China’s population time bomb is about to explode (Matthew Henderson, 1/21/24, The Telegraph)
China’s workforce is shrinking and its population aging. There are now 280 million CCP citizens aged 60 or over. Rather than Xi’s vaunted glorious rejuvenation, a massive demographic time bomb in China is ticking.How did this develop, and will Xi be able to defuse it? Around 1980, the CCP decided that the rate of population growth was harmful and launched mandatory birth planning measures known as the ‘One Child Policy’. Negative incentives and coercive force were then used to drive down birth rates for more than 30 years. By degrees it became clear that things had gone very wrong. Traditional patriarchal bias resulted in widespread selective female abortion, infanticide and abandonment. In China there are now 110 males for every 100 females, amounting to some 34 million ‘excess’ males. The productive labour and taxes of one young worker now have to boost the state pensions of 4 retired relatives. The number of retired CCP citizens will increase more than 30% in the next decade. The current pension system simply cannot handle this.