Marathon task to count China's millions

Press, 14 July 1982, Page 14

Marathon task to count China's millions

From “The Economist,” London

Even the cons,us takers are too numerous to be counted precisely. Some 5 million to 6 million of them set out this week to conduct the world's most intimidating demographic exercise—the first scientific census in China. Their findings will be fed into 29 computers, financed by

the United Nations and supplied. after prolonged bureaucratic foot-dragging, by the United Sates. By October China will know how many millions to give or take from last year's highly tentative popula’tion estimate of 996 million. One immediate use for the census will be for fine tuning

china's birth control policies. Last year China's population is reckoned to have grown by 1.4 per cent. That is 0.2 per cent faster than the year before and 0.4 per cent faster than its target rate. This backsliding, due to a "baby bulge" in the late 19505. was expected. The census will enable China to anticipate. further dips and

bulges with greater accuracy by measuring age cohorts. Nobody knows, for example, what the birth rates were in the early 1960 s when.the death rate was reported to have doubled in the aftermath of the catastrophic great leap forward. The count of today's 22-year-olds will not only provide a footnote to history; it will help predict how many babies of the 1960's will be marrying and having babies of their own in the next few years. China is now aiming at a population of 1.2 billion by the year 2090. The World Bank is projecting an end-century Chinese population only slightly higher, at 1.24 billion’, assuming that the Chinese maintain a fertility rate between now and then of 1.6 children per couple. Last year’s rate, after a decade of stringent birth control, was 2.5. This is why the Chinese are pressing now for one child only. Demographers rate China's

birth control programme as the world's most successful. From 1972 to 1979 the birthrate fell by 67 per cent. It is now less than half the norm for income levels comparable to China, but Chinese techniques are not easily replicable in non-authoritarian societies. Mr John Aird. of the United States Census Bureau, who has been playing population poker with the Chinese for years, notes that the single most important factor behind China’s dramatically reduced birthate is ‘’direct administrative pressure on individual Chinese families."

This pressure ranges from exhortation to outright coercion. The present phase, since the end of last year, appears to be a coercive one, with numerous reports of involuntary

abortions and insertions of in-tra-uterine devices. Ordinary Chinese obviously have doubts about the one-child policy. So do demographers who worry about the impact of an over-rapid reduction in fertility on a society's age structure. If China keeps its birthrate on target for 20 years, the ratio of children to elderly will shift from 8 to 1 now to 3 to 1. This will bring a radical change in the demand' for agerelated goods and services, chief among them some form of social security. Chinese are rightly fearful that so long as

their country is too poor to pay a universal pension, the onechild policy is bound to leave many people unsupported in old age. The government’s answer is that although age distribution will change, the total number of dependants per working person will actually drop in the next two decades. The World Bank agrees that the proportion of working age people in China's population will not decline for another 50 years. So tomorrow's problem will be the same as today's: unemployment. The census will quantify this too.