Demographics and international relations

Most commentators do not mention the role of demography in international relations, in large part because the study of population can seem dry (I won’t lie to you — until a few years ago, if I saw a talk with the the word “demography” in the title, I was already bored) and because the effect of current demographic trends usually don’t play themselves out for generations. That said, Tyler Cowen links to a Nicholas Eberstadt essay in Policy Review that’s worth a gander. First, Eberstadt actually justifies the failure to pay attention to demography:

By comparison with other contemporary forms of change — social, economic, political, technological — demographic changes are very slow and very regular…. And demographic change is only sharp and discontinuous in times of utter upheaval and catastrophe (circumstances, to be sure, not unfamiliar to modern Russia, China, Cambodia, and Korea — and a number of other Asian or Eurasian populations). From the standpoint of strategic demography, momentous developments can and do occur from one generation to the next, but rather less of note can be expected to take place over the course of three to five years.

That said, Eberstadt instroduces some startling facts — and the same one that caught Tyler’s attention caught mine:

Between 2000 and 2025 China’s median age is set to rise very substantially: from about 30 to around 39. According to unpd projections for 2025, in fact, China’s median age will be higher than America’s. The impending tempo of population aging in China is very nearly as rapid as anything history has yet seen. It will be far faster than what was recorded in the more developed regions over the past three decades and is exceeded only by Japan. There is a crucial difference, however, between Japan’s recent past and China’s prospective future. To put the matter bluntly, Japan became rich before it became old; China will do things the other way around. When Japan had the same proportion of population 65 and older as does China today (2000), its level of per capita output was three times higher than China’s is now. In 2025, 13.4 percent of China’s population is projected to be 65-plus; when Japan crossed the 13.4 percent threshold, its per capita gdp was approaching $20,000 a year (constant 1990 ppp dollars). One need not be a “Sino-pessimist” to suggest that China will be nowhere near that same economic marker 22 years from now…. Thus, China’s rapidly graying population appears to face a triple bind. Without a broad-coverage national pension system, and with only limited filial resources to fall back on, paid work will of necessity loom large as an option for economic security for many older Chinese. But employment in China, today and tomorrow, will be more physically punishing than in oecd countries, and China’s older cohorts are simply less likely to be up to the task. The aggregation of hundreds of millions of individual experiences with this triple bind over the coming generation will be a set of economic, social, and political constraints on Chinese development — and power augmentation — that have not as yet been fully appreciated in Beijing, much less overseas.

However, the startling fact in Eberstadt’s article in the increasing gender imbalance in Chinese and Indian birth rates — a function of “1) strong and enduring cultural preference for sons; 2) low or sub-replacement fertility; and 3) the advent of widespread technology for prenatal sex determination and gender-based abortion.” Eberstadt’s conclusion is sobering:

It would be cheering to think that the gender imbalances emerging in Asia’s major population centers were a vestige of backward ideas and will consequently pass away with increasing modernization. The facts to date, unfortunately, do not support such an interpretation. In both India and China over the past two decades, the nationwide sex ratio at birth has increased along with per capita income, female literacy rates, and urbanization. In China today, the more literate provinces tend in fact to have somewhat higher, not lower, sex ratios at birth; and in India it is urban, not rural, areas in which the disproportion between boys and girls is greatest. For the time being, we must live with the disturbing possibility that continuing “development” and “globalization” will heighten rather than reduce nascent gender imbalances in these two enormous countries — and the knowledge that these particular expressions of “Asian values” will have unpredictable but perhaps not inconsequential repercussions on society and politics in these ostensibly rising powers for decades to come.

Read the whole thing.