China’s population is falling for the first time in 60 years, but Japan has been battling its own demographic crisis since 2008 and provides a possible snapshot of China’s future.
| Shigeo Hagihara abandoned city life to move to the picturesque Japanese mountain village of Ohi in the 1990s.
The country’s looming demographic crisis is expected to have long-term ramifications for the global economy and derail China’s prospects of overtaking the United States as the world’s largest economy.Japan, which has had a declining population since 2008, offers a potential snapshot of China’s future. Japan has been battling economic and political stagnation since its asset price bubble burst in the early 1990s.
Japan’s population, which exploded after World War II and peaked at 128 million, has been declining since 2008 with the numbers accelerating each year. The population shrunk by 20,000 in 2008, but this increased to 640,000 people in 2021. The number of people aged 65 and over is expected to increase to 35 per cent by 2040, according to the National Institute of Population and Social Security Research.
“Recently, Chinese authorities have rushed to launch a series of policies to boost fertility, but they are likely to fail like Japan,” Yi Fuxian, a demographer at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, says. “What the Chinese government want to do, the Japanese government has already done.”“Japan’s approach has proved expensive and inefficient, temporarily boosting the fertility rate from 1.26 in 2005 to 1.45 in 2015 and back down to 1.23 in 2022.
“Compared with the economic development level of Japan and South Korea, the time point for the negative growth of my country’s total population is obviously coming too early,” it said.
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