China's Demographic Outlook to 2040 and Its Implications. (2024)

For any serious attempt to assess China's future outlook, anexamination of the country's population prospects is not onlyadvisable but absolutely indispensable. There are two reasons for this.

First, of all areas of inquiry about China's future that mightbe of interest in academic, business, and policy circles, China'sdemographic future is perhaps the least uncertain over the cominggeneration. The reason, quite simply, is that the overwhelming majorityof the people who will be living in China in (say) the year 2040 arealready alive, living there today. Population projections are far fromerror-free, but if we are trying to peer ahead a couple of decades, theyare most assuredly more reliable (and empirically grounded) thancorresponding projections of economic change, much less political ortechnological change. (1)

Second, demographics and demographic change actually matter--toeconomic performance and social development and in some measure arguablyto such things as military potential, political stability, andinternational security. This is not to invoke the "demography isdestiny" claim, often attributed to the 19th-century Frenchpolymath Auguste Comte. A less forid, more immediately defensiblereformulation of that aphorism would be that "demographics slowlybut unforgivingly alter the realm of the possible." In thefollowing pages, I try to show just how the realm of the possible isbeing reshaped in China by impending demographic changes over thedecades immediately ahead.

China's Current and Future Population: What We Know and How WeKnow It

Before presenting the demographic projections underpinning thisreport, we are obliged to address two basic questions about China'sdemographic outlook: What do we know and how do we know it? Answeringthese questions requires us to discuss data limitations today and theintrinsic limitations of demographic projections for tomorrow.

Consider first the limits of current Chinese population data.Vastly more population information is available for China today than wasfor most of the Maoist era, when a virtual statistical blackoutprevailed. China today also has trained and groomed a large cadre oftop-rate demographers and population economists who work in thenation's universities, state-sponsored think tanks, and government.On the other hand, China has not yet achieved complete or near-completevital registration, meaning that analysts must rely mainly onreconstructions of trends from censuses and "mini-censuses"(2)--and these counts are far from error-free.

Many errors in China's population data are essentiallypolitically induced; the data are deformed by mass misreporting due toordinary people's attempts to avoid the harsh consequences ofBeijing's various population control policies (using that termbroadly). With regard to Chinese household registration data (which arederived from a separate demographic system run by the Ministry of PublicSecurity), the 2010 census indicated that at least 13 million Chinesecitizens lacked legal identity papers because they were born "outof hukou"--that is, outside the locality that the state mandates tobe their residence (3) (more on the hukou system shortly). But thatguesstimate is based on official assumptions about China's truepopulation totals, and China's vital statistics, census returns,and sample population surveys have undercounted the nation's actualnumbers for decades due to Beijing's heinous One-Child Policy andthe familial incentives it established for birth concealment.

The United Nations Population Division (UNPD) currently suggeststhat the 2010 China census estimate missed the mark by about 30 million,even after its own internal undercount adjustments, and that it may havefailed to enumerate well over a quarter of all female children under 15years of age. (4) From the 1982 China census onward, population totalsand sex ratios for given birth years from one census to the next haveproved unstable for babies, children, and youth. These errors due topoliticization of demographic rhythms of life may lessen now thatBeijing appears to be scrapping its anti-natal campaign, but they areembedded in the data we use for projections to 2040.

As for demographic projections themselves, these are no morereliable than the baseline data they use and the assumptions they inputabout future trends in fertility, mortality, and migration.International migration is negligible for China in relation to itsenormous population, and the assumption is this will continue to betrue--lucky that, since demographers have no really defensible methodfor projecting international migration trends into the future.Demographic techniques for projecting survival trends for the currentlyliving are fairly good--thanks to actuarial mathematics, after all, thelife insurance industry has not gone out of business--but catastrophesof biblical proportion do take place from time to time, and Providencehas already visited a number of them on postliberation China.

As a matter of simple population mathematics, however, fertilitytrends dominate longer-term population projections, and since there isno reliable method for projecting future fertility levels, assumptionsare crucial. China clearly undercounts births--with a reported totalfertility rate (TFR) of 1.18 births per woman per lifetime in the 2010census--but no one knows by exactly how much. The consensus, for betteror worse, is that the actual rate in recent years has been around 1.6,or about 30 percent below the level required for long-term populationstability in the absence of in-migration, but consensuses are not alwayscorrect.

China 2040: The Population Projections

Like sausages and law, the making of demographic projections maynot look so pretty when seen up close. Nevertheless, populationprojections for China are likely to be less problematic than for manyother countries or regions of the world. China is a low-migration,low-mortality, low-fertility society. This means there is, so to speak,relatively little "turnover" in the population from one yearto the next. According to UNPD or US Census Bureau projections, almostfour-fifths of China's projected 2040 population will be 22 orolder then--meaning they have already been born at this writing. Thisbrute fact far outweighs many of the smaller uncertainties highlightedabove and in a sense rescues us from them.

Nonetheless, we need to know the assumptions built into the Chinapopulation projections. Consider UNPD's projections, which I willmainly use in this report. (The UNPD's assumptions, by the way, arefairly close to those of the US Census Bureau and for that matter alsothe National Bureau of Statistics of China.) For the 2015-40 period, theUNPD assumes negligible net outmigration from China of 0.2 percent peryear--a rounding error, essentially. With respect to mortality, the UNPDestimates overall male plus female life expectancy at birth was a bitover 76 years in 2010/15 and that it would rise to 80 by 2040/45 (withdetailed "life tables" offering survival probabilities formales and females of every age over the interim). As for fertility, theUNPD "medium variant" fertility projections envision a gradualrise in China's TFRs from 1.6 to just over 1.7, meaning thatchildbearing in China would still be almost 20 percent below the levelrequired for long-term population stability around 2040. While thisassumption about China's fertility trajectory is highlydebatable--future fertility trends are always a "knownunknown" (5)--this assumption has relatively little influence onour overall assessment of the implications of coming demographic trends.These assumptions, for example, would affect only the small share of the2040 labor force as yet unborn (those then in their late teens or veryearly 20s), and even for this cohort the impact of errant assumptionswould be marginal. Perhaps the clearest and simplest way to see whatthese changes would portend is to superimpose the projected populationstructure of China 2040 on the estimated population structure of China2015 (see Figure 1).

Overall, total numbers in 2015 and 2040 would be quite similar:somewhere around 1.4 billion. But this is only a coincidence. Due tosteep and prolonged sub-replacement childbearing (China's netreproduction ratio is widely believed to have dropped below 1.0 in theearly 1990s), China's population would be on track to peak in abouta decade (circa 2028 or 2029) and shrink at an accelerating tempothereafter. Whereas China is thought to be growing by around 5 million ayear nowadays, by these projections it would be shrinking by about 4million a year in 2040. (In these UNPD projections, incidentally, Indiaedges out China as the world's most populous country just before2025.)

Although China's population totals are similar in 2015 and2040, a fundamental transformation of China's population structureis manifest in Figure 1-a change so dramatic we might even call it aleap into the demographic unknown. To be sure, there are esoterica inthis tableau that would naturally catch a demographer's eye, suchas the population bulge for "the class of 1987," which is an"echo" of the upsurge in births in the early 1960s after theend of the famine unleashed by Mao's catastrophic Great LeapForward. But the main story on display is the extraordinaryredistribution of China's population upward, toward the top of the"population pyramid."

Two broad differences between China 2015 and projected China 2040stand out. First, the overall population under 50 years of age is largerin China 2015 than in China 2040, and for certain cohorts, such as thosein their mid-20s or early 40s, China 2015 is dramatically larger thanChina 2040. Second, the overall population over 50 years of age is farlarger in notional China 2040 than actual China 2015--over half again aslarge--and for many age cohorts, including septuagenarians,octogenarians, and nonagenarians, China 2040's population is vastlylarger than China 2015's. In fact, the China of 2040 in Figure 1would contain a quarter billion more people over 50 than the China of2015, while the ranks of those under 50 would be diminished by almostthe same amount.

Most people understand intuitively that steep sub-replacementfertility levels eventually lead to depopulation (absent compensatoryimmigration). Less appreciated but no less avoidable is the relationshipbetween low fertility and population aging: Very small families makegray societies. In these projections, two generations of pronouncedsub-replacement fertility would bring China to a place where none havegone before (at least so far). By UNPD medium variant projections,median age in China 2040 would be 47 years--higher than the median agefor any country or territory on the planet as of 2015, according to UNDPestimates.

A discerning observer may notice other aspects of Figure 1-amongthem, the surfeit of males over females for the cohorts born during thedecades of One-Child-Policy population control. Additional, potentiallyquite significant, population changes are underway that cannot bedetected by a simple "national headcount approach." I nowexamine these various issues.

Manpower and Labor Availability

By 2040, in these projections, China would have experienced almosthalf a century of sub-replacement fertility, and for most of the decadesin question the nation's fertility level would have been far belowreplacement. Thus, it should come as no surprise that the working-agepopulation is thought to have peaked just before 2015, and from 2015 to2040, it is projected to shrink at ever-greater speed.

By ancient convention, demographers talk of the "working-agegroups" as ages 15 through 64, and I shall do so as well in thisreport. I know this formulation is arbitrary and also a bit archaic:Nowhere is everyone between 15 and 64 in the workforce; growing numbersof teens and twenty somethings are out of the workforce because theyenrolled in the training they need or want in order to join it, and inthe real world ever-increasing numbers of people 65 and older happen tobe earning pay, in China and elsewhere. Yet as a first approximation the15-64 cohort may not be a bad one for China's working ages. In anycase, population decline is in the cards between now and 2040 for mostof the subgroups within this broad category too.

China's past trends and future outlook are presented in Figure2, which details estimated and projected changes in China's"adult" (age 15+) population by broad age groups from 1970 to2040.

Between the fateful December 1978 plenum of the 11th CentralCommittee of Chinese Communist Party (where Deng Xiaoping pointed Chinaon a historic new economic direction) and 2010, China's working-agepopulation grew by about 80 percent, swelling roughly from 560 millionto one billion. Thus, over that period, overall manpower availabilityrose by an average of 1.8 percent per annum, and total national workhours may have risen more rapidly as underemployed labor was absorbed inboth the cities and the countryside. But between 2010 and 2015, manpowergrowth was roughly zero, reaching its projected (all-time historical?)peak around 2014. Thereafter, China's working-age population isprojected to commence a long decline, dropping by well over 100 millionby 2040 to around 880 million, at which point it would be shrinking at arate of 1 percent a year.

In terms of simple economic "growth accounting,"increased labor inputs did not account for all of China'sspectacular economic growth during the 19782010 period, or even for mostof it, but it did account for a hardly trivial fraction of that boom.(6) The coming reversal of the delta for manpower change in the yearsimmediately ahead means that, from the standpoint of the simplest sortof growth accounting, the Chinese economy will be facing increasinglyunfavorable headwinds simply due to manpower decline, everything elsebeing equal.

But everything else will not be equal. We already know, forexample, that the composition of the working-age population isirrevocably set to change, and in ways that would seem inauspicious foreconomic growth. Over the coming generation, the pool of young manpoweris on track to shrink sharply, with only the pool of older manpowerexpanding. This is not the way economic planners would have designedthings. The youth labor group (ages 15-29) in modern societies alwayshas the highest educational attainment, is the most IT and tech savvy,and tends to be the most flexible (all the more so in China since mostpeople in this age group have not yet started to form families). Between2015 and 2040, the 15-29 group is projected to shrink by 75 million, orroughly a quarter, and to shrink as a share of total manpower from alittle less than a third to just over a quarter.

The 30-49 group, for its part, might be regarded as a part of thelife cycle in which entrepreneurship and inventiveness comes tofruition. Benjamin F. Jones' international findings on "theage of great discovery" are particularly intriguing in this regard(see Figure 3). Without getting too deterministic about this, we mayentertain the conjecture that thirty somethings and forty somethings adda "secret sauce" to the workforce and the economy. Too bad forChina's outlook if so: Between 2015 and 2040, this group is alsoprojected to shrink by a quarter (well over 100 million men and women)and to drop from 43 percent to 37 percent of total manpower. Only the50-64 cohort can be expected to grow over the generation ahead: theleast educated and healthy contingent in the labor force, althougharguably also the most experienced. Its share jumps from about 25percent of total manpower to about 35 percent over the years underconsideration, but even projected numbers for this group start to fallbefore 2040.

Beijing's economic policymakers have some options inresponding to this unfavorable impending change. Improving education ofthe workforce is one option, but the 50-64s of 2040 are already out ofschool, and China's inverted population pyramid makes the task ofincreasing overall educational attainment through schooling much slowerthan it would be for a youthful population. Raising the capital-laborratio is another theoretical option (what Ronald D. Lee and others call"the second demographic dividend" (7)), but China's grossdomestic capital formation ratio today is already bizarrely, perhapsunsustainably, high.

Some have argued that China can muddle through this problem byraising labor force participation rates for the working-age manpowerpool. (8) But it is far from obvious that this will be feasible.China's everyday labor statistics are notoriously poor. The mostreliable available numbers come perhaps from the 2010 census. If we goby those figures, China's working-age manpower may not be asferociously mobilized as say Kim Il Sung's North Korea, (9) but itslabor force participation ratios for both men and women are comparableto or higher than most countries in the Organisation for EconomicCo-operation and Development, and the same is true for work rates(employment-to-population ratios). (10) Some might hope there would beroom for coaxing additional labor out of China's underemployedadults, especially those in the countryside, but Cai Fang, perhapsChina's most influential population economist, has argued thatChina already reached the Lewis-model "turning point" a decadeago. (11) Some countries and places--Singapore, the Gulf states, andeven Western Europe among them--have attempted to redress laborshortages through international migration, but as currently theworld's largest country, China has a scale problem. Attracting 100million plus workers voluntarily and through economic incentives overthe coming generation is simply inconceivable in the world as we knowit. However, there is the option of internal migration: ramping upproductivity for the existing, dwindling manpower pool by movingpeasants to more remunerative work in the cities. Beijing has seized onthis option and is actively promoting it through its ongoing NationalNew-Type Urbanization Plan, widely known as the "urbanizationdrive." (12) There is promise in this strategy, but as we shall seein a moment, it is not exactly an unalloyed cure.

Population Aging

Despite the prospect of overall population decline in the eraahead, China will be experiencing a very particular type of populationexplosion: an explosive increase in its number of senior citizens 65years of age and older. Between 2015 and 2040 in these UNPD projections,China's 65+ population would jump by almost 150 percent, from 135million to almost 340 million. That is a long-term growth rate of 3.7percent a year: a breathtaking tempo of growth for any major populationgroup for decades on end and one that perforce should be expected toreshape the nation's economic, social, and perhaps even politicaloutlook. By 2040, if things go well, China will be a "super agedsociety" with 22 percent of its people 65 or older (21 percentbeing the conventional threshold for defining "super aged").(13) (The only scenarios under which China does not become super agedare catastrophic ones.) By the criteria median age and share ofpopulation 65+, China would in fact be more aged than the United States,meaning the US of 2040 (at least, by Census Bureau projections). HowChina copes with its coming senior tsunami and the attendant impendingold-age burden is a critical question for China's future.

Over the past generation there has been considerable research onthe role of the "demographic dividend" in spurring economicdevelopment. (14) This work holds that the fertility transition offers aonce-in-history chance to accelerate development by raising the share ofa nation's working-age population: not only increasing theavailability of laborers more rapidly than total population but alsopropitiously influencing savings and investment possibilities throughthis shift in population structure. Most population economists todayattribute some of China's spectacular success over the past fourdecades to this demographic dividend. (15)

For better or worse, China's demographic dividend has alreadybeen cashed. Between 1978 and 2010, China's 15-64 group shot upfrom 58 percent of total population to an amazing 74 percent. Now it ison its way back down, and by 2040, in UNPD projections, it will be backto 62 percent--where it was in 1982--and still heading south. Thedependency ratio of 2040 and 1982 may be identical, but their portent isvery different, since almost all the nonworking age population then werechildren and in 2040 the great majority will be elderly adults.

To be fair, in 2040, on current trajectories, the 65+ population inChina will be the healthiest and best educated cohort of seniors thathas ever inhabited the Chinese mainland. Among other things, this meansthey may be less economically dependent than those before them, morecapable of making do financially on their own. But that is a relativecomparison.

China's seniors in 2040 will also be China's leasteducated adult grouping. By the projections of the Wittgenstein Centre,for example, in 2040 nearly half (46 percent) China's seniors wouldhave a primary school education or less--that is, six years or less,with 5 percent of them having no education at all. (The correspondingshare in 2040 for the 20-39 group would be 13 percent.) Overthree-fourths of China 2040's seniors would have no more than lowersecondary education--that is, nine years of school or less (see Figure4). (16) Thus, paradoxically, China's seniors--China's mostphysically fragile contingent--would be the group most likely to beobliged to engaged in physical labor if attempting to support themselveseconomically. Wang Feng (University of California, Irvine, and FudanUniversity) and his colleagues calculated that as of 2010 Chineseseniors earned less than 40 percent of the resources that weresustaining them at age 65, just 20 percent at age 70, and maybe 10percent at age 75. (17)

The fastest-growing contingent of seniors in China as elsewhere isthe oldest old, men and women 80+ years of age. This group is on trackalmost to triple as a share of China's population, from 1.7 percentin 2015 to 4.9 percent in 2040. The risk of dementia andAlzheimer's increases rapidly after age 80; until and unlesshumanity finds the silver bullet for this terrible afiction, the burdensimplicit in an Alzheimer's explosion also must be taken intoaccount with China's senior tsunami. In addition, a steadilygrowing share of China's seniors and oldest old are living bythemselves in one-person households (a trend, not particular to China,but to the contrary witnessed worldwide.). The especially rapid growthof China's live-alone senior population can only make foradditional vulnerability and risk in the years ahead.

Note that the graying of China promises to be a highly variedprocess geographically, with one of the most dramatic cleavagesseparating urban and rural China. Projections by Yi Zeng (18) of PekingUniversity and Duke and his colleagues suggest that rural China isalready far grayer than urban China thanks to rural-to-urban labormigration--and that the gap is only set to widen in the decades ahead(19) (see Figure 5). Zeng et al. anticipate a China in 2040 wheresomething like a third of total population would be 65 or older--twicethe ratio for urban areas. By way of comparison, the grayest spot onearth today (2015) according to UNPD is Japan, with 26 percent ofpopulation 65+. As the famous aphorism notes, Japan got rich before itgot old; one does not have to be a Sino-pessimist to recognize thatrural China is getting ready to do things the other way around. In fact,China's grayest regions in the future are most likely to be itspoorest, least educated, and least healthy as well; they will no doubtbenefit from remittances (from migrant working-age children living of inurban China), but only to a degree. Even with better education, health,and capital investment in 2040, seniors in China are set to be dependenton support from resources other than their own earned income.

The question inescapably arises: Who will provide for China'simmense population of future seniors? A first response would be thatcurrent government policies will almost certainly not do so--or at leastwill not do so comprehensively and adequately. Beijing has beendithering about nationwide public pension and old-age health careguarantees for over two decades now, and while it has taken someimportant steps, the situation is what might charitably be called a workin progress. As of 2017, for example, less than 65 percent ofChina's working-age population was covered by any pension schema,and only 35 percent of urban migrants were covered. In rural areas, thepension schema offered a "basic benefit" of 70 RMB per monthfor qualifying retirees--just over $10 US per month at today'sexchange rates. (20)

Even so, China's real existing pension and health system isseverely underfinanced, due in part to over-promises to specialconstituencies such as urban residents and state-owned enterprise (SOE)employees. According to International Monetary Fund calculations, theimplicit debt (net present value of unfunded liabilities) inChina's current health and pension programs amounts to about 100percent of the country's gross domestic product (GDP). (21)China's pension liabilities can be reduced through practical andfeasible reforms--reexamining vested benefits for urban groups and SOEsand raising retirement ages from the Stalin-normed levels of 60 for menand 55 for women that were set in the early Maoist era--but that stillbegs the question of coverage and support levels for the gray needy, ofwhom there will likely be vast numbers. And this budgetary problemstands in addition to China's other notorious looming debtchallenges.

If public policy will not fill the gap, what will? Personal savingsare one answer, and uncertainty about future government old-ageguarantees may help explain China's strikingly high private savingsratio. (22) But generally speaking, savings and need are inverselycorrelated in China as elsewhere, meaning China's vulnerable agedof tomorrow cannot count on their own savings and assets for old-agesecurity.

China's historic mechanism for assuring care and incomesecurity for seniors was called the family. The family mechanism will nodoubt be relied on in the coming generation, too. Just how well it willacquit itself in providing for frail and failing elders is anotherquestion. Two generations of sub-replacement fertility will have takentheir toll on the family unit in China 2040 (and on the extended familyas well). The son--or rather, the daughter-in-law to which he isattached--has been the notional caregiver and provider for aging parentsunder Chinese norms since at least the consolidation of the Chineseempire under the Qin dynasty.

What happens when there is no living son? We are about to find out,big time. Back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest that the proportionof Chinese women 60 years of age with no male child may have risen from7 percent in the early 1990s to 30 percent or more for post-2025 China.Dutiful daughters may of course step in, but their loyalty, attention,and resources may be too frequently divided, inadequately, between twosets of aging parents.

All of this presupposes that two and a half millennia of Confucianvalues will inform the behavior of adult children toward their elderlyparents in the generation to come. That means taking the near-universalcontinuation of flial piety for granted. Such devotion might have beeneasier when the elders were scarce and the children were plentiful;tomorrow those tables will be turned. Beijing has already begun to laydown markers, criminalizing nonsupport of parents and even nonvisitingin 2013. (23) Why do authorities feel such laws to be necessary?

We can assume China will be considerably richer in 2040 than today;ceteris paribus that would mean more resources for elderly support.Human beings tend to cope: As work from Ronald D. Lee's NationalTransfer Account project has suggested, intergenerational householdresource transfers may be quite efective in dealing with populationaging in much of East Asia, including perhaps China. Some Pollyannashave even suggested that the sheer scale of need for China's risingcohort of seniors will help the nation undertake overdue reforms, suchas a shift to consumption-oriented growth. Suffice it to observe thatdarker scenarios are also possible, including the prospect in ruralareas of something like a pervasive, slow-motion humanitarian tragedymet with Darwinian solutions. It is also possible that these"optimistic" and "pessimistic" scenarios couldunfold at the same time within the same country.

Gender Imbalance and "Marriage Squeeze"

China's eerie and biologically unnatural One-Child Policy-eraupsurge in sex ratios at birth raises another demographic dilemma forChina, this one seemingly out of a science fiction novel: the prospectof a Chinese future with a major and persistent shortage of brides.

In normal human societies of any size, there is an abidingregularity to the sex ratio at birth (SRB) across history, countries,and ethnicities, typically running in the range of 103 to 105 baby boysper 100 baby girls. From the 1982 China population census to thiswriting, however, weirdly high SRBs have been reported in officialChinese population data. By the 2010 census, the reported SRB was about120. In certain provinces, the SRB has reportedly exceeded 130, and innot a few localities, it has exceeded 150. These numbers point to massfemale feticide in the context of reliable prenatal gender determinationtechnology and unconditional abortion. China is by no means the onlyspot on the planet where this is taking place (elsewhere I have writtenabout "the global war against baby girls" (24)), but it isarguably the largest and most brutal battle-front in that campaign.

Given the persistent undercounting of China's babies in theOne-Child-Policy era, we cannot tell directly from official data justhow severe China's true SRB distortion has been. It is left todemographers to reconstruct actual trends, and their assumptions aboutthe degree of undercounting can differ; likewise in projections aboutthe future. UNPD today estimates that China's SRB peaked in the2000s at 117, is currently around 115, and will be 111 around 2040. TheCensus Bureau says SRB peaked at 118 in 2005, is 113 in 2018, and willbe 107 in 2040. (Such differences of course have a multiplier effect onthe dimensions of the "marriage squeeze" one envisions for thebrides-and grooms-to-be several generations hence, but they do not muchaffect estimates for the dimensions of the "marriage squeeze"facing China in 2040.)

Up to now, family formation in China has been influenced by what wemight call a "universal marriage norm," an ethos stronglyinformed by the Confucian metaphysical imperative of continuing thefamily lineage through the male issue. Toward the end of the 20thcentury, that norm was translated into reality with all but 4 or 5percent of men and an even smaller fraction of women in their late 40shaving been married. Now the arithmetic of gender imbalance means allthis must change. It will change even faster and more acutely if theuniversal marriage norm erodes. In almost all the rest of East Asia,that norm has already fallen into considerable disrepair; demographerGavin Jones talks of a "fight from marriage" in the region,(25) with ever greater proportions of young men and women postponingmarriage or forgoing it altogether. If young women in China follow theexample of their peers in Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and elsewhere, theprospects for the marriageability of China's prospective futurebridegrooms will dim all the more.

In Figure 6, I project one outlook for China's coming marriagesqueeze, using Zeng's invaluable ProFamy software. (26) (I regardthis as a "middle" variant set of assumptions about fertility,SRBs, "fight from marriage," and the rest. More dramaticscenarios could be imagined.) In this scenario, 20 percent of Chinesem*n in their early 40s are never-married by 2030--up from just 4 percentin 2000. This would be a nationwide average, though. Needless to say,the odds of being unable to marry would be higher for men who wererural, poor, or poorly educated. Such projections furthermore suggest aChina 2040 with tens of millions of essentially unmarriageable men(although such calculations also would include some men who would bevoluntarily never-married).

A reality check on these projections comes from UNPD and US CensusBureau projections for China 2040. In UNPD medium variant, there wouldbe 23 million more men than women in the 25-44 cohort, and 29 millionmore men than women if the more appropriate comparison is men 30-49 forwomen 25-44. In the census projections, the corresponding surfeit ofmarriage-age males would be 22 million and 30 million, respectively, or13-17 percent of the total male reference population. Since we aredealing with stocks and flows in calculating the prospective marriagesqueeze, these figures are not so inconsistent with the projections inFigure 6.

What will it mean for China to have a growing internal army ofunmarriageable, predominantly poor and poorly skilled young men?Counterintuitively, there may be some positive economic spillovers: Someresearch suggests male competition for brides has already promotedsomething like a savings race. (27) Economists and public intellectualssuch as Gary Becker and Richard Posner, further, have mused that thescarcity of females in China would eventually have the beneficial effectof increasing their "value." (28) To date, alas, "risingvalue of women with Chinese characteristics" has meant kidnapping,sex trafficking, and other violations of human rights.

Moreover, there is no obvious policy solution in sight for thecoming marriage squeeze. Places such as Hong Kong and Taiwan have dealtwith their own bride shortages by "importing from abroad," butChina has a scale problem. Mainland China would also be in a differentsegment of the marriage market, requiring (huge numbers of) willingbrides for its relatively impoverished hinterlands. Zeng and others havesuggested that establishment of solid national pension and health careguarantees would reduce "son hunger" in China, especially inthe countryside. But as already mentioned, nothing like this is yet inplace in rural areas, and once implemented, it would take anothergeneration for such policies to affect the marriage squeeze.

Does China's coming "bare branches" problem portendsocial or political instability? The question occasions continuing,sometimes heated, debate. Valerie Hudson, author of the bare branchesthesis, (29) famously argues that a surplus of men tends to make fordomestic and international tensions. (30) On the other side, Feng andothers have pointed out that a serious surplus of marriage-age men hasbeen the norm rather than the exception throughout Chinese history dueto the abhorrent but time-honored practice of mass female infanticideand killing of girls, (31) suggesting that Chinese customs andinstitutions have long adapted to this demographic anomaly.

Feng et al. have those historical particulars right. What thatmeans for the future, however, is another question. In the generationahead, China may well be on the rise, but an increasingly powerful andafuent nation will be inhabited by growing numbers of presumablyfrustrated young men who find their life chances worsening in a mostpersonal and bitter fashion. Their expectations will be shaped not byancient Chinese history, but by marriage prospects within living memory.Will this make for millions of stories of quiet personal desperation orsomething more collective and convulsive? For anomie or fury? It is tooearly to tell. At the very least, we should regard China's futuremarriage squeeze as a potential wild card--possibly an important one.

Domestic Migration, Urbanization, and the Hukou System

Integral to the structural transformation of the Chinese economyduring its extended spate of exceptionally rapid growth has been areallocation of labor out of agriculture and into industry and servicesand a corresponding movement of population out of the countryside andinto the cities. Between 1978 and 2015, the population of what Chinaofficially defines as urban areas has grown by almost 600 million(roughly 200 million more than total national population growth), andthe official urbanization ratio has more than tripled, catapulting from18 percent to almost 56 percent. (32) The UNPD envisions a furtherincrease of China's urban population of over 300 million between2015 and 2040, at which point China would be over three-fourths (76percent) urban. (33)

Chinese leadership is counting on urbanization as an engine ofeconomic growth for the Chinese future and is attempting to acceleratethe rise of cities through the aforementioned far-reaching urbanizationdrive. Authorities in Beijing are right to regard cities as engines ofgrowth; a corpus of economic research corroborates that judgment. (34)But "urbanization with Chinese characteristics" involves apopulation problem that does not show up in conventional "headcount" statistics. It relates to China's peculiar institution,the hukou system. (More detail on the dilemmas of urbanization andmigration in contemporary China can be found in a forthcoming AEImonograph, (35) some of the findings from which I summarize in thefollowing pages.)

Hukou is a system for household registration and personalidentification that traces far back into imperial China, but whosemodern import derives from Mao's weaponizing it as a tool oftotalitarian control. From the 1950s onward, the Chinese Ministry ofPublic Security has supervised hukou and designated the official placeof residence of every Chinese citizen. It is illegal to live outside ofone's authorized hukou, although temporary hukou can be approved incertain circ*mstances (for example, if one has found a job in a city ora different province).

Although Beijing relaxed its stringent controls on domesticmigration in the early 1980s, to date the Chinese government has provedextremely reluctant to "update" workers' ormigrants' hukou in accordance with their new places of residence.Thus, an enormous "floating population" of out-of-hukoumigrants has emerged with the rise of Chinese cities and the attendantupsurge in urban demand for labor. As of 2010, China officially numbersits floating population at around 220 million; about one-fifth of allworking-age men and women were out-of-hukou then, and both the totalsand proportions would be higher today.

Most of China's floating population is comprised of migrantpeasant working in urban areas. (Their hukou identity papers ascribethat class status, by the way, but delicately categorize this backgroundas "agricultural.") With few exceptions, these men andwomen--and the migrants who left their hometowns and cities for otherurban jobs--work in places where they are at best second-class citizens,at worst de facto illegal aliens. In their "temporary"residence as a rule they have no right to local services (e.g., healthcare and education). They have no right to bring their (nonworking)family members with them. Their compensation is lower than for in-hukoucounterparts with the same education and skill levels. And in legal orother disputes involving authorities, they are virtually sure to lose.

Urban China desperately needs migrants for demographic and economicreasons. Fertility levels are extremely low in Chinese urban areas andextraordinarily low in China's bigger cities. In recent years TFRsin places such as Beijing and Shanghai have sometimes been below1.00--one birth per woman per lifetime. Overall, prolonged extraordinarysub-replacement fertility means that these places can no longer sustaintheir overall population totals, much less their labor forces, without aconstant inflow of new migrants.

Thus, the contradiction: Cities (and economic planners) need newurban migrants, but those very same migrants must be treated as inferiorbeings by the logic of the current hukou population control system. Thecontradiction is highlighted in Figure 7, which depicts the populationstructure by hukou status of China's big cities (shi) as of 2010.In all, migrants accounted for over 40 percent of the big-citypopulation that year, and migrants comprised a majority of all big-cityresidents in their late teens, 20s, and early 30s. The data in Figure 7are now nearly a decade out of date. Notwithstanding, we can be surethat migrants still form a majority of many working-age groups in agreat many of China's larger cities today. (36)

Even in the Beijing dictatorship itself the patent injustice ofhukou-based exploitation of the new caste of migrant workers is widelyrecognized. Official and semiofficial discussion of hukou"reform" (meaning abolition) has been in the air for more thantwo decades. And some adjustments are underway: The officialurbanization drive talks of granting local hukou to 13 million workers ayear through at least 2020. But since urban population will be growingrapidly at the same time, such measures would merely more or less capthe size of the urban out-of-hukou contingent. If everything goesaccording to plan, 15 percent of China's total population (over 200million people) will be "temporary urban residents" in 2020.To judge by current indications, Chinese leadership plans to maintainthe hukou system indefinitely.

But why? There are at least two obvious answers. First, undercurrent arrangements, migrant workers are cash cows for the cities andtownships in which they toil. Vesting them with the same rights toservices as in-hukou urbanites would throw public finances into disarrayfor municipalities across the country. The central government could fixthis problem through budgetary consolidation relatively easily--but thiswould also be expensive, and Beijing does not want to assume thesecosts. Second, the hukou system still seems to be viewed by this policestate as an indispensable instrument of control. Social and politicalstability in urban areas is a paramount concern for Chineseleadership--in part for historical reasons. Dynasties fall when thecapital and the major cities fall, and the hukou system helps assurepublic order in cities. (37)

Just a decade ago, during the global financial crisis of 2008-09,an untold number of migrant workers (perhaps 20 million or more) weresent back home when export demand slumped; this mass resettlement wasenforced via hukou. What would have happened if those unemployed masseshad stayed in place, milling about in the cities? Chinese authoritiesdid not want to find out. That experience--and more recent exercise ofhukou power for mass ejection of migrants (in Beijing for example)--haspresumably demonstrated the utility of the hukou system and reinforcedthe regime's determination to keep it in place.

In the hukou system we see a political problem in demographic form.It is akin to "influx control" under the old South Africaapartheid regimen; thanks to hukou, urban centers now look a bit like"Soweto with Chinese characteristics." We know what happenedin Soweto. Until and unless the hukou system is genuinely reformed,China may have comparable tinderboxes in every one of its big cities.For this reason, migration and urbanization should be regarded asanother wild card in China's future--and one whose risk of beingcast could be considerably higher than the marriage squeeze card.

The Coming Revolution in Family Structure

One immensely important and utterly unstoppable demographic changenow underway in China has attracted curiously little attention formChinese policymakers and their think-tank advisers: the comingrevolution in Chinese family structure. While the Chinese Academy ofSocial Sciences, the Development Research Center of the State Council,and other organizations have provided voluminous analyses on cominglabor force trends, the implications of population aging, urbanizationand migration, and even SRB gender imbalance, there has as yet been noresearch so far as I can tell on mapping out the dimensions or examiningthe implications of the now unavoidable atrophy of the extended family,or the equally unavoidable rise of a "new family type" inChina. Perhaps this is because such work would take us beyond "theheadcount approach"; the Chinese government, like other modernstates, collects demographic data on individuals and households, notkinship networks.

Changes in childbearing and survival patterns cannot help butchange nuclear family and extended family patterns too, and dramaticchanges in child-bearing and survival lead to dramatic changes in familypatterns. (For simplicity's sake, I will discuss onlyconsanguineous family here, but that is not a bad first approximationfor family in China today.) Generally speaking, improved survivalincreases the number of living family members and kin at any pointacross one's life course, while declining fertility has theopposite effect. But the distribution of births (the "parityprogression ratio" or PPR) also matters: A society could have anaverage of two births per woman if half of all women had four childrenand half had none, and this would look very different from one in whichall women had exactly two children. China's tremendous improvementsin life expectancy since the early 1950s greatly increased the number ofliving kin for grown men and women over the past three generations. Buttotal potential living kin depend on birth patterns, and, of course,fertility has plummeted in modern China. (We discuss the outlook andimplications for these changes in a separate forthcoming AEI volume,(38) which helps inform the following pages.)

Of particular interest in this regard is the number of onlychildren in China, today and tomorrow. The rise of the only childradically transforms not only the structure of the nuclear family butalso extended kinship networks. Both official Chinese and independentlyconducted reconstructions of PPRs indicate that almost all women ofchildbearing age married and almost all had at least one child, butsince around 1993, fewer than half of first births led to further birthsfor the country as a whole. In 1990, by these reckonings, about one insix Chinese births would end up only children; by 2000 the fractionwould jump to two in five or perhaps even higher.

Calculations for the proportion of only children are highlysensitive to underreporting of births, so it is possible that theyoverstate the nationwide proportions of only children in China. Thatsaid, there is no doubt whatever that only children have comprised amajority of newborns in urban China for decades. Whereas the nationalfertility level fell below replacement in the early 1990s, it appears tohave dropped below replacement in urban China in the early 1970s, yearsbefore the One-Child Policy. By 1982, in the early days of thatpopulation control drive, TFRs in urban areas were already down to anestimated 1.4 births per woman per lifetime. (39) By 1984 over half ofall urban births (townships plus big cities) may have been onlychildren, and in the big cities the ratio may have been closer to 70percent. In the biggest metropolitan areas the share of only childrenmight be even higher. By collaborative estimates of the National Bureauof Statistics of China and the East-West Center in Hawaii, four-fifthsof babies born in Shanghai were only children as early as 1990, withratios for Beijing only slightly lower.

Today, only children form a majority of urban China's (legalhukou) population under 35 years of age and a supermajority of theunder-35 population in the country's big cities. This means we arestarting to see the rise of a new family type in China: only childrenbegotten by only children, and boys and girls with no siblings, cousins,uncles, or aunts, only ancestors and (perhaps eventually) descendants.For this new family type, the traditional extended family hasessentially collapsed. This new family type is now beginning to accountfor a sizable fraction of urban China's (officially authorizedresident) children--very possibly, an outright majority in thecountry's economic and political nerve centers (Shanghai andBeijing) and in other cities of size as well. Even in places where theemerging new family type does not dominate in the rising generation whowill be the parents of 2040, the extended family and its kinshipnetworks are being dramatically compressed by long-term sub-replacementfertility.

The family unit matters everywhere, but it has assumed aparticularly prominent institutional and even spiritual role in Chinesetradition. For millennia, guanxi networks--comprised principallyalthough not exclusively of fellow clansmen--have helped providefinancial and human security for the Chinese population. They have beenintegral to getting business done at the micro level and at the macrolevel have improved national economic performance by reducingtransaction costs and risk.

What will happen to economic performance in China as its guanxinetworks come under extraordinary new demographic pressure? We are aboutto find out. There are of course functional substitutes of sorts forfamily-based guanxi networks: Deep personal friendships among unrelatedindividuals would be one; impersonal spheres of "social trust"now witnessed in China's fascinating "fintech revolution"would be another. But it is far from clear that these substitutes arecomplete substitutes, much less perfect ones.

The ongoing family revolution in China might also have implicationsfor political cohesion and national security. A decade ago, thousands ofschoolchildren perished in the tragic Sichuan earthquake. Many were onlychildren; their deaths brought a permanent end to untold familylineages. In those localities and across China there was a spasm ofsocial rage as people learned that the earthquake knocked down cheap andshoddily constructed schools, even though nearby Chinese Communist Partyand government buildings survived the tremors. The tragedy took on anelectrifying import across China, one magnified by its consonance withthe age-old Chinese theme of unjust rulers losing the Mandate of Heaven.This disaster was thus also a public relations disaster and forced theregime into contrition mode, requiring the unusual spectacle ofconspicuous and repeated public apologies by Chinese officialdom, allthe way to the very top.

Consider what this domestic tragedy may portend for a futureinternational confrontation or confict involving serious Chinesecasualties. Many of the soldiers in the People's Liberation Armywill presumably be only children. Major losses would mean the end of agreat many family lines. If China sufers setbacks in internationalmilitary operations or if the Chinese public deems these losses to bethe result of an illegitimate use of power, what sort of explosion ofsocial rage might Beijing face? No less pertinent, how might regimecalculations about the possible risk of social rage due to militarylosses condition China's defense strategy and tactics in the yearsahead?

Concluding Observations

Demographic factors suggest, among other things, that the cominggeneration will not see a repeat performance of the phenomenal economicrise that China enjoyed over the past generation (or generation and ahalf). To be sure, despite the demographic constraints outlined above,China is certainly capable of generating creditable rates of economicgrowth for the foreseeable future. But demographic realities among otherforces are likely to end China's era of "heroic economicgrowth," possibly sooner rather than later. Using a humancapital-based model, Stanford's Scott Rozelle and his colleagueshave ventured that the Chinese economy would grow by an average of 3percent per annum over the coming 20 years. (40) In my own current work,a simple human-resources-plus-business-climate calculation comes up withresults more or less consistent with Rozelle et al.: about 2.5 percentper annum GDP growth for the 2025-40 period in purchasing-power-parityterms (with somewhat higher rates for exchange-rate-based GDP), assumingno changes in business climate over the decades immediately ahead. (41)We should recognize that such projections are lower than most prevailingestimates, but they highlight the headwinds the Chinese economy faceswhen demographic trends are taken into consideration.

Demographic constraints could also complicate Beijing's questto mobilize political power and/or apply it abroad. At this writing theChinese regime seems to be behaving in an increasingly ambitious andassertive fashion: The era of "hide your strength, bide yourtime" appears to be over. Demographic stresses could reduce socialcohesion or even contribute to social or political instability. Note theverb "could": This is by no means a certainty, but it is apossibility that would be unwise to ignore. Dynasties in China alwaysend. When and how the current regime will end, and whether demographicforces will play any appreciable role in its demise, will only be knownin the fullness of time.

In any event, over the next generation that regime must cope notonly with the "marriage squeeze" and the "floatingpopulation" problem but also with an upending of an extended familysystem that is as old as Chinese civilization itself. It is stilldifficult for us to imagine what China will look like, much less howthings will work, with the rise of the new family type. We cannot yetdismiss out of hand the conjecture that this development could prove tobe an existential, civilization-challenging event.

Finally, there is the question of China's long-term fertilitytrends and what the government may do to affect these. This question isnot too pertinent to the demographic outlook for 2040, as we havealready seen, but it is highly relevant to speculation about China 2050and beyond.

It is important to recognize that the regime still holds thenational birth rate to be a matter of state, not of parental choice. Theadjustments to the population policy in recent years did not vitiate theregime's claim for itself to the right to set national fertilitylevels; it merely raised the birth quotas the government would permit.

Now there are hints that Beijing may be toying with a populationpolicy U-turn, a 180 degree shift to a pro-natal population policy. Somehave noted, for example, this year's new Lunar New Year postagestamps, featuring a cartoon of five happy pigs: two parents and theirthree children. Little signals like this are sometimes leadingindicators for new political campaigns.

Absent government pressure, China's "natural"fertility trajectory might well be further decline. After all, fertilitylevels today are decidedly lower in neighboring Hong Kong, Taiwan, SouthKorea, and Japan. They are lower in authoritarian Singapore too, despitethat nation-state's attempts to encourage births through threedecades of pro-natal measures.

Could Beijing succeed where Singapore has failed? Police statepower may be effective in forcing births down--but could it also forcebirths up? In the 1960s Communist Romania suddenly banned abortionwithout notice and doubled the nation's birth rate the followingyear--but that was a one-off, and birth rates gradually returned theabortion-era levels.

Beijing may have more sophisticated and intrusive tools at hand forany future pro-natal campaign. "Social media credit ratings"through fintech could be one of these: far-reaching financial penaltiesfor those evidencing unpatriotic tendencies, including childlessness.Think of it as "market totalitarianism." To date, pro-natalpolicies around the world have met with at best limited success. Butthen again, none yet have experimented with market totalitarianism.

About the Author

Nicholas Eberstadt ([emailprotected]) holds the Henry Wendt Chairin Political Economy at AEI.

Acknowledgments

The author thanks Cecilia Joy-Perez for research assistance andvaluable suggestions on this report. An earlier version was presented atStanford University's Hoover Institution, where the author alsoobtained useful feedback. The usual caveats apply.

Notes

(1.) Population projections lose their reliability whendemographers begin to makes guesses about how many babies the currentlyunborn are going to bear. There is no reliable basis for suchprojections today--and as long as human births are a matter of futureindividual volition, there presumably never can be. If we try to lookmore than a generation ahead for any population, we are thus gettinginto the realm of science fiction.

(2.) There are additional source of official data that also aid indemographic reconstructions for China today--among them, educationalenrollment figures by age for children and young people, hospital birthrecords, and hukou registration numbers compiled by local authorities.See Wei Chen, "Evaluation of the Completeness of Birth Registrationin China Using Analytical Methods and Multiple Sources of Data,"paper presented at UN expert group meeting "Methodology and LessonsLearned to Evaluate the Completeness and Quality of Vital StatisticsData from Civil Registration," New York, November 3-4, 2016,http://www.un.org/en/development/desa/popiulation/events/pdf/expert/26/notes/Chen_2016_Birth%20Registration%20in%20China.pdf. But suchpopulation information may be regarded as supplemental, while the censusreturns and "mini census" surveys are essential

(3.) Yong Cai, "China's New Demographic Reality: Learningfrom the 2010 Census," Population and Development Review 39, no. 3(September 2013): 371-96,http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1728-4457.2013.00608.x.

(4.) Chen, "Evaluation of the Completeness of BirthRegistration in China"; UN Secretariat, Department of Economic andSocial Afairs, Population Division, 2017 Revision of World PopulationProspects, accessed on August 27, 2018,http://esa.un.org/unpd/wpp/index.htm; National Bureau of Statistics ofChina, China Population Census: Tabulation of the 2010 Population Censusof the People's Republic of China (Beijing: China Statistics Press,2012). For a more detailed discussion of the reliability of availabledemographic data for China today, see Nicholas Eberstadt and AlexCoblin, "Urbanization with Chinese Characteristics": Migrationand Urban Growth in Contemporary China, American Enterprise Institute,forthcoming.

(5.) Fertility projections for China these days may bear anadditional measure of uncertainty--for they not only reflect theintrinsic uncertainties inherent in any projection of fertility trendsinto the future but also are conditioned by a special measure ofuncertainty about past fertility trends. This is so quite simply becauseof the lingering and still unsettled questions regarding the demographicimpact of China's anti-natal population control policy. Somedemographers argue that the birth trajectory traced out in China underthe One-Child Policy was strongly shaped by compulsory policies; othersargue instead that socioeconomic development was the main engine offertility decline and that coercive population policy was rather lessresponsible for sustained sub-replacement fertility in China thanBeijing's population planners have asserted. For contendingassessments, see on one hand Daniel Goodkind, "The AstonishingPopulation Averted by China's Birth Restrictions: Estimates,Nightmares, and Reprogrammed Ambitions," Demography 54, no. 4(August 2017): 1375-400,https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13524-017-0595-x and on theother Wang Feng, Yong Cai, and Gu Baochang, "Population, Policy,and Politics: How Will History Judge China's One-ChildPolicy?," Population and Development Review 38, no. S1 (February2013): 115-29, https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1728-4457.2013.00555.x. Until there is resolution of the controversy about thedegree to which past trends reflect forcible suppression of nationalfertility levels below those desired by China's parents, there willbe a corresponding debate about the prospective demographic impact ofrelaxing birth strictures for the years ahead.

(6.) Very roughly speaking, the raw labor input simpliciter mayhave contributed close to one-quarter of China's measured economicgrowth over those decades.

(7.) Ronald Lee and Andrew Mason, "Fertility, Human Capital,and Economic Growth over the Demographic Transition," EuropeanJournal of Population 26, no. 2 (May 2010): 159-82,http://doi.org/10.1007/s10680-009-9186-x.

(8.) Baozhen Luo, "China Will Get Rich Before It GrowsOld," Foreign Afairs, October 30, 2015,https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/china/2015-04-20/china-will-get-rich-it-grows-old.

(9.) Nicholas Eberstadt and Judith Banister, The Population ofNorth Korea (Berkeley, CA: Institute of East Asian Studies, 1992).

(10.) Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development,"LFS by Sex and Age--Indicators," Health Status,https://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DataSetCode=LFS_SEXAGE_I_R.

(11.) Fang Cai and Yang Du, "Wage Increases, Wage Convergence,and the Lewis Turning Point in China," China Economic Review 22,no. 4 (2011): 601-10,https://econpapers.repec.org/article/eeechieco/v_3a22_3ay_3a2011_3ai_3a4_3ap_3a601-610.htm.

(12.) See Xinhua, "National New-Type Urbanization Plan(2014-20)," March 16, 2016,http://www.gov.cn/zhengce/2014-03/16/content_2640075.htm. See also"China Unveils Urbanization Plan: Aims to Have About 60 Percent ofPopulation Living in Cities by 2020," Wall Street Journal, March16, 2014, https://www.wsj.com/articles/china-unveils-long-awaited-urbanization-plan-1395024223; and World Bank and People's Republic ofChina, Development Research Center of the State Council, Urban China:Toward Efficient, Inclusive, and Sustainable Urbanization, July 2014,https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/handle/10986/18865.

(13.) Martina Miskolczi and Kornelia Csefalvaiova, "Process ofPopulation Ageing and Its Dynamic" (lecture, Seventh InternationalDays of Statistics and Economics, Prague, September 19-21, 2013),https://msed.vse.cz/files/2013/121-Miskolczi-Martina-paper.pdf.

(14.) See David E. Bloom, David Canning, and Jaypee Sevilla, TheDemographic Dividend: A New Perspective on the Economic Consequences ofPopulation Change (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2003).

(15.) Nancy Birdsall et al., The East Asian Miracle: EconomicGrowth and Public Policy, World Bank, 1993,http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/975081468244550798/Main-report.

(16.) Wittgenstein Centre relies on its own population projectionsin these estimates, not UNPD's.

(17.) Feng Wang et al., "Economic Boom, Population Aging, andPolicy Shift: What's Ahead for China?" (presentation, FudanWorking Group on Comparative Aging Societies, Shanghai, June 8, 2013),https://www.ntaccounts.org/doc/repository/presentation%20Wang.pdf.

(18.) Professor Yi Zeng of Peking University and Duke is one ofChina's foremost demographers.

(19.) Yi Zeng et al., "ProFamy: The Extended Cohort-ComponentMethod for Household and Living Arrangement Projections," inHousehold and Living Arrangement Projections by Yi Zeng et al. (NewYork: Springer, 2013).

(20.) World Bank, "China Economic Update--December 2017:Growth Resilience and Reform Momentum," December 19, 2017,https://www.worldbank.org/en/country/china/publication/china-economic-update-december-2017.

(21.) International Monetary Fund, "Capitalizing on GoodTimes," Fiscal Monitor, April 2018,https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/FM/Issues/2018/04/06/fiscal-monitor-april-2018.

(22.) Marcos Chamon, Kai Liu, and Eswar Prasad, "IncomeUncertainty and Household Savings in China," Journal of DevelopmentEconomics 105 (July 27, 2013): 164-77,https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/85c2/eb00498e554f69b691cef3c1b8660b3ba3ed.pdf.

(23.) Celia Hatton, "New China Law Says Children 'MustVisit Parents,'" BBC News, July 1, 2013,https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-23124345.

(24.) Nicholas Eberstadt, "The Global War Against BabyGirls," New Atlantis 33 (Fall 2011): 3-18,https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/the-global-war-against-baby-girls.

(25.) Gavin W. Jones, "The 'Flight from Marriage' inSouth-East and East Asia," Journal of Comparative Family Studies36, no. 1 (Winter 2005): 93-119, http://www.jstor.org/stable/41603982.

(26.) Zeng et al., "ProFamy." I wish to thank ProfessorZeng for graciously providing me access to both PROFAMY and his"baseline" China data.

(27.) Shang-Jin Wei and Xiaobo Zhang, "The Competitive SavingMotive: Evidence from Rising Sex Ratios and Savings Rates in China"(working paper, National Bureau of Economic Research, New York, June2009), https://ssrn.com/abstract=1422971.

(28.) Gary S. Becker and Richard A. Posner, Uncommon Sense:Economic Insights, from Marriage to Terrorism (Chicago: University ofChicago Press, 2010).

(29.) Valerie M. Hudson and Andrea M. den Boer, Bare Branches: TheSecurity Implications of Asia's Surplus Male Population (Cambridge,MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 2005).

(30.) Valerie M. Hudson and Andrea M. Den Boer, "A Surplus ofMen, a Deficit of Peace: Security and Sex Ratios in Asia's LargestStates," International Security 26, no. 4 (2002): 5-38,http://www.jstor.org/stable/3092100.

(31.) James Z. Lee and Wang Feng, One Quarter of Humanity:Malthusian Mythology and Chinese Realities, 1700-2000 (Cambridge, MA:Harvard University Press, 2001).

(32.) National Bureau of Statistics of China, China StatisticalYearbook 2017 (Beijing: China Statistics Press, 2018),http://www.stats.gov.cn/tjsj/ndsj/2017/indexeh.htm.

(33.) UN Population Division, "World Urbanization Prospects2018," accessed September 24, 2018, https://population.un.org/wup/.

(34.) Edward Glaeser, Triumph of the City: How Our GreatestInvention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier (NewYork: Penguin Press, 2012).

(35.) Eberstadt and Coblin, "Urbanization with ChineseCharacteristics."

(36.) These are data from China's 2010 census as officiallyreported. We know that UNPD believes the nationwide figures involved anundercount of about 30 million, but since most of that undercount isthought to have been rural, this should not distract us here.

(37.) Jeremy L. Wallace, Cities and Stability: Urbanization,Redistribution, and Regime Survival in China (Oxford, UK: OxfordUniversity Press, 2014).

(38.) Nicholas Eberstadt, ed., China's Changing FamilyStructure: Dimensions and Implications, American Enterprise Institute,forthcoming.

(39.) Zen Guo et al., "The Efect of Urbanization onChina's Fertility," Population Research and Policy Review 31,no. 3 (2012): 417-34, http://paa2012.princeton.edu/papers/120365.

(40.) Hongbin Li et al., "Human Capital and China'sFuture Growth," Journal of Economic Perspectives 31, no. 1 (2017):25-47, https://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1257/jep.31.1.25.

(41.) Nicholas Eberstadt's ongoing research for the Office ofNet Assessment/Office of the Secretary of Defense contributed to thisreport.