Opportunities and challenges of 1.4 billion people

'Too many or too old" has long been an issue of debate among Chinese demographers. But the answer to the question, according to official statistics released on Friday, may be both.

The government officially announced on Friday that the population on the Chinese mainland crossed 1.4 billion, temporarily laying to rest speculation that India might surpass China as the world's most populous country. However, being the country with the largest population comes with its own issues.

Good news came at the same time that China's GDP reached nearly 100 trillion yuan ($14.6 trillion) in 2019, with per capita GDP at $10,276. For years Chinese demographers have been addressing the challenge of "China not being rich yet with its population already aging". Amid all this, the news that China's economy is moving toward the 100 trillion yuan mark brings a sigh of relief.

But that doesn't mean China can rest assured that it can meet its daunting population challenges. China's population is not only the largest in the world but also has a very unbalanced structure.

The World Health Organization issued an alert on the dramatically rising pace of aging populations across the world. France had almost 150 years to adapt to the rise in aging population from 10 percent to 20 percent of the total, whereas China has to adapt to the change in slightly more than 20 years.

The figures released on Friday don't draw a clear picture on China's aging population in 2019. But by the end of 2018, the number of people above 60 had reached 249 million, more than 17 percent of the total population. And a country with more than 10 percent of its population above 60 is labeled as an aging society. The number of Chinese people above 60 is widely expected to increase to 255 million in 2020.

It's high time for the most populous country to race against the fast pace of aging, from making up for the shortfall in pension funds to improving its healthcare system and expanding nursing care services.

To meet the challenge of aging population, China first eased its population policy in 2013. And since Jan 1, 2016, it has implemented a policy allowing all couples to have a second child. But the huge costs of raising a child, including high housing prices and big expenditure on education, prevent many couples from having a second child.

In 2019, there were 14.65 million newborns, with the population increasing 4.67 million year-on-year. The decline in new births means China's population may reach its peak of just below 1.5 billion even before 2030, Cui Shuyi, a demographer, said.

Days ago, Liang Jianzhang, founder of China's largest online travel agency Ctrip.com and a Peking University professor, sparked controversy by saying on a talk show that China's population will continue to decline and even reduce to zilch in a thousand years if birth rates remain at the current low level.

Such a hypothesis may grab eyeballs but doesn't hold water. People's willingness to have children fluctuates with the times based on the economy, policy, culture and other factors, which play complicated roles. And as China's birth rates have seen rapid changes in the past decades, how can the rates remain at the same level for hundreds of years?

However, Liang did draw attention to the urgent population challenge in an exaggerated way. In Northeast China, the population witnessed negative growth, aggravating the already grave aging population problem. Liaoning province, for instance, has witnessed negative population growth since 2011, despite the nationwide two-child policy.

People can never be too old to learn about China's aging challenge. The country has to strike the right balance between population growth and development. It needs to maintain an optimal population size without putting too heavy a burden on its natural resources, while taking measures to ease households' burden in order to encourage births and provide more public services to take care of the aged.

The author is a writer with China Daily.