central China, is made up of four counties that contain two cities. At the end of 1995, the Jitai Basin was home to 2.47 million people; its population density was 198 persons per square kilometer.

Historically, the Jitai Basin was a relatively developed area for agricultural production and handcraft industries such as shipbuilding and textiles, because the Ganjiang (Gan River) served as a main transportation artery between north and south. But with the development of modern industry and communications, the opening of foreign trade ports (Guangzhou, Shanghai, Fuzhou, Xiamen, and Ningbo) in the late nineteenth century, and the building of the Guangzhou–Wuhan and Wuhan–Beijing

railways, the direction of the flow of goods changed rapidly, weakening the transportation function of the Ganjiang River. From then on, China saw its economy grow rapidly in coastal areas, and the Jitai Basin gradually lost its dominant position in communications and the economy and slipped into a declining state.

After the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949, the central government began to promote the development of the more rural regions of the country. As a result, in the 1950s and 1960s the Jitai Basin was the beneficiary of significant investment in an industrial program, technological assistance, and an influx of trained migrants from the more developed regions. Development of the country as a whole, however, was at a very low level, and cultural, political, and economic restrictions hampered the assistance efforts. In the end, then, no significant socioeconomic development occurred in the Jitai Basin from 1949 to 1978, and, indeed, population pressure and extreme economic policies resulted in serious damage to the region's natural resources. For example, overcutting of forests to provide fuel for steel smelters caused deforestation and soil erosion. And the expansion of agriculture to marginal hilly and mountainous areas in order to meet the subsistence demands of the rapidly growing population for food and fuel further accentuated the serious problems of environmental degradation.

Since the introduction of government reforms in 1978, the Jitai Basin has achieved relatively remarkable economic development in absolute terms. With implementation of the “household responsibility” system in 1982, agricultural productivity increased and the transition from cereal production to cash crop production (such as fruits and vegetables) accelerated. Meanwhile, the local government, aware of the damage to the ecosystem generated by deforestation and soil erosion, successfully implemented a series of policies to reforest the hills and mountains. Despite these achievements, the Jitai Basin still lags behind the coastal regions in economic development and urbanization. In fact, the gap between its socioeconomic development and that of developed regions (for example, the Pearl River Delta) is widening. One important reason is that the central government's economic development strategy tends to favor coastal areas. Other reasons are the Jitai Basin's location in China's hinterlands and its limited access to investment, technology, and the markets in metropolitan areas. In addition, because the region had a surplus of agricultural laborers stemming from the significant lack of development of the nonagricultural sectors, the massive out-migration of young laborers from the Jitai Basin to developed regions such as the Pearl River Delta increased. This development relieved the pressure on local employment, but also weakened agricultural production.

PEARL RIVER DELTA

Formed by the alluvium delivered by the West, North, and East Rivers, the Pearl River Delta is located in southern China's Guangdong Province. The study region, which lies in the central part of Pearl River Delta, consists of 13 counties or cities, which belong to six municipalities and are distributed on either side of the Pearl River estuary. The Pearl River Delta is one of the most heavily populated regions of China. In 1995 its permanent population density was 743 persons per square kilometer, compared with 378 for all of Guangdong Province and 126 for China as a whole.

Historically, the Pearl River Delta was known nationally for its production of grain, sugar, silk, freshwater fish, and fruits. Indeed, the region was referred to as the “Fish and Rice County.” The Delta also was one of the places in China where modern industry first appeared. However, from 1866, when industry first arrived, to 1949, when the new China was founded, the region's economy developed very slowly, and many residents of the Delta left to earn a living abroad. One factor in its slow growth was its location; because the Delta is situated at the frontier of the national defense, very few of the important industries were allowed to set up operations in the region.

After implementation of socioeconomic reforms in 1978, the Delta quickened its pace of development and now is one of the richest areas in China. But rapid industrialization and urbanization also have produced dramatic changes in the Pearl River Delta's landscape, as well as environmental pollution. Overall, within less than 20 years the Delta area was transformed from a rural agricultural area into a highly developed region through rapid industrialization and urbanization. Within this process, the interactions between population growth, land use change, and the relevant economic and environmental problems are complex and unique.

As the world's population exceeds an incredible 6 billion people, governments—and scientists—everywhere are concerned about the prospects for sustainable development.

The science academies of the three most populous countries have joined forces in an unprecedented effort to understand the linkage between population growth and land-use change, and its implications for the future. By examining six sites ranging from agricultural to intensely urban to areas in transition, the multinational study panel asks how population growth and consumption directly cause land-use change, and explore the general nature of the forces driving the transformations.

Growing Populations, Changing Landscapes explains how disparate government policies with unintended consequences and globalization effects that link local land-use changes to consumption patterns and labor policies in distant countries can be far more influential than simple numerical population increases. Recognizing the importance of these linkages can be a significant step toward more effective environmental management.

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Case Study: China

The Chinese government introduced the ‘One Child Policy’ in 1979. The aim of this policy was to attempt to control population growth. The policy limited couples to one child. Under this policy couples have to gain permission from family planning officials for each birth.

If families followed this policy they received free education, health care, pensions and family benefits. These are taken away if the couple have more than one child.

The benefits of this policy are that the growth rate of China’s population has declined. Without the policy it is estimated that there would be an extra 320 million more people in a country whose population is estimated to be 1.3 billion.

The scheme has caused a number of problems in China. This is particularly the case for hundreds of thousands of young females. Many thousands of young girls have been abandoned by their parents as the result of the one child policy. Many parents in China prefer to have a boy to carry on the family name. As a result large numbers of girls have either ended up in orphanages, homeless or in some cases killed. Also, 90% of foetuses aborted in China are female.

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How China’s population boom will impact the environment

Few places in the world showcase the overgrowth of the human population like China does. A new study published in Nature Sustainability looks at the environmental impact of the populous China’s increasing need for food . 

Study lead author Hao Zhao is associated with the Integrated Biosphere Futures Research Group in the IIASA Biodiversity and Natural Resources Program.

“Assessing the impacts of future food demand requires comprehensive analyses of the agricultural sector, while tracking global environmental impacts calls for models representing trade with other regions individually. We focused on China in the global context, projecting the dynamic global future compared with other local models,”

The research predicts that demand for food in China will continue to steadily increase, especially the demand for livestock and livestock feed. To meet this demand, more land will be used for grazing and greenhouse gas emissions will increase. This also means an increasing reliance on food imports. By 2050, the paper predicts, as much as twice the agricultural land abroad will be needed to feed the growing nation. 

By feeding China’s demand for food, the rest of the world will pay some of the environmental cost as well. On average, as much as 30 percent of a given country’s environmental challenges will be related to exports to China. In New Zealand for instance, 48 percent of agricultural land use and 33 percent of related greenhouse gases will be caused by China. 

Various trade possibilities and greenhouse gas emissions will influence the extent of the environmental impacts associated with China’s food production. How those impacts are distributed will also depend on trade routes. 

The researchers say that the focus should be on increasing the sustainability of agriculture at home in China. Livestock especially has a lot of room for improvement toward becoming truly sustainable. 

“China’s rising demand for agricultural products is one of the greatest challenges on the way to reaching the Sustainable Development Goals, not only domestically, but also in China’s trading partners,” said study co-author Peter Havlik.

“To reduce the global impacts, policies promoting both sustainable consumption and production need to be further pursued in China, and promoted globally, also through appropriate trade agreements.”

By Zach Fitzner , Earth.com Staff Writer

On a mission to end educational inequality for young people everywhere.

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• Politics and Policy

Overpopulation Countries Trends: Impact on the United Nations’ Agenda for Sustainable Development

Overpopulation is a critical issue wherein the number of individuals in a specific area surpasses the environment’s carrying capacity. With the global population approaching 8 billion and projected to grow significantly, this phenomenon has raised concerns about population growth trends. Some regions are experiencing rapid population expansion, increasing in highly populous countries. This article delves into the implications of these trends on the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Agenda.

Which Countries Are Most Populous?

Overview of the most populous countries.

Several countries worldwide grapple with high population numbers, leading to numerous challenges associated with overpopulation. China, India, and the United States are among the most populous nations, each facing unique demographic dynamics.

China: As the world’s most populous country, China has a population exceeding 1.4 billion. The Chinese government has implemented various policies, including the one-child policy (now relaxed), to manage population growth. These policies have had far-reaching socio-economic impacts.

India: India closely follows China in terms of population, with over 1.3 billion people. It is also one of the world’s youngest populations, with a significant portion under 25. While India has witnessed improvements in healthcare and education, it faces the challenge of providing opportunities and resources to its growing population.

United States: With over 330 million people, the United States has a large and diverse population. While its growth rate is lower than some other populous countries, immigration significantly shapes its demographic landscape.

Nigeria: A Case Study

Nigeria , situated in the vibrant region of West Africa, provides a compelling illustration of population dynamics. As the current most populous country on the African continent, Nigeria stands at the forefront of a significant demographic shift. Projections indicate that by 2050, Nigeria is on track to claim its position as the world’s third most populous nation, marking a remarkable demographic transition.

Rapid population growth in Nigeria is a multifaceted issue with several key contributing factors. Firstly, high birth rates are pivotal in driving this demographic surge. The country’s fertility rates remain notably high, leading to a substantial increase in births yearly. Cultural, social, and economic factors that impact family planning choices influence this elevated fertility rate. 

Population Projections for 2022 and 2050

Population projections for 2022 and 2050 provide crucial insights into the evolving global demographic landscape. These projections, as outlined by the United Nations Population Division, offer a glimpse into the anticipated trajectory of the world’s population and the challenges it entails.

As of 2022, the global population stands at approximately 7.9 billion people. While already substantial, this figure is expected to surge significantly over the next three decades. By 2050, the world’s population is projected to approach a staggering 9 billion individuals. This trajectory signifies a considerable demographic shift with far-reaching implications for human society and the environment.

It’s important to note that population growth rates are not uniform across all countries and regions. While some nations may experience relatively stable or declining populations, others, particularly those with higher fertility rates, will contribute disproportionately to this global increase. Regions such as sub-Saharan Africa are expected to undergo particularly rapid population growth during this period.

This demographic forecast underscores the urgency of implementing comprehensive and sustainable development strategies globally. The challenges of overpopulation are multifaceted and touch upon various domains, including resource management, environmental sustainability, healthcare provision, education, and social welfare.

To address these challenges effectively, policymakers, governments, and international organizations must prioritize initiatives that promote sustainable population management, access to family planning services, and investments in healthcare and education. Additionally, it necessitates a concerted effort to balance population growth and the sustainable use of resources, ensuring that the growing global population can thrive while safeguarding the planet’s ecosystems.

Why is Overpopulation a Concern for the United Nations?

Implications for sustainable development goals.

Overpopulation poses significant concerns for the United Nations in its pursuit of sustainable development goals (SDGs). These global goals encompass eradicating poverty, ensuring universal access to healthcare and education, and promoting environmental sustainability. However, overpopulation exerts immense pressure on resources and infrastructure, making it increasingly challenging to achieve these ambitious objectives. See the report here .

Environmental Impact of Overpopulation

Overpopulation exerts considerable stress on the environment, with far-reaching consequences. The growing human population leads to the depletion of natural resources and widespread environmental degradation. Some notable impacts include:

• Deforestation: Overpopulation drives demand for land, resulting in deforestation to make way for agriculture , urbanization, and infrastructure development. This contributes to habitat loss and threatens the survival of countless plant and animal species.
• Pollution: A burgeoning population produces more waste, leading to increased pollution of air, water, and soil. Industrial emissions, transportation exhaust, and improper waste disposal are among the factors contributing to deteriorating air and water quality.
• Biodiversity Loss: The expansion of human settlements and agricultural activities often encroaches upon critical ecosystems. This, in turn, accelerates biodiversity loss as species struggle to adapt or face habitat destruction.

Social and Economic Consequences

Overpopulation’s social and economic ramifications are equally concerning, impacting the United Nations’ sustainable development agenda. These consequences include:

• Strained Healthcare and Education Systems: Rapid population growth pressures healthcare and education infrastructure. Insufficient resources and facilities make providing quality services to all, particularly in densely populated regions challenging.
• Unemployment and Poverty: Overpopulation can exacerbate unemployment and poverty rates. Competition for limited job opportunities can increase unemployment rates among young adults. This, coupled with limited access to education and healthcare, contributes to cycles of poverty.
• Social Unrest: High population density and limited resources and opportunities can lead to social unrest. Scarce resources, inadequate access to basic services, and economic disparities may fuel civil unrest and conflict.

What are the Effects of Overpopulation?

Pressure on Resources and Infrastructure

Overpopulation leads to increased pressure on resources and infrastructure. As the population grows, the demand for food, water, housing, and energy also increases. This strains the existing resources and can lead to scarcity and inequality.

• Resource Scarcity: Overpopulation leads to heightened demand for essential resources such as arable land, freshwater, and energy sources. As an example, India, one of the world’s most populous countries, grapples with intense pressure on its agricultural land due to overpopulation. This has resulted in land degradation and disputes over limited farming space.
• Inadequate Housing: Rapid population growth often outpaces housing construction efforts. In metropolitan areas like Mumbai, India, soaring population figures have led to overcrowded slums and inadequate housing conditions, exacerbating the housing crisis.
• Transportation Congestion: Overpopulation in urban areas contributes to traffic congestion and deteriorating transportation infrastructure. Cities like Manila, Philippines, experience daily gridlocks due to the surge in vehicles on the road, highlighting the strain on transportation systems.

Increased Demand for Food and Water

With the growth of the global population, there is an increased demand for food and water. This puts pressure on agricultural systems, leading to land and water resources overexploitation. It becomes challenging to ensure food security for everyone.

• Agricultural Strain: Overpopulation escalates the demand for food production. In China, the world’s most populous nation, this has led to intensive agriculture practices, including synthetic fertilizers and pesticides, contributing to environmental degradation.
• Water Stress: Overpopulation amplifies water scarcity concerns. The depletion of the Aral Sea in Central Asia is a stark example of overpopulation’s impact on water resources. Diversion of water for irrigation projects in densely populated areas resulted in the near collapse of this once-vibrant ecosystem.

Impact on Healthcare and Education

Overpopulation affects the healthcare and education sectors. As the population grows, there is a need for more healthcare facilities and professionals to cater to the increasing number of people. Similarly, there is a higher demand for educational institutions and teachers. However, limited resources often result in inadequate access to quality healthcare and education for all.

• Healthcare Challenges: Overpopulated regions face challenges in providing adequate healthcare services. In parts of sub-Saharan Africa, high population growth rates have strained healthcare systems, making it difficult to ensure access to basic healthcare for all residents.
• Educational Shortages: Overpopulation leads to a surge in the demand for educational facilities and teachers. In countries like Pakistan, the need for more schools and educators to accommodate the growing student population has resulted in overcrowded classrooms and limited access to quality education.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the subject of this faq.

The subject of this FAQ is the impact of overpopulation in certain countries on the United Nations’ Agenda for Sustainable Development.

What does the term “overpopulation” refer to?

Overpopulation is when the number of people in a specific area exceeds the available resources and infrastructure to support them.

Which countries are known for their overpopulation concerns?

Some of the most populous countries in the world, such as Nigeria, are known for their overpopulation concerns.

How does overpopulation impact the United Nations’ Agenda for Sustainable Development?

Overpopulation can strain resources, hinder efforts to achieve sustainable development goals and lead to socio-economic challenges.

What population trends are observed in countries with overpopulation concerns?

In countries with overpopulation concerns, population sizes are increasing rapidly, and the rate of population change is high.

What are the consequences of overpopulation?

Consequences of overpopulation include increased pressure on natural resources, environmental degradation, poverty, and inadequate access to basic services.

What are some initiatives to address overpopulation concerns?

Initiatives include family planning programs, reproductive rights advocacy, and population policies to manage population growth.

Are there any specific conferences or events related to overpopulation and sustainable development?

Yes, the United Nations Population Conference, the International Conference on Population and Development, and other similar conferences discuss issues related to overpopulation and its impact on sustainable development.

Are there any countries specifically mentioned as experiencing a population explosion?

While many countries face population growth challenges, some of the most notable cases are called the “seven countries,” including Nigeria, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, Tanzania, Indonesia, Egypt, and Pakistan.

What is the role of organizations like the Pew Research Center in studying overpopulation trends?

Organizations like the Pew Research Center conduct research and provide data on population trends, fertility rates, and other related aspects to contribute to understanding overpopulation issues.

How do fertility rates impact overpopulation concerns?

Fertility rates, which represent the average number of births per woman, are one of the key indicators of population growth. High fertility rates can contribute to population increases and overpopulation concerns.

In summary, overpopulation is a critical global issue that pressures resources, infrastructure, food, water, healthcare, and education. Urgent collective action is vital, especially with the global population nearing 8 billion.

The United Nations faces the challenge of addressing overpopulation’s effects, including resource scarcity, environmental damage, social and economic consequences, and strains on healthcare and education. Strategies balancing population management and sustainable development are necessary, like empowering communities with family planning, promoting education, gender equality, and responsible resource use.

International collaboration among governments, civil society, and individuals is crucial. Joint efforts are the path to mitigate overpopulation’s impact and work toward a more equitable, resilient, and sustainable future in line with the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Agenda. 

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