India Article 1:

India's population hurtling toward the topDue to pass China in 2020, India has seen uneven progress in efforts to cut birthrates, and struggles to feed and house many of its people.December 02, 2011|By Mark Magnier, Los Angeles Times

Reporting from New Delhi —

Aastha Arora is one in a billion. At least that's what they called her when she was born on May 11, 2000.

Designated with great fanfare as the symbolic 1 billionth Indian, Aastha — her name means "faith" in Hindi — is now called something different. "They call me 'the special child' at school," the perky sixth-grader said, in the family's two-room apartment. "Teachers, friends know about the big ruckus when I was born."

In the last 11 years, India has added 240 million people and, according to U.N. estimates, is on target to surpass China as the world's most populous nation in 2020.

Aastha's mother, Anjana, recalls being wheeled out of the delivery room after a tough birth, more difficult than that of Aastha's brother, only to face about 100 television cameras.

"This is like a dream," she told a reporter at the time, even as she feared for her baby's health with all the commotion.

While China has slowed its birthrate dramatically under a controversial one-child campaign, India has relied on voluntary measures. India's fertility rate has dropped by more than half since 1950, but progress has been uneven because population planning programs are run by individual states, not the central government.

India enacted more coercive methods from 1975 to 1977 during the so-called emergency period, which left a bitter taste. Ratna Jaitley, 75, then a teacher at a government school in New Delhi, said she was ordered to find men to sterilize or risk losing her job, a demand justified at the time for reasons of national development.

With great anguish, she offered up two families that washed and ironed clothes, one with six children, the other with eight, figuring they'd already had quite a few offspring.

"A lot of people in my position took undue advantage of the poor and the uneducated," she said. "Many childless and newly married were sterilized."

Even as some economists talk about India's 'population dividend' in coming years — the idea being that young populations tend to be more economically vibrant and productive — that's premised in part on educating the citizenry and providing suitable opportunities.

But some are skeptical, given India's spotty record in preparing young people for the job market.

"There are quite a few challenges for India ahead," said K. Srinivasan, professor emeritus with Mumbai's International Institute for Population Sciences. "The biggest is going to be providing employment to the millions and millions coming up that aren't skilled or qualified or [don't] have access to education."

Large families often have the fewest resources. "India's remaining population predicament is the same as in the rest of the developing world: Population growth remains stubbornly high in the poorest countries and,

within countries, in the poorest areas, helping to keep them poor," said O.P. Sharma, New Delhi-based consultant with Washington's Population Reference Bureau, a civic group.

Even as headlines tout India's space program, glitzy call centers, fast-growing economy and rising middle class, the nation is struggling to feed, clothe and house many of its people amid the population growth, corruption, inefficiency and weak government.

A report released recently found that the poor in India were better fed 30 years ago, and that India is worse off than its neighbors and many sub-Saharan African countries. The picture is similar in health, hygiene, education and women's status.

Educating and otherwise raising women's stature is a key to curbing runaway population growth, development workers say, yet India came in 113th of 135 countries on women's status, according to a ranking by the Geneva-based World Economic Forum.

If anything, rising wealth has reduced women's stature, sociologists say, because the cost of dowries has skyrocketed, leading to more female infanticide and abortions after the sex of a fetus is determined.

Indians were shocked recently to find that hundreds of girls in eastern Maharashtra state had been named Nakushi, a word that means "unwanted" in the Marathi language. Maharashtra has some of the lowest girl-to-boy ratios in the country. In October, the state held a naming ceremony allowing the "unwanted" women to choose new names.

Jayashree, known as Nakushi until lately, said she got used to being labeled "unwanted" by her family and neighbors. "I accepted it," she said. "It was just a normal thing."

India Article 2:

Urban India and its female demographic dividendIndia's urban female work-force participation rate is growing 5.6% annually since 1991, in comparison with 2% for rural females and 3% for urban males

Over the past decade, India has been near the bottom of the global rankings, as far as female participation in theurban workforce is concerned. The good news: our analysis of data from the past two decades shows that this is beginning to change. Women (especially young women) are entering and looking to enter the urban workforce in large numbers.The bad news: unfortunately, most women are only able to find marginal work in the informal economy, with low wages and little or no job security. In addition, highly educated young urban women appear to have very limited job options in urban India.The growth in the urban female workforce is characterised by two trends—more than 60% of urban females are a part of the informal sector while unemployment is the highest among urban females with graduate degrees and above, with an unemployment rate of 15.7%, much higher than other demographic groups.India’s urban female work-force participation rate (WPR) is one of the world’s lowest at 15%, ranking eleventh from the bottom among 131 countries, according to a 2012 report on global employment trends by the InternationalLabour Organisation (ILO). This, however, might be changing, with the participation rate growing 5.6% annually since 1991, in comparison with 2% for rural females and 3% for urban males.Change in labour force participation: the female demographic dividendCompared to other countries which are at similar levels of development, Indian women tend not to participate as much in wage employment. The WPR for women above 15 years of age in India was a little below 30% in 2011, significantly below the world average of around 50%, according to World Bank estimates. In comparison, Brazil and China were at 60% and 67% for the same age group.The female WPR is especially low in urban areas and has remained close to 15% over two decades, as Figure 1 shows. Meanwhile, the female WPR in rural areas has varied between 25% and 30% in the same time period. In contrast, urban male participation rate is 53%, according to2011 National Sample Survey Organisation data (NSSO).Fig 1: Workforce Participation (UPSS) by Gender and Place of Residence 

Source: Employment and Unemployment Survey, NSSO (various rounds)

While several recent studies have highlighted low female WPRs in urban India, we present evidence to show that urban women are beginning to enter the labour market in greater numbers.The number of women working and seeking work grew by 14.4% annually between 1991 and 2011, even though the population of urban women grew at only 4.5% during the same time period, according to Census 2011.The total number of women in the work force increased more than three-fold, from 9 million in 1991 to 28 million in 2011, while the number of women seeking or available for work increased more than eight-fold, from 1.8 million in 1991 to 15.5 million in 2011.This means that the number of women in the workforce in 2011 would have been higher by more than 55% if these 15.5 million women were able to find jobs.In comparison, the male workforce would have increased by only 13% if the 14 million men seeking or available for work found employment. This indicates a significant shift in women’s participation in the labour market in urban areas since 1991.Fig. 2: Composition of Urban Male and Female Population, 2011

Source: Census of India, 2011

Fig. 3: Urban Female Population Composition 1991 and 2011, Age Group 20-40 year

 Source: Census of India, 2011

This fact is corroborated by the Employment and Unemployment Survey 2011 conducted by the NSSO which shows that urban females between 15 and 59 years have the highest unemployment rate at 15.7% as compared to 9% for males belonging to the same age group.These numbers indicate that urban women are increasingly looking to enter wage employment but are currently unable to find adequate and relevant opportunities.If this trend continues, women might choose to drop out of the labour force altogether or settle for jobs that are not commensurate with their skills and expectations.Unemployment is highest for women with graduate degrees and aboveAt 13.9%, the unemployment rate is highest for urban women with graduate degrees and above. Within this category of educational attainment, the unemployment rate for women aged 15 to 29 is even higher, at 23.4%. This highlights the severity of the problem for educated young women inurban India.Some studies have suggested that a possible explanation for women voluntarily dropping out of thelabour force is the stigma associated with working in jobs that require lesser qualifications.Figure 4 shows the urban female workforce disaggregated by level of educational attainment. The ‘illiterate’ and ‘graduate’ categories have the highest number of workers.

Fig. 4: Work Status of Urban Women by Education Levels, 2011-12

Source: Employment and Unemployment Survey, NSSO 2011-12

 The dotted line in Figure 4 shows unemployment rates for women aged 15 and above across categories of educational attainment.The evidence shows that educated urban women are increasingly seeking work but are unable to find opportunities that meet their expectations. A skills training and industrialisation agenda might be inadequate to address the employment concerns of this demographic group.Increase in marginal work for womenIlliterate and semi-literate women have a very low unemployment rate. A possible explanation: they are absorbed in the informal sector that requires low skills and offers low remuneration in sectors, such as services, manufacturing, wholesale trade and construction at low wages.Close to 20% of urban females work as domestic help, cleaners, vendors, hawkers and salespeople. 43% of urban women were self-employed and the same proportion of women had regular wage salaried jobs, according to NSSO in 2011. Yet, 46% of urban women with regular wages have no social security or employment benefits, while 58% have no written contract for their jobs.Skill-development programmes, such as vocational training and entrepreneurship development, might be beneficial to some extent for this group of workers and might enable them to move from vulnerable occupations to more secure ones. However, skill training is only one of the measures that will lead to better employability. A number of other factors such as societal and gender norms, education levels, access to credit and so on affect the employment sought by and available to these women.Why Make-in-India and Skill-India Mission may fall shortIndia has transitioned to a $2 trillion economy in the past two decades without creating adequate and secure jobs for its large, mostly-unskilled labour force.The current government is attempting to address this issue through two related sets of interventions. First, by promoting the industrial sector in India through the Make in India campaign and second, through the recently-launched Skill India Mission, which aims to train 400 million workers over the next seven years.These interventions assume that industrialisation will drive job creation, following the development trajectories of the East Asian economies.

An examination of the numbers presented above allows us to question this assumption and add an additional set of priorities for India’s employment agenda. In their current form, these policies are not sufficiently cognisant of the changing composition of the work force, particularly in relation towomen who comprise half of India’s potential work force.An explicit focus on the changing nature of women’s work is essential to ensure the sustainability and inclusiveness of India’s growth. 

India Article 3:

India’s Growth Held Back by OverpopulationBY FRED DE SAM LAZARO AND FOR THE PULITZER CENTER  October 19, 2011 at 10:28 AM EDT

It’s common these days to see Brazil and India lumped together in media reports, particularly the financial press: two emerging economic powerhouses that, with Russia and China, form the bloc known as BRIC. However, spend a few days in the cities of each country, as we did for a series about global population, and you’ll see a large gap between the South America’s largest nation and one that will soon be Asia’s most populous. And population – more than any single factor – seems to define that difference between a middle-income nation and a poor one.

At roughly 1.2 billion inhabitants, India’s population is projected to grow to 1.8 billion before stabilizing around the middle of this century. It is already six times Brazil’s current 200 million, a figure that is stable and likely to begin descending in years ahead. Not surprisingly, Brazil’s per capita GDP is more than three times that of India.

The gap is instantly visible in the megacities we have visited: India’s capital New Delhi, whose larger metro area has 23 million inhabitants, and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil’s second largest city at 13 million.

Both have seen construction binges in recent years, driven by robust economic growth in general as well as major showcase events. We were in Delhi weeks after it hosted the Commonwealth Games, (an “Olympics-lite” for the 72 nations of the former British Commonwealth), which spurred $7 billion in beautification and construction projects plus a $2.7 billion airport opened in time for the event. Yet it’s impossible to mask the daily stresses on a city that adds an estimated 700,000 inhabitants every year, cramping crowded slums of flimsy shacks, where the only “infrastructure” – likely illegal – are low-hanging wires tapping the power grid.

Most of the newcomers are migrants unable to sustain a living in the vast countryside. In Delhi, the struggle to earn a livelihood is compounded — and interrupted — by the lack of easy access to life’s most basic need: water. People in the Vasant Kunj neighborhood told us they spend four to six hours a day waiting for the municipal tanker truck to arrive. Hundreds of people are forced to share inadequate public toilets, which often malfunction, forcing people to find secluded areas in the open.

“There’s a forested area across the street,” said Chanda, who shared only her first name. “It’s really humiliating.”

Rio de Janeiro, on the other hand, is beginning a $100 billion facelift as it rolls out the red carpet for two of the world’s most prestigious sporting events: soccer’s World Cup in 2014 and the Olympics in 2016. Electricity and water are much more readily accessible to most residents of the city’s slums, known as favelas. The pressing challenge here is violent crime. More than 4,800 homicides were reported in Rio in 2010 (10 times the total in New York City the same year), despite efforts by the city at “pacification” that have dropped the number by almost half since 1995. A number of non-government groups are working to ensure that the long-neglected favela neighborhoods receive a share of the infrastructure spending in what remains one of the world’s most unequal societies.

However, one critical improvement that has already arrived across the class spectrum, including poor neighborhoods, is access to basic health services, including contraception. Combined with growing economic opportunity, particularly in urban areas, and a social safety net introduced in recent years, it has brought down Brazil’s fertility rate dramatically to just below replacement level.

“You only get pregnant if you want to,” Liliane Moreira Da Silva, a 30-something resident of the Rocinha neighborhood told us. “We have free access to any sort of family planning.”

Fertility rates have declined in India, too, but more slowly and unevenly. They are stable in urban centers and the more prosperous south. Unlike Brazil, which is more than 85 percent urban, almost two-thirds of India’s population lives in rural, underserved regions. Even though India introduced family planning programs in the 1950s, the effort has had a tortured history. In the ’70s, a widespread campaign of coerced sterilization drew massive protests and helped bring down the government of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. Since then population has been a third rail few politicians are willing to touch, said demographer Ashish Bose. That leaves development as the best contraceptive alternative, he added.

India is seeing this small population decline with healthy economic growth, particularly in its services sector, and it has a competitive advantage by having an overwhelmingly young population. More than a quarter of the world’s supply of new workers in the next decade will come from India, according to the United Nations. However, it will take significant efforts in public education and health care, among other needs, if the country is to take full advantage of this demographic dividend and join the club of middle-income countries that now counts Brazil as a member — efforts ironically hindered by the pressures of overpopulation.

India Article 4:

India’s demographic challengeWasting timeIndia will soon have a fifth of the world’s working-age population. It urgently needs to provide them with better jobsMay 11th 2013 | PATNA, BIHAR | The Economist

ONE of India’s bigger private-sector employers can be found in Patna, the capital of Bihar, a poor, populous state in the east of the country. Narendra Kumar Singh, the boss, has three gold rings on his right hand and arms big enough to crush rocks. His firm, Frontline, has 86,000 people on its books. They are mostly unskilled men from rural areas in poor states like Bihar; thanks to Mr Singh they have jobs in cities all over India.

There is lots to celebrate about this. Mr Singh’s business has sales of $185m and its employee base has grown by 1,600% since 2000. He is looking for a Western partner and wants to expand to Sri Lanka and Bangladesh. He is providing paid work for part of the large cohort of young people now entering the workforce. And by shifting people from farms to cities he is helping urbanisation of the sort that underpinned startling progress elsewhere in Asia.

Yet Frontline is also a symptom of a colossal failure. For it is not supplying labour for a manufacturing boom of the kind that helped so many in China, South Korea and Taiwan out of poverty, or for the IT services at which India has excelled. Instead it offers relatively unproductive service-sector jobs—in particular, security guards. It has become de rigueur for every ATM, office, shop and apartment building to have guards. Across India millions of young men now sit all day on plastic seats in badly fitting uniforms with braids and epaulettes, unshaven and catatonically bored as the economic miracle passes by. This isn’t how East Asia got rich.

From a bomb to a boom and backDuring the boom of the 1990s and 2000s, it became fashionable to talk of India’s forthcoming “demographic dividend”. This was quite a turnaround. In the 1960s and 1970s, the booming populations of states like Bihar were seen as a curse. “The Population Bomb”, a Malthusian bestseller by two American environmentalists, Paul and Anne Ehrlich, began by describing “one stinking hot night in Delhi”, and its horrifying number of “people, people, people, people”. In the 1970s there was a forced sterilisation programme. Sanjay Gandhi, a thuggish scion of the ruling dynasty, organised vasectomy camps near Delhi—one doctor boasted he could perform 40 sterilisations an hour.

In the 1990s, though, economic liberalisers evoked the experiences of East Asia and the demographic dividend it benefited from when previously high fertility rates began to decline. Working-age populations rose at the same time as the ratio of dependants to workers fell. An associated rise in the rate of saving allowed more investment, helping pay for the vast expansion in manufacturing that employed those workers and lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. In the mid2000s the prospect of a similar dividend in India, where the fertility rate had dropped a lot in the 1980s and 1990s, was a key reason for investors’ optimism. The timing was particularly encouraging: India’s labour force was due to soar as China’s began to decline (see chart 1).

Now many are worried that India is squandering this demographic opportunity. This is partly because the economy is in a funk. Growth is at 4.5%, half the rate at the peak in the mid-2000s. Industry is 27%

of output, compared with 40-47% in other big developing Asian economies. High inflation has prompted households to store ever more of their savings in physical assets rather than the financial system (see chart 2). The costs are clear. With few manufacturing exports, India has a chronic balance-of-payments problem. And India has created too few formal jobs in the past decade.

India’s leaders have long said they are committed to employment, but have shown little stomach for the economic upheaval rapid job creation entails. China’s policymakers accepted that the process of adding jobs overall often destroyed jobs in particular industries and places. For years India’s politicians have preferred economic palliatives such as NREGA, a giant scheme that guarantees work for the rural poor, and subsidies for the needy.

Now India’s borrowing has soared to queasy levels and welfare spending is being squeezed. There are worries that joblessness could be feeding the spasmodic unrest seen in some cities since 2011. Not all protesters were young. And their motivation varied from support for the anti-corruption guru Anna Hazare to disgust at a series of rapes in Delhi. But the protests added to a sense of youthful volatility.

An official report into the public finances in 2012 warned that a combination of slower growth and the demographic bulge could be “politically destabilising”. Rahul Gandhi, who is poised to lead the ruling Congress party in the general election due by 2014, speaks of the “angry” young and their “urgent demand for jobs”. The government’s economic adviser, Raghuram Rajan, says jobs are the biggest priority. Some in the elite seem to be waking up. But is it too late?

Quantity and qualityTo see the scale of the challenge, consider that the working-age population, aged between 15 and 64, will rise by 125m over the coming decade, and by a further 103m over the following decade. On current trends a third of the growth will come from poorer and less literate states in the north, notably Uttar Pradesh and Bihar.

Not everyone of working age will be in the job market. More people aged 15-24 will remain in education—26% do today. Some adult women will stay at home; presently only about a third work, a low level by Asian standards. But India probably needs to create about 100m net new jobs in the next decade.

China’s boom created 130m net jobs in services and industry between 2002 and 2012. But India is no China. The most recent survey showed no net new jobs were created between 2004-05 and 2009-10, a dramatic slowdown on the previous five years, when 60m jobs were created.

These figures may not be as shocking as they seem. Fewer jobs were created partly because some folk voluntarily withdrew from the workforce. More women in rural areas decided not to look for jobs—perhaps because several fairly good years for farmers meant they did not need the cash. Wages for the unskilled have been rising, and though this is partly because of the NREGA guaranteed-work scheme, it suggests there has not been a collapse in the jobs market. For all these caveats, though, the headline data remain disquieting. Even during a boom few jobs were created. Now that the economy is growing more slowly things have got harder.

The rural poor seem likely to be frustrated, which will add to the number of migrants headed for the cities. The better-educated will suffer, too. By some estimates India produces twice as many new graduates each year as it can absorb. In a half-built private-run campus in Patna most students have modest expectations of their future salaries—typically $500 a month. Even so, their professor worries they won’t all get job offers.

The problem lies not just in the quantity of jobs, though; quality matters too. Statistics verify what the naked eye can see in any Indian city. They all have their armies of guards, peons, delivery boys, ear-dewaxers and men who sit on stools in lifts pressing the buttons. About 85% of India’s jobs are with “informal” enterprises—those organisations with fewer than ten staff which are not incorporated. Another 11% are casual jobs with formal companies. Only 16% of Indians say they get a regular wage. People with informal jobs are usually very poor. An official study of 2004-05 data concludes that 80% of informal workers got less than the then national minimum wage of $1.46 a day. There are some good jobs. But India’s IT firms, for example, account for only a few million jobs out of a total of half a billion.

All this seems to be closely linked to the lack of manufacturing. Although some 23% of Indian workers are categorised as working in “industry”, compared to nearly 30% in China and 22% in Indonesia, half of India’s “industrial” workers are in construction whereas the figure is just a quarter in Indonesia. Of the remainder almost all

are in the “manufacturing” subcategory. But these are not jobs that involve exposure to modern machinery, techniques and training (crucial for unskilled labour let down by the country’s education system). More than half of Indians in the manufacturing sector work in facilities without electricity.

The obvious problem is a “missing middle”. Most of the jobs are in tiny operations. Most of the value added is in a few big, sophisticated firms that prefer using machines to humans. Some, such as Tata Sons and Mahindra, are well-known. Most of those seem keener on expanding globally than on building factories at home. For every dollar of foreign direct investment (FDI) made by outsiders in Indian manufacturing in the five years to March 2012, local firms invested 65 cents in manufacturing abroad. The number of jobs in factories (excluding the very smallest) has increased since 2005; but only by 2.8m.

What manufacturing FDI India does attract tends to be high-end—Volkswagen has a smart €570m plant full of robots. Meanwhile investment is pouring into Vietnam and Indonesia (see chart 3) as costs in China rise. Li & Fung, a big trading firm based in Hong Kong which buys goods in Asia and sells them in the West to retailers including Walmart, gets some 5% of its goods from India, compared with about 20% from South-East Asia.

Death on the shop floorIndia’s missed opportunity is most evident in textiles and clothing, a labour-intensive industry that has been dominated by China. In 2011 McKinsey, a consultancy, found that purchasing managers at global clothing firms wanted to shift their sourcing from China; their favoured new destinations included Bangladesh, Vietnam, Indonesia and Cambodia—but not India. India’s textile exports have grown, but those from Vietnam and Bangladesh, combined, easily outstrip them.

Why don’t more people want to make things in India? Indian migrant workers are sought across the world, not least in the Gulf. But at home tricky labour relations are a problem.

In a dusty lawyers’ room in the industrial belt near Delhi, five workers explain how they were fired by Maruti Suzuki, a carmaker controlled by Suzuki of Japan, after simmering tensions on the shop floor led to a riot at a nearby plant in July 2012. A manager was burned to death. The men are in their 20s and from rural families. They have a strong sense of injustice. “We have told our families that they should consider us as behind bars and that they should make other plans for their lives. We are ready for a long fight.” The Maruti violence has so far been a one-off. But the episode unnerved businesspeople.

Economists have long identified arcane labour laws as the key to India’s manufacturing problem. Scholars have gleefully dissected India’s 51 central and 170 state labour statutes, some of which pre-date independence, to demonstrate how they make it hard for firms with more than a handful of staff to fire people and allow disputes to become legal endurance tests. Studies have shown how tighter rules impede growth in labour-intensive industries and prompt firms to remain small.

Two-tier worldYet the industrial belt in which Maruti’s factory sits shows times have changed. Big firms can bypass labour law by using “contract” workers, technically employed by third-party agents. In the past decade they have used—or, workers say, abused—this kink in the rules a lot more. At three car and motorbike plants, based on discussions with workers, about 70% of 14,500 staff work on a contract basis. Their average wage is $5-6 per working day, a quarter of what permanent, unionised staff get. The minimum wage in Guangzhou, a Chinese industrial hub, is $10.5 per working day.

That might appear to be good news. If lots of factory workers can be hired at globally competitive rates, on flexible terms, manufacturing firms should pile into India. In practice the situation is unstable. As the Maruti riot showed, the two-tier workforce has caused anger—the five men in the lawyers’ room were permanent employees who say they were disgusted by the treatment of their contract colleagues. Maruti is abandoning the distinction. And from a financial perspective the contract system is not as good as it looks for employers. They must still hire unionised permanent staff, and though these may be in a minority they can account for the majority of a plant’s wage bill, lifting the average pay across all workers to Chinese levels.

The labour situation is a long way from the strikes and militancy of the 1970s, but it is unpredictable. That puts off potential manufacturers. And there are lots of other deterrents, too, from red tape to erratic electricity (see, for example, the monumental blackout across north and east India in 2012), a lack of land, bad roads and busy ports. One shipping boss thinks logistics add 20% to the cost of making something in India, compared with 6-8% in China.

The Middle Kingdom hardly excelled on such metrics 20 years ago, but India does seem to be especially intimidating for industrial firms. Where non-labour problems have been tackled, notably in Gujarat, manufacturing does better. But Gujarat—population 60m—is not a big state by Indian standards.

Since 2000 India has tried carving out special economic zones (SEZs) to create islands with lower taxes and access to infrastructure, where manufacturers can feel at home. But these have been a limited success, with many dominated by IT firms. A new twist is a proposed industrial corridor between Delhi and Mumbai, inspired by the expressway between Seoul and Busan in South Korea. The project has Japanese support, but basic things such as access to land and water have yet to be settled.

In its frustration India is flirting with a more overt industrial policy. A new rule says that government offices must now buy computers with a chunk of components made locally. This is designed to improve the balance of payments and promote an indigenous industry. The government is also now offering subsidies that could be worth billions of dollars to attract a microchip foundry. There is a push to indigenise the defence industry.

The legislation on offer to try to change the situation more generally may not enthuse industry. There are noises about labour-law reform, but rather than liberalise the regime for permanent workers it may merely tighten the one for contract employees. A bill that is supposed to make it easier to buy land could make the process even more expensive and protracted, argue many businesspeople.

For robust jobs growth there must be a change of mindset among officials, judges and politicians. Although Mr Gandhi and others are talking about the challenge, not everyone is, partly due to the electoral system’s skew towards the countryside. Only 10% of legislators in the lower house have urban constituencies in which 75% or more of the population is urban, reckons the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS), a think-tank. Jobs in factories in cities are not a priority for most politicians.

Failing gentlyCould the voices of the young change this? There is a rising level of political involvement. A recent survey by CSDS and the Konrad Adenauer Stiftung, a German think-tank, found that nearly twice as many of today’s 18- to 33-year-olds say they are interested in politics as did in 1996. Some 20% of young rural men say they participate in protests, as do 22% of college-educated young men. Those with exposure to the media, from talk shows to social media, are most politically active. One of India’s big mobile-messaging sites, Nimbuzz, with 25m mostly young users, says traffic doubled in the aftermath of the rape scandal in Delhi in December and during the Anna Hazare anti-graft protests. But the young have little independent political identity; their party allegiance is much like that of their parents. Nor do they have any obvious muscle.

The lack of political resolve and of a clear signal from voters mean India is unlikely to summon up the single-minded dedication with which South Korea, Taiwan and China created industrial jobs. Its demographic dividend will yield only a fraction of what it could, and the problem of low-quality employment will fester. That would be an immense waste. Most policymakers and well-off people would deny that it is a deep threat, though. The country’s religions, its distinctive mix of hierarchical culture and populist politics and its durable family structures will ensure social stability, they say.

They are probably right. They might want to pay their security guards a little more, though. Just in case

China Article 1:

China's Concern Over Population Aging and HealthToshiko Kaneda (for Population Bureau) (June 2006) As late as 25 years ago, China was concerned it had too many children to support. Today, however, China faces the opposite problem: as a result of the success of its

"one-child" policy, the country faces the prospect of having too few children to support a rapidly aging population (see Figure 1 for China's projected aging trend between 2000 and 2050).

Figure 1Population Pyramids, China: 2000 and 2050

2000 2050

Source: World Population Prospects: The 2004 Revision (2005).

The dramatic fertility decline and improved longevity over the past two decades are causing China's population to age at one of the fastest rates ever recorded, accompanied by an increase in the prevalence of chronic disease and disability in the population.

Meeting the health and long-term care needs of this growing elderly population will result in soaring health care costs—and with a shrinking working-age population to help pay the bill. Indeed, the challenge of paying for health care in China is immense, especially since the Chinese health care system has already experienced large increases in overall costs and greater private expenditure since shifting to a market-oriented system in the early 1980s.1

But while China is not prepared to meet the health needs of its growing elderly population, its government has recognized these challenges and is starting to develop a comprehensive response. As a first step, Chinese health officials have implemented various chronic-disease prevention programs at the national level. They are also starting to set up long-term care delivery systems for the elderly. But while China's economy continues to grow rapidly, whether it will be able to allocate enough income to meet these rising health care costs remains as a major concern.

A Profile of Aging, Chronic Disease, and DisabilityChina has made vast improvements in health over the past five decades, with life expectancy at birth increasing by two-thirds from 40.8 to 71.5 between 1955 and 2005.2 The country already has about 102 million elderly (those ages 65 and over), or over one-fifth of the world's elderly population.3 And the percentage of elderly in China is projected to triple from 8 percent to 24 percent between 2006 and 2050, to a total number of 322 million (see Figure 2).4

Figure 2Percentage of Older Adults (Age 65+) in China, 1950-2050

Source: World Population Prospects: The 2004 Revision (2005).

Because chronic health problems become more common in old age, China's population aging has led to increases in the country's prevalence of chronic disease and disability, creating a greater need for long-term care. And improved living standards in China have exacerbated the epidemic of chronic disease by increasing exposure to major risk factors such as smoking, high-fat and high-calorie diets, and more leisure time without physical activity.

Chronic diseases accounted for almost 80 percent of all deaths in China in 2005, with the major causes being cardiovascular disease, cancer, and chronic respiratory diseases.5 Hypertension prevalence in adult population (currently 19 percent) has increased by one-third over the past decade.6 Prevalence of obesity, though still around 7 percent, has almost doubled in a decade. These trends suggest potential increases in the prevalence of these conditions for future cohorts of China's elderly.

Demographic Trends Endanger the Chinese Health Care SystemThe rate of increase in health care costs has already exceeded the growth of the national economy and individual earnings.7 Long-term care for the elderly, traditionally provided at home in China by adult children (especially by daughters-in-law), will become increasingly less feasible in coming decades when parents of the first generation of the one-child policy

start reaching old age and retiring. These singletons will face the need to care for two parents and often four grandparents without siblings with whom to share the responsibility, a problem sometimes referred to in China as the "4-2-1 problem."

And the macro-level outlook for health care spending is no better. While the number of elderly in the population who require care is growing, the size of the working-age population (who pay much of the health care costs) is shrinking. The elderly-support ratio—the working-age adult (ages 15 to 64) per number of elderly (age 65 and above)—is projected to decline drastically, from 9 persons to 2.5 persons by 2050.8

This demographic shift is troublesome for a health care system that already faces a number of challenges—most important of which is the rapid increase in overall costs and in private health care spending.9 The health care system in China—once regarded as exemplary for low-income agrarian societies—has degenerated considerably in access since the early 1980s at the same time as its costs have soared. A system that relied heavily on public subsidies and provided egalitarian access to basic health care has shifted to a market-oriented system that relies heavily on private funding and is characterized by excessive usage fees.

Now, rising out-of-pocket costs prevent many Chinese from seeking early care and have resulted in wide disparities in health care access, particularly between urban and rural areas. These trends are of particular concern to the elderly, who likely have higher health care needs yet less means to afford that care, and who also make up larger proportion of the rural population than the younger population.

Public Health Responses to Population AgingThe Chinese government has only recently acknowledged the consequences of rapid population aging and has started to address them in various policies and programs:

Strategies for long-term care. Though public funding for the long-term care of the elderly in China is still limited, the Chinese government has started to allocate more funding in this area.10 At the same time, new opportunities for entrepreneurship in the health service industry have opened—a result of China's social-welfare reform in the 1990s, which decentralized government-funded welfare institutions and significantly reduced their government financing.11

Today, an increasing number of private elder homes as well as the country's former government-sponsored elder homes (which used to be reserved exclusively for elderly with no children and no other means of support) are providing an alternative to familial elder care.12 However, these facilities are still small in number, of varying standards, and are often too expensive for many elderly and their families.

Community-based long-term care services for the elderly in China—both informal and local government-supported—have also begun to emerge, especially in urban areas.13 These efforts are serving various needs of the elderly and their family caregivers, including daily care, home maintenance, and information and referral services.14

The lack of a trained workforce in caregiving to elderly is an important issue facing China's long-term care delivery system.15 Some local government agencies (such as the labor union and the department of health) are training laid-off workers to work in long-term care—but these training programs are short and cover only limited basic caregiving skills.

Some observers are calling for more knowledge-based training programs that offer a broader range of caregiving skills. Besides long-term care, the government has plans to develop geriatric medical training at an undergraduate level and to establish more geriatric units to increase the country's capacity to address the specific health care needs of the elderly.16

Strategies for primary and secondary prevention. China's ministry of health has also been addressing chronic disease prevention and control. In 2002, for instance, it established the National Center for Chronic and Non-Communicable Disease Control and Prevention to oversee efforts at the national level; the same year, it unveiled the Disease Surveillance Points System, a national resource for chronic disease surveillance.17

The ministry is also working to develop the first long-term (from 2005 to 2015) comprehensive national plan for chronic disease control and prevention in cooperation with relevant sectors and supported by the World Health Organization (WHO). Reducing adult male smoking, hypertension, overweight and obesity, and building capacity for chronic disease control are among the plan's highest priorities.

Programs targeted toward specific diseases have also increased. These efforts include a community-based intervention on management of hypertension and diabetes conducted in three cities (Beijing, Shanghai, and Changsha) between 1991 and 2000; a national cancer control plan, the Program of Cancer Prevention and Control in China; and ratification of the WHO Framework Convention of Tobacco Control. Furthermore, to prevent chronic disease at early ages, projects to improve nutrition and health status have been undertaken. These projects are focused mainly on primary schools and have achieved encouraging reductions (by as much as 30 percent in one year in one example) in the prevalence of childhood obesity.18

Outlook for the FutureThe challenges of population aging are daunting for any country, but especially so for China. Unlike developed countries where economic development preceded population aging, China faces the massive demands of population aging at one of the fastest rates ever and while its economy is still not fully developed—hence, without the funds necessary to address the demands. China's dilemma is how to allocate resources among competing needs of various sectors while still continuing its economic growth.

In addition to the 4-2-1 problem, trends in both the female labor-force participation and the sex ratio of young Chinese may well create additional issues for a society which traditionally has left elder care to its women, especially daughters-in-law. The labor-force participation among young Chinese women is very high and could affect the informal provision of long-term care in the coming decades. The sex ratio at birth for the young cohorts born after China's one-child policy is highly skewed toward boys, potentially creating a future deficit of daughters-in-law as elder caregivers.19

While the trend of population aging is inevitable and can even be accelerated by further declines in mortality and fertility, stemming the epidemic of chronic disease is one promising way to reduce the overall impact of aging on China's social and economic development. Investing in a formal long-term care system to complement the informal care currently provided primarily by family members could also encourage their continued participation in the provision of care. Addressing these elder care challenges will be crucial to China's continued social and economic development and stability.

China Article 2:

GENDER IMBALANCE: HOW CHINA'S ONE-CHILD LAW BACKFIRED ON MEN

BY BILL POWELL ON 5/28/15 AT 6:27 AM Newsweek

Zhang Wei, a 29-year-old male resident of Beijing, is at first glance an unlikely exemplar for the power of women in modern China. But hear him out. A junior executive at a state-owned energy company, Zhang has not yet been able to save enough money to afford a decent apartment in Beijing, where prices have pretty much gone straight up since he entered the workforce seven years ago. So Zhang says he saves nearly 30 percent of his salary every month and is hoping prices decline a bit so he can buy in the next year or two. “I am,” he concedes, “a little bit crazed by the idea.”Why would a young professional male be obsessed with buying an apartment in a market a lot of people think is already overpriced? “Because,” he says, “I’d like to get married and start a family. My parents are really pressuring me. And if I don’t own an apartment, that’s really hard.’’Cut to a fashionable restaurant in Shanghai, where four women—friends from college, also young professionals—are having a drink after work. They could be cast in the Chinese version of Sex and the City: All are single and in their late 20s or early 30s. Tell them the tale of the thrifty Zhang, and they all smile. “I wouldn’t even go out with a guy who didn’t own a house, never mind marry him,” says Hua Feng, triggering laughter from her friends, who then debate the pros and cons of Zhang, even though they’ve never met him.

Is the fact that he works for a state-owned company a plus or a minus? “It means he’s more stable, his company won’t go out of business, he’ll always have a job,” says Hua. “That’s good.’’“Yes,” chimes in Li Junling, an advertising executive, “but he’ll never make a lot of money either. Who knows? Maybe he’ll never have enough to buy a nice apartment.’’ But when will they get married? After all, by traditional Chinese standards, they are running out of time. Aren’t their grandchild-desiring parents putting heat on them?“I feel like when it comes to [marriage] there’s no real rush,” says Li. “I don’t really feel pressure. I think time is on my side actually.” Her friends nod in agreement.Related: China Abandons One-Child Policy, Allowing Couples to Have Two ChildrenLi is right. The reason young urban women in China these days are putting off marriage—working longer than they might have in the past, and earning more—is because they can. The simple fact is that they—not their male counterparts, like poor old Zhang in Beijing—are in the demographic driver’s seat in China, and they will be for years to come. For a generation now, the number of boys being born in China has greatly outstripped the number of girls. This gender imbalance reached a peak of 1.22 to 1 in 2008, and is now about 1.16 to 1. By 2020, the National State Population and Family Planning Commission projects that males of marrying age will outnumber females by at least 30 million.

Historically, China has been a patriarchal culture in which the subjugation of women is symbolized most cruelly by the phenomenon of bound feet, a practice that didn’t disappear entirely until the early 20th century. And it remains a male-dominated society today, never mind that ever since the ruling Communist Party came to power in 1949 it has trumpeted a phrase attributed to Mao Zedong: “Women hold up half the sky.” Indeed, the demographic imbalance between men and women speaks to just how male-dominated it remains. The combination of China’s one child policy and the advent of sonograms has meant that families who preferred a son could get what they wanted, aborting unwanted girls. The gender imbalance is a function of what Lauren Johnston, a Ph.D. student at Peking University writing a book on the subject, calls “the familial race to have an heir,” greatly intensified by the one-child policy, which has been in effect since 1980.With that backdrop, the recent progress of women within China is significant. Ever since 1995, when it hosted a high-profile United Nations conference on women’s rights (attended by then–first lady Hillary Clinton) the government in Beijing has paid increasing attention to—and made some progress on—core feminist issues: access to jobs and higher education; stricter laws (and enforcement thereof) against domestic violence and sexual harassment; and more equitable divorce laws.

That there is still a long way to go is undeniable. The April arrest of five feminist activists for trying to raise awareness of sexual harassment in the workplace triggered a storm of criticism on Chinese social media—and was an abject embarrassment for a central government that this fall is scheduled to co-host with the U.N. a global women’s summit. Too much of the all-male leadership at the very top of the Beijing government “have not an iota of an idea about the women’s rights movement,” says Wang Zheng, a longtime feminist activist in China and a professor at the University of Michigan.But the demographic reality of modern China—that the number of boys so greatly outnumbers the girls—has far-reaching effects. And one of them—in the social sphere, in the everyday interaction between the sexes—is empowering women. In Chinese cities, the evidence of that is pretty much everywhere.

Consider Cai Li (who asked her real name not be used in this article), a 34-year-old marketing executive in Shanghai: She is smart, engaging, hip and attractive. She is also the divorced mother of an 8-year-old girl. When she caught her husband, a Taiwanese businessman, philandering five years ago, she didn’t hesitate. “I divorced him as soon as I could,” she says. “He was shocked. He thought I wasn’t serious, that I wouldn’t do it because of our daughter. I said, ‘You’ll see.’ And within a week I had filed the papers [for divorce]. And why wouldn’t I? Why should I put up with that? I have parents here in Shanghai who help take care of my daughter. I had a good job. Plus, if I want to get remarried, it’s not as if there’s a shortage of men, even at my age, who would be interested. [My ex] was crazy to think I was going to stick around.’’

The only problem for Cai was that her parents sided with her ex. “They had a typical Chinese reaction. They said, ‘Oh come on, he probably won’t do it again. It’s not that big a deal anyway,’” she says. “It was a generational attitude. When they were young, people put up with it, I guess. But I told them, not now. I was really angry. I put my foot down.… Things are different now.”

Indeed, even government officials acknowledge that the demographic chasm in China is playing a role in the steadily increasing rate of divorce—a trend especially evident in big cities like Shanghai. Nationwide, the divorce rate rose from just over 1 percent of couples in 2003 to 2.57 percent in 2013, the last year for which complete data is available. Though that is still very low by international standards, the divorce rate in urban areas, where women are far likelier to be able to support themselves, is much higher. Recent research suggests that divorce rates in Beijing and Shanghai are now over 30 percent.

The number of divorces is “going to continue to go up for the foreseeable future,” says Liu Xia, a former official in China’s Family Planning Commission, “partly because women now have more choices, economically and demographically.”

Young Chinese women are also playing harder to get in the marriage market. Li Junling and her three single friends in Shanghai are not outliers. Chinese women are getting married later and later. Nationwide, the average age is now 27.4, up from 26.4 in 2007. And in Shanghai last year, for the first time ever, the average age for young women to get married was over 30.

While that data would seem mainly to be a problem for 20- and 30-somethings (like Zhang), government officials know the demographic imbalance has “serious and far-reaching consequences,” as Beijing’s Family Planning Commission Minister Li Bin put it last year. Researchers and law enforcement agencies believe the gender imbalance has led to increases in sex-trafficking and prostitution. It, for example, propelled an active illicit business in forcing women refugees from North Korea into arranged marriages to older, single peasant men in northeastern China.Some prominent researchers have begun to wonder whether the gender imbalance, and the effect it has on the marriage market in China, has a bearing on some of China’s more pressing economic issues. They wonder if the behavior of a gentleman like Zhang—desperately saving all he can so he can buy an apartment and thus impress a prospective bride—might have something to do with China’s stubbornly high household savings rate.Wei Shang-Jin,, a former professor at Columbia University, is now the chief economist at the Asian Development Bank. In 2009, he and co-author Xiaobo Zhang, in the paper, "The Competitive Saving Motive," put forth a radical hypothesis as to why China’s savings rate was so high, and why it wasn’t coming down (as many economists have predicted it would). The high savings rate is hugely consequential. As Shang-Jin notes, China’s household savings rate affects everything from international capital flows, to its massive trade imbalance, to U.S. exports and therefore employment. Put simply, if Chinese consumers spent more and saved less, Beijing’s trading partners, the U.S. included, would sell more goods and services to them.

The standard economic story is that average Chinese save because of the absence of a solid social safety net, in particular a nationwide pension and health insurance system like Social Security and Medicare in the U.S. Wei is skeptical. He notes that in the past decade there has been significant improvement in both the national pension and health care systems. So he looked at data across several Chinese provinces that tried to correlate savings with gender imbalance. The results were striking. “We found that not only did households with sons save more than households with daughters on average, but that households with sons tend to raise their savings rate if they also happen to live in a region with a more skewed gender ratio,” Wei says.

The effect of that, he says, was even more pronounced than he expected. “Even those not competing in the marriage market must compete to buy housing, and make other significant purchases, thus pushing up the savings rate for all households.’’ To him the conclusion is inescapable. “None of the discussion about global imbalances has brought family-planning policy or women’s rights to the table, because many do not see these issues as related to economic policy. Our research suggests that this is a serious omission.’’

That the pursuit of marriage-aged women is so intense that it might move the needle on nationwide savings rates speaks to the power of the demographic imbalance. And it also speaks to the increasingpersonal power that lies in the hands of young, unmarried women. In the “marriage market,’’ as Wei calls it, “when a young woman says jump, the young man best ask, how high?’’

There is tremendous irony in that. China’s gender imbalance is a moral scandal, a fact at least implicitly acknowledged by the Family Planning Commission in Beijing, which has set a goal of reducing it by the end of this year. That young women increasingly get to call the shots when it comes to love and marriage (and divorce) is one of the by-products of the imbalance. Guys like Zhang Wei may not like it. But they’d better get used to it.

China Article 3:

Shrinking China: A Demographic Crisis“What is the real fulcrum of China’s strength?” a popular Chinese website asked in 2009. There was a one-word answer: “Population!”

Citizens of the world’s most populous state take pride in their great numbers, and the country is, not surprisingly, filled with population determinists. “More people means more power,” wrote a poster named “Fang Feng” on the “Strong Country Forum” of the Communist Party’s People’s Daily. “This is the truth.”

Perhaps so. But unfortunately for the Chinese, their country’s population is about to peak and then shrink fast. Fewer people may not necessarily mean less power, but a shriveling population requires the country’s leadership to overcome demographic trends rather than be propelled by them, as it has since the founding of the People’s

Accelerated demographic decline is already evident, set in motion by the decades-old one-child policy. Beijing’s vigorous enforcement of this statist planning measure has created population abnormalities that have already disfigured society and, in all probability, will do so for generations. China’s economy, the motor of the country’s rise in the post–Mao Zedong period, is likely to be especially hard hit.

China’s population will not peak in 2026, as estimated by the US Census Bureau a half decade ago, or sometime in the 2030–35 timeframe, as United Nations statistics, mostly based on Beijing’s own numbers, now indicate. Senior official Liu Mingkang, speaking at the Asia Global Dialogue in May 2012, admitted growth will end in 2020.

More important, China’s workforce is shrinking rapidly. The number of working-age Chinese fell for the first time in 2010, according to some of the country’s leading demographers, or in 2012, according to the official National Bureau of Statistics. As recently as the end of last decade, Beijing was predicting the high point would not be reached until 2016.

These developments are the result of plunging fertility. China had a total fertility rate—essentially the number of births per woman per lifetime—of 5.9 in the beginning of the 1970s. Today, official sources claim China’s TFR is “between 1.5 to 1.6.” In reality, it’s more like a “dangerously low” 1.4, according to Lu Yang of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, and it could even be under 1.2.

In any case, China is now well below 2.1, the rate needed to maintain a stable population, and it is looking more like Western Europe in this regard every day.

The problem of a low TFR is compounded by the growing scarcity of females. As a result of the one-child policy and a social bias in favor of male children, the country probably has the world’s most skewed sex ratio at birth, 115.9 boys for every 100 girls, according to official data released in January. As a result of the imbalance—most societies do not exceed 106 boys to 100 girls—there are 33.8 million more men than women, according to Beijing’s official statisticians (or 51.5 million more, according to other estimates).

Chinese leaders created this anomalous situation by lurching from one population policy to another. Mao, the founder of the People’s Republic, wanted as many Chinese in the world as possible. But his radical pro-growth policies were

unsustainable, and toward the end of his life Beijing’s technocrats adopted the mostly voluntary “wan, xi, shao”—“late, long, few”—program to limit population growth.

These efforts were mostly effective, with the birthrate falling by half in less than a decade. Mao’s successor, Deng Xiaoping, was not satisfied with such progress, however. He rolled out the one-child policy, often termed the world’s most draconian social experiment, in 1979 and 1980, as one of his first initiatives after assuming power.

Chinese leaders congratulate themselves for this policy, which they credit for preventing 400 million births, yet it’s clear the harshly enforced program has not only created a horrendous gender imbalance but has caused other demographic abnormalities, such as the almost complete disappearance of aunts, uncles, and cousins.

Frightened by the demographic trends they themselves created, Chinese leaders have progressively relaxed the policy over time. The last major change was announced in November 2013, when additional couples were allowed two children, but the liberalizations have been too little and too late to avert a crisis, which now seems virtually inevitable. Demography may not be destiny, but population trends define the realm of the possible and are, especially in China’s case, unforgiving.

So why has China’s technocratic leadership failed to scrap an approach obviously not needed in more than a decade?

First, population-control measures are administered by a large bureaucracy that has an interest in their maintenance and has been tenaciously fighting to keep them in place. Second, the population-planning apparatus is one of the Communist Party’s most effective means of controlling people both in the countryside and the city. At a time of protest and other signs of discontent, an increasingly repressive leadership apparently believes it cannot surrender the power the policy provides. Third, a reversal in long-held population programs, which have been strenuously defended for decades, would inevitably call into question the party’s judgment and therefore its legitimacy. Thus officials must consistently reaffirm their support for the now-counterproductive rules, what population expert Susan Yoshihara has termed “the world’s worst law.”

The price for this official intransigence will be high. As Nicholas Eberstadt of the American Enterprise Institute wrote a half decade ago, “These problems will compromise economic development, strain social harmony, and place the traditional Chinese family structure under severe pressure; in fact, they could shake Chinese civilization to its very foundations.”

Some of these problems are already evident, such as increased prostitution, elevated HIV-infection rates, and renewed trafficking in females. Gangs are kidnapping women in Russia, Mongolia, North Korea, Burma, and Vietnam and transporting them to China, where they are sold and resold to husbands in “bachelor villages.” And there is also the rise of various criminal groupings, the so-called “dark forces.” All these maladies can be traced to the presence of unmarriageable males, “bare branches,” whose numbers are expected to rise over the coming decades. In the 2030–45 time frame, there will be no potential wives in China for a fifth of the country’s males.

And this could have political as well as social consequences. “Bare branches,” for instance, have been responsible for domestic turmoil throughout China’s dynastic history. One bare branch, Zhu Yuanzhang, founded the Ming dynasty, which was eventually destroyed by another one, Li Zicheng. The next set of emperors, the Qings, were in part ruined by the consequences of sex-ratio imbalances. “China, it seems, is re-creating the vast army of bare branches that plagued it during the 19th century,” write Valerie Hudson and Andrea den Boer in their controversial work, Bare Branches: The Security Implications of Asia’s Surplus Male Population.

Hudson and den Boer also argue that such male-female imbalances impede democratization. “High-sex-ratio societies are governable only by authoritarian regimes capable of suppressing violence at home,” they contend. Accordingly, the pair thinks the prospect for “full democracy” in China is “poor.”

Although they write too sweepingly, there is a kernel of truth in their thesis on democratization. Li Jianxin, the author of The Structure of Chinese Population, states that behind the mass-violence incidents of the first decade of this century are “shadows of surplus males,” who magnify the challenges of maintaining social stability. Chinese officials are

concerned about the problem as well, which is why some of them have suggested, for example, that single children are one of the causes of a juvenile crime wave.

The Chinese one-party state, as it has sought to quell this turmoil during both decades of this century, has noticeably become more repressive. The demographic turmoil is by no means the only reason Beijing has cracked down hard on civil society, but it has been used as an excuse to postpone political liberalization.

Hudson and den Boer take their theory one step further, suggesting a linkage between the existence of large numbers of bare branches and the adoption of risk-taking foreign policies: “The security logic of high-sex-ratio cultures predisposes nations to see some utility in interstate conflict.” And as academics Christian Mesquida and Neil Wiener explain, “It is likely then that controlling elites astutely underwrite such risky undertakings as territorial expansion or colonization, especially when the alternative is having the aggressive tendencies of the male citizens directed at themselves.”

The idea that single males are “testosterone-powered violence machines” is a crude sexual stereotype that nonetheless has some validity, but to link their presence in society to belligerent foreign policies is a stretch. There are also, of course, reasons why a country like China, with too many males, might not be prone to misadventure abroad.

For one thing, bare branches can cause so much trouble at home that a country’s leadership would become too busy maintaining internal stability to be able to channel their discontent into provocative acts against other states. Tens of millions of bare branches have traveled the Chinese countryside and populated the slums of great cities for a generation, but Beijing’s external policies did not become especially belligerent until a half decade ago.

In China’s one-child nation, moreover, a son’s death in battle would mean the extinction of the family name, something unacceptable in a society attaching great importance to continuing bloodlines. China’s pampered “little emperors” may or may not be selfish, spoiled, and self-indulgent—and therefore not likely to sacrifice themselves for the nation—but Chinese parents today are surely more protective of their sons than their counterparts in earlier eras.

There are also other demographic factors pushing China in a peaceful direction. As China’s population shrinks rapidly—as it undoubtedly will in the next two decades—the nation will become grayer. Countries with large elderly populations do not appear inclined to start wars because, in addition to the narrowing ambitions of aging societies, they lack the resources to engage in prolonged combat.

We can only speculate as to the future states of mind of the Chinese people and their leaders. But this much is clear: The relentless and ruthlessly enforced one-child policy has created some of the most unusual demographic patterns in the absence of war and pestilence. We know that this policy can affect the country’s external policies in dramatic ways. At this point, however, we just do not know in which direction.

There is also rapid demographic change along China’s borders. East Asia, for instance, is headed for a “death spiral,” a term applied to Japan but soon applicable to much of the rest of the region. Low Japanese fertility—the country has a TFR of 1.4—is matched by low fertility in South Korea (1.3) and Taiwan (1.1). Hong Kong and Macau, China’s two special administrative regions, have TFRs of 1.2 and 0.9, respectively. Japan, even with a slightly higher TFR, is further along the demographic curve than its neighbors, so it is leading the pack downward. By 2050, the Japanese will be living in “the oldest society the world has ever known,” but nearby countries will not be far behind. Together, they are headed to near-simultaneous demographic collapses without historical precedent.

So China’s demography, as perilous as it is, does not look out of place in East Asia except, of course, that the other societies are far more stable, both socially and politically, and therefore better able to handle wrenching demographic changes. Fertile South Asia presents a quite different situation. The populations of Pakistan and Bangladesh are growing fast, but the big concern for Beijing is India, a peer competitor with an estimated 2.5 total fertility rate.

Sometime in the next 10 years, India will overtake China as the world’s most populous state, a status China has held for at least three centuries and perhaps for all recorded history. And India will continue to grow rapidly while China goes in the opposite direction. India’s population will peak, according to the UN, at 1.645 billion in 2065–70. By that period,

India is projected to have 368 million more people than China, and, in all probability, the gap will be even larger, as UN numbers do not reflect the accelerated Chinese demographic decline evident today.

Where it counts—workers—China will be a distant second. India’s workforce will overtake China’s by 2030, if not sooner. By mid-century, there will be about 1 billion Indians of working age, at least 130 million more than the Chinese in the same group, perhaps as many as 200 million more.

At that time, the median age of India will be a young 37, versus China’s 46. People 65 and over will constitute 23.9 percent of China’s population but only 12.7 percent of India’s. “India has close to ideal demographics,” Credit Suisse’s Robert Prior-Wandesforde recently told CNBC. “It’s in a sweet spot.” China, on the other hand, has one of the world’s most unenviable population profiles at this time, and its government, by insisting on maintaining the one-child policy, appears determined to make its situation even less advantageous.

Chinese demographers know what future trends mean. Li Jianxin, for one, believes the Indians could end up dominating the middle of this century. Chinese economists agree. “When you see a country’s population decline, the country will definitely degrade into a second-rate one,” says economist Yao Yang of Peking University’s China Center for Economic Research.

Yao may be overstating the situation, but he is generally correct in assuming that a deteriorating demographic profile will undermine an economy over the long term. China’s fabulous economic growth in the post-Mao period coincided with the country’s “demographic dividend,” an extraordinary bulge in the workforce created by boldly imagined and rigorously enforced population policies. It’s not clear that Chinese technocrats will be able to engineer consistent increases in gross domestic product while the country’s population tumbles. Already, India’s economy looks like it is growing faster than China’s.

Its economy propelled China’s astounding leap to the top ranks, and now many Chinese think that the present era belongs to their nation. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, however, talks about the years to come as “India’s century.” China, of course, appears to be the more powerful of the two now, but demographic trends suggest Beijing will not be the dominant one for long.