Chandrabhushan
Who could have thought till recently that a country’s population coming out less than last year would become the world’s biggest news. But if it is the case of China, which brings down the global price of every commodity on the basis of the world’s largest population, then it is bound to surprise everyone. China’s National Bureau of Statistics recently released the data and said that at the beginning of the year 2023, the population there was 8.5 lakh less than the same date of 2022. In other words, the population of China has begun to decline.
There is no use in reversing the policy
The Chinese government had realized this in 2015 itself. So in 2016, it reversed its 35-year-old policy of ‘Mian-Bibi and one child’. First two, then increased the number of children to three in 2021. But this disease itself is such that no medicine works.
- The Chinese government appealed to its people to please produce more children.
The survey showed that the Chinese middle class, troubled by the exorbitant expenses on children’s education, has confined itself to only one child, so online tutoring companies were banned after losing billions of dollars. - Such rules were made that parents should not even run towards private tuitions for their children.
- Some state governments have made arrangements to give some relief to the husband and wife in the job for three years after the birth of the child. But in the last seven years, all the government measures were seen to be working to some extent only in one year, 2016-17, when a slight increase in the child birth rate was registered.
- In fact, the damage that was to be done to China’s population and its social fabric has happened in the 35 years from 1980 to 2015 and it seems very difficult to recover it now.

China’s declining population
tight family structure
In human history, children have been brought up only through the village-neighborhood-neighborhood and through the family structure of maternal uncle-aunt, uncle-aunt. But a whole generation has grown up in China who have not even heard of these relationships. If there are no brothers and sisters of the parents, then where will the maternal uncle, aunt, uncle and aunt come from? The insecurities associated with single children lead people to see even neighbors as potential enemies. Sociologists of China have been enumerating all such problems for a long time. Despite this, the government there remained adamant on the policy of ‘one child’ for 35 years, the main reason for this was the fear that people dissatisfied with not being able to provide employment and basic facilities to the growing population might create difficulties for its one-party rule. A look at population trends in Communist China shows surprising fluctuations.
- A song became popular in India during the Indo-China war of 1962 – ‘Chalis crore ko Himalaya ne pukara’. At that time our population was just over 400 million, but China’s population was then touching 650 million.
- By the beginning of the seventies, it had crossed the figure of 80 crores and the Chinese leadership had come to the conclusion that even if it stood on its head, jobs, houses, food-clothes, education and health for such a large population Can’t arrange.
- Note that the decade following the deaths of Mao Zedong and Chao Enlai was marked by a crisis of order in Communist China. After much turmoil, Deng Xiaoping took over the reins of power there, following the path of market-order and openness to the outside world. The first thing he did at the domestic level was to reverse the trend of rapid population growth through the ‘one child policy’. Covered.
there were some advantages
- By the end of the 20th century, this policy helped China in a matter that due to the reduction of essential expenses, people continued to live on a small income and on the strength of their savings, they very soon started behaving like a middle class consumer society.
- Seeing this, China not only turned into a huge market, but taking advantage of the openness brought to the world through the World Trade Organization, made irrelevant the established manufacturing sector of Europe, America and Japan on the strength of its cheap goods.
- These developed countries began to realize the ground that had slipped from under their feet after the recession of 2008-09, but by then it was too late. China became the world’s number two economy, had turned them into rent-eating forces.
What will happen now
The question is, when China’s policy wheel is about to turn back from its axis of population, will the story of its development continue as before? By the year 2027, leaving America behind and becoming the world’s number one economy, the possibility that was being expressed, will it still remain as it was? These questions will be answered only after a few years, when a final opinion will be formed on Chinese efforts to stabilize its population and the reality of its claims of achieving technological self-reliance by 2025 will be tested. Broadly speaking, if no major war breaks out in between, then by 2026-27 we will be in a position to draw some conclusions regarding the future of China. Right now it is just that in the next five years, some of the places surrounded by it in the world economy will definitely be vacant, which India should be entitled to.
Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author’s own.