In his 2024 New Year’s address, Xi Jinping said that China’s economy has “maintained the momentum of recovery” after the coronavirus pandemic, and that all Chinese people, including those in Taiwan, will share the “glory of the rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.” said it should.
Both of these lead phrases are fantasy. However confident Mr. Xi may be in his autocratic control over the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), he appears to lack both the vision and the means to reverse China’s classic middle-income trap. The post-pandemic economic recovery that the Chinese Communist Party had hoped for did not materialize. The outlook for the IMF is bleak. For 60 years, the Chinese population has increased. We now know that it is starting to shrink. Last year’s death rate was the highest since 1974, when China was in the turmoil of Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution. But even more worrying is that the birth rate in 2023 will drop by 5.7%, the lowest in the history of the Communist Party of China.
China’s workforce is shrinking and its population is aging. Currently, there are 280 million Chinese citizens over the age of 60. Rather than the glorious rejuvenation that President Xi boasts about, China’s massive demographic time bomb is ticking.
How did this happen, and can Mr. Xi de-escalate it? Around 1980, the Chinese Communist Party decided that the population growth rate was harmful and instituted a forced policy known as the “one-child policy.” Birth planning measures have begun. Negative incentives and coercion were then used to reduce birth rates for more than 30 years. Gradually, it became clear that things were going very wrong. Traditional patriarchal prejudices led to widespread selective abortion, infanticide, and abandonment of women. In China, there are currently 110 men for every 100 women, which means there is an “excess” of about 34 million men. Now, one young worker’s productive labor and taxes must increase the state pensions of four retired relatives. The number of retired Chinese Communist Party nationals is expected to increase by more than 30% in the next decade. The current pension system cannot accommodate this.
In response, the Chinese Communist Party recently adopted policies aimed at encouraging younger generations to have more children. However, achieving this turns out to be much more difficult than bullying people to reduce their income. A sign of Xi’s desperation is his de facto order last May for the participation of 2 million Chinese military personnel. The rest of the population is unimpressed by various material incentives for increasing birth rates.
Like it or not, China’s young people are increasingly passively resisting the party’s intrusion into their private lives, following President Xi’s prolonged and ineffective zero-corona lockdown. Since the start of the pandemic, Chinese social media has been filled with nihilistic, discontented interactions among young people about the gap behind President Xi’s fabricated “China Dream” and their hopeless existence. It’s full of. No amount of state censorship could suppress this.
The reality is harsh. Last year, 11.6 million Chinese graduates tried to find jobs. One in five people could remain unemployed. Those who do find work are victims of an outdated ethic of unrewarding hard work and sacrifice. They prefer to do the bare minimum and give up vain hopes of career advancement. This is an approach known as “laying down.” Mr. Xi has named the idea and exposed it to strong criticism, but has received nothing in return. To make matters worse, in one speech he told young people five times to be stronger and learn to “eat the bitter.” They are more than impressed by his exhortation to “seek out self-inflicted hardship” in the new economic normal.
The Chinese people are increasingly aware that their leaders have abandoned all pretense of a credible social contract to justify one-party rule. Neither they nor the free people of Taiwan believe in any talk of China’s “glorious resurgence.” From both sides of the strait, it can be seen that the emperor in Beijing is not wearing any clothes.
Matthew Henderson is an Associate Fellow at the Geographical Strategic Council.