India may already have overtaken China as the world’s most populous country, according to research by an independent Chinese demographer.
Yi Fuxian, a scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said Chinese officials had overestimated the number of births between 1990 and 2016 by almost 90 million.
He attributed the alleged error partly to an overly optimistic fertility rate figure. China’s fertility rate was estimated at 1.6 children per woman in 2015, while Yi believes it could be as low as 1.05.
If Yi is correct, China’s population at the end of last year was 1.29 billion, compared to the government’s official figure of 1.38 billion. India’s population is officially estimated at 1.33 billion.
Yi’s research, which was presented to academics in Beijing this week, highlights the demographic crisis confronting Chinese policymakers. China’s working age population fell for the first time in 2012 and has been declining ever since, raising the prospect that the country may “get old before it gets rich”.
“I haven’t looked at India’s population figures,” Yi told the Financial Times. “But its population will soon exceed China’s if it hasn’t already and will eventually be far greater.”
Yi is a longstanding critic of China’s controversial “one child” policy, which was enforced from the early 1980s until 2015. In his 2007 book, Big Country with an Empty Nest, he argued that the Malthusian fears of Chinese Communist party planners were unwarranted.
Most Chinese officials and scholars now accept that the one child policy hastened the arrival in China of the “Lewis Turning Point” — set out in 1954 by economist Arthur Lewis — which describes the moment when a country’s surplus rural labour pool is exhausted and wages begin to rise rapidly. This will make it much harder for China to match the easy productivity gains of the past quarter-century.
Yi believes that without the one child policy, China’s population would have peaked at 1.6 billion in 2040 before beginning to decline, allowing the world’s second-largest economy to enjoy a much longer “demographic dividend”.
His contrarian views were for years unwelcome in the Chinese government, which banned his book until 2013. But as Beijing officials began to appreciate the real costs of the one child policy, they warmed to the US-based academic. In March, the Chinese government flew Yi business class from the US to attend the Boao Forum for Asia, an annual gathering in southern China modelled on the World Economic Forum’s Davos meeting.
While there were exceptions to the one child policy for certain minority ethnic groups and rural families whose first child was a girl, most Chinese families were only allowed a single child. The policy was amended two years ago to allow families to have two. The one child policy was often brutally implemented by local officials who conducted forced abortions, many of them late-term, and sterilisations.
The relatives of people who fled to avoid family planners were often imprisoned until they returned. One of China’s most famous dissidents, the blind activist Chen Guangcheng, endured years of extra-legal house arrest for exposing family planning abuses. He escaped to the US in 2012 after giving his jailers the slip and seeking refuge at the American embassy in Beijing.