By Prof. Swaran Singh
The real numbers are uncertain, and what they actually mean for China and India even more so
World media have been abuzz with the United Nations’ State of World Population 2023 report released this month, declaring India the world’s most populous country.
Equal focus has been on the People’s Republic of China experiencing its first ever population shrinkage in the last six decades and how its elderly population will overtake its working-age population by 2080. This is projected to have a profound effect on everything in China, from the economy to President Xi Jinping’s legitimacy.
Some blame China’s population decline on the one-child policy imposed during Deng Xiaoping’s rule during early 1980s. That policy was finally scrapped in 2015, but the current population decline is expected by some to bring about a total collapse of China, in political, economic, and demographic terms, triggering unprecedented global volatility.
Put together, such reports have sought to highlight the population issue as one more point of comparison between China and India. Speculations about whether this will become another point of confrontation have seen experts cite Premier Li Qiang’s reference to China focusing on a “talent” dividend to compensate for its loss of the demographic dividend to India.
Indeed, some television and other media debates have sought to ask whether India’s rise as the next economic powerhouse will trigger China’s decline, thus presenting this as a zero sum equation between the two Asian giants.
All this rhetoric calls for a serious rebuttal, to put things in perspective, and to question various basic assumptions in these super-hyped, sensational insinuations.
Estimates are tentative
First and foremost, all these estimates are just that, estimates. Based on projected trends, the aforementioned UN report concludes that India’s population this year will exceed that of China by 2.9 million. This figure, when put against the 2.9 billion combined population of China and India, leaves too little space for any margin of error: 0.001%, to be precise.
Now compare this with the margin of error in China’s recent census. The census for 2020 was conducted during the Covid-19 pandemic, with an officially accepted undercount rate of 0.05%. This is way above the aforementioned 0.001% margin of error in predicting India as the world’s most populous nation.
Second and more important to remember is that China’s population projections do not include its autonomous regions of Hong Kong and Macau, which together stand at more than 8 million people – way more than the margin of 2.9 million to make India the world’s most populous nation. This, of course, also does not include the 24 million people of Taiwan, which China considers its renegade province.
Third, in the middle of the pandemic, India was not able to conduct census. This means that its current reliable census figures remain those of 2011, and figures used since then they represent broad trend projections that will remain tentative until the next census is conducted. India first postponed its census to 2021 and has since postponed it to 2024.
Devil in the details
As is often said, absolute numbers always miss hidden subtleties that make a real difference. The focus, for example, has been primarily on the workforce, and India’s workforce is expected to be 900 million. But irrespective of the median age of the workforce, as the locomotive of national economic growth they may be carrying varying productive potential.
Apart from unemployment figures, which also reflect the complex reality of a bloated labor force shifting out of agriculture, half of this workforce consists of women. China holds an impressive record in women’s employment even in comparison to most developed nations, and it is twice the world average. Compared with China’s 72%, India’s female participation in the labor market has been as low as 29%.
There is also debate on whether India having world’s largest workforce will follow China’s example to emerge as another economic powerhouse in the making. Again, there is no reason to believe India will – 0r can – follow China’s example. This is not just because the two have had very different cultures and models of development but also because China’s began in the early 1990s when the world had just come out of the Cold War and the brief unipolar moment.
China’s economic rise took off in an era when manufacturing was still seen as the main driver of economic growth. By comparison, growth rates are today driven by the services sector, especially those led by Internet-enabled services and by digital platforms, where India already has established credentials.
India accordingly has been experimenting with blending its demographic dividend with its talent dividend.
Moreover, India becoming the world’s most populous nation is not as new as is being made out in the aforementioned media reports. These demographic trends have been a well known and a long time in the making. So understandably, both China and India have been working to deal with this reality and have put in place multiple initiatives to face the various challenges and opportunities that flow from this transition.
On expected lines
Finally, the transition has been on expected lines. It is a commonplace that a rise in prosperity, especially with more women joining the productive workforce, has a direct impact on birth rates and women’s fertility. The growth rates of the populations of China and India have been slowing since the 1950s.
So just as China has experienced a population decline this year, India will also be experiencing a similar decline in coming years. Already, India’s fertility rate has fallen from 5.7 per woman in 1950 to 2.2 per woman now. Only in the face of its unprecedented economic rise has the slowdown in China’s population growth happened faster than India’s.
Likewise, an aeging population need not necessarily lead to lower productivity per capita.
Infusions of technology, skill development and automation can actually make longevity an asset, allowing a trained person to work for longer years. Especially with the shift toward e-commerce and digital platforms in increasing number of industries, the correlation of age and production does not hold true in the case of advanced nations.
No doubt, by all estimates, India is ordained to surpass China’s population size, but it need not happen this year and should not be seen as marking any breaking point in either their growth and development trajectories or their bilateral equations.
Both China and India have always had large populations and large workforces that have expanded gradually over the last half-century.
If anything, the world will be witnessing the expanding global outreach of both Chinese and Indian people around the world and how it impacts the the United States, whose population is barely one-fourth of either China’s or India’s.
Originally published: AsiaTimes, April 25, 2023.
Posted in SIS Blog with the authorization of the author.
Prof. Swaran Singh is visiting professor at the University of British Columbia, fellow of the Canadian Global Affairs Institute in Calgary, Alberta, and professor of diplomacy and disarmament at the School of International Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India