Demographic decline is a vicious spiral. Population aging accelerates, and eldercare burdens increase. Eldercare burdens increase, and fertility weakens. Low birth rates then exacerbate population aging and decline once again.
Although population aging is not exclusive to China, the rapid pace of China’s demographic transition makes its situation particularly severe— and the consequences are already reverberating across the economy, social systems, and individual experiences. “China is aging before affluence,” describes Dr. Emma Zang, “and that sequencing is really the crux of what makes this so hard to manage.”
Dr. Zang agreed to an email interview with the U.S.-China Perception Monitor to elucidate the broader picture surrounding China’s rapidly-aging society, including economic disillusionment, disproportionate policy impacts across rural-urban and gendered lines, and the historical irony surrounding Beijing’s attempts at pro-natalist intervention.
Emma Zang is an Associate Professor of Sociology, Biostatistics, and Global Affairs at Yale University. She also is a Faculty Fellow of the Institution for Social and Policy Studies (ISPS) and the Council on East Asian Studies (CEAS), and a Faculty Affiliate of Yale Institute of Network Science (YINS), Computation and Society Initiative, Yale Center on Climate Change and Health (YCCCH), Yale Claude D. Pepper Older Americans Independence Center, and Yale Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center (ADRC). Her research interests lie at the intersection of health and aging, family demography, and inequality. Dr. Zang’s work has appeared in journals such as the American Journal of Sociology, Demography, Journal of Marriage and Family, International Journal of Epidemiology, and JAMA Internal Medicine. Her research has received significant media coverage by major outlets in the United States, China, South Korea, India, and Singapore.
Isobel Li: China is rapidly approaching designation as a super-aged society. Could you give an overview of how it got to this point, beginning with the motivations for the One-Child Policy? What are the consequences?
Emma Zang: The One-Child Policy was not designed by demographers. It was largely shaped by a rocket scientist. Song Jian, an aerospace engineer, visited Europe in 1980, read The Limits to Growth, ran the numbers using systems-control mathematics, and concluded China’s optimal population was around 650 to 700 million, which was roughly half of what it actually was. His hard-science credentials gave the proposal enormous authority within the party. What’s striking is that the people who actually understood population dynamics had almost no role in designing the policy.
What is often underappreciated, and something I emphasize in my own work, is that fertility in China was already falling sharply before the One-Child Policy took effect. The 1970s saw a major campaign called “later, longer, fewer,” which pushed later marriage, longer intervals between births, and smaller families. In countries with similar fertility levels in the early 1970s without extreme measures, fertility also declined to comparable levels. So the OCP accelerated and institutionalized a trend that was already underway, but it also added enormous coercive machinery on top of it, including forced sterilizations and abortions at massive scale.
The consequences are staggering. China now has over 320 million people above age 60, a scale I’ve had to grapple with in my own work on aging and policy. Decades of son preference under enforced family size limits produced a severe sex ratio imbalance. And the working-age population supporting all of this is shrinking fast.
What makes China’s case particularly acute is the speed of the transition. France took 115 years and Sweden 85 years to move from an “aging” to an “aged” society. China did it in 22. And it’s doing all of this before it’s gotten rich. Japan and South Korea face similar demographic pressures, but from a far more developed economic base. China is aging before affluence, and that sequencing is really the crux of what makes this so hard to manage.
IL: What other societies, past or present, can we use to better understand the problems China is currently facing and how to solve— or accept and adapt to— demographic decline?
EZ: If you want to understand China’s future, don’t look at China. Look at Japan, specifically at thirty years of failed pro-natalist policy. Japan has spent decades trying virtually every pro-natalist tool available: cash transfers, parental leave, childcare subsidies. Its fertility rate hit a record low of 1.15 in 2024, with births falling below 700,000 for the first time. What I take from Japan, especially looking at the policy evidence, is that once the economic and social calculus of childbearing shifts, it becomes extraordinarily difficult to reverse, and that cash transfers, despite being the most popular policy instrument, show limited evidence of actually working; childcare infrastructure matters far more.
Eastern Europe offers a different lens. Countries like Romania and Bulgaria have experienced demographic decline compounded by mass emigration; falling fertility plus youth outmigration hollows out communities in ways that national averages obscure. China’s internal migration dynamics, particularly rural-to-urban flows, produce analogous regional effects.
The comparison I find most useful, though, is the broader East Asian pattern: South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, where Confucian expectations about gender roles have collided with educational expansion and punishing labor markets in ways that produce some of the world’s lowest fertility rates. These are places where women have achieved high education levels but face steep structural penalties for combining work and motherhood. China fits squarely in this regional pattern, with the additional weight of its policy history layered on top.
Across these cases, a consistent pattern emerges: fertility decline is stubbornly resistant to policy when the structural conditions driving it go unaddressed. Cash incentives don’t compensate for career penalties. Pronatalist campaigns don’t override economic anxiety. What moves the needle, where anything does, is changing the actual cost-benefit landscape of having children, through childcare infrastructure, genuine labor market equity for women, and economic security for young families. That’s a much harder lift than writing a check.
IL: You wrote in a previous analysis that Beijing can only achieve two of these three goals: sustaining economic growth, expanding welfare, or rebuilding China’s shrinking population. What actions have been taken on any of these fronts and what are their domestic or international implications? What are the most notable takeaways from China’s 15th Five-Year Plan?
EZ: This trilemma is actually what pushed me to write the book, because I kept finding that standard demographic analysis was missing the political economy underneath. The fiscal tension is real: pronatalist transfers at meaningful scale are expensive. So is expanding elder care and pension coverage for a rapidly aging population. Doing both while sustaining the investment-driven growth model that has defined Chinese development is probably not possible without major structural adjustment. Something has to give, and the key question is what adjustments are made and who bears the cost. The book’s central argument is that Beijing is structurally unable to solve all three simultaneously, and that understanding which corner of the trilemma it sacrifices tells us more about China’s future than any individual policy announcement.
What we’ve seen from Beijing so far is a pattern of gesturing toward all three goals simultaneously without making the hard trade-offs explicit. The relaxation of the One-Child Policy from two children, to three, to the effective removal of limits, was the most visible move, but it has had minimal demographic effect. Cash incentives for births have been rolled out unevenly across provinces, with wealthier coastal governments offering far more substantial packages than poorer inland ones. Pension reforms are inching forward, including the retirement age changes we can discuss separately.
The 15th Five-Year Plan signals a recalibration toward domestic consumption and social investment, and I find that interesting to watch, though I’d be cautious about reading too much into the rhetoric. In my own research, I keep returning to the question of whether this reflects a real willingness to shift resources toward household welfare, or whether it’s primarily a response to external pressure, such as the decoupling dynamics with the U.S. and the need to stimulate internal demand. Those are different political economic logics, and they have very different implications for whether ordinary families, especially those at the bottom of the distribution, actually see meaningful relief.
IL: China has begun gradually raising its retirement age. Do you foresee any consequences or improvements arising from this change, whether economic, social, or health-related?
EZ: Raising the retirement age makes sense on paper: more years of labor force participation, more pension contributions, a lighter dependency burden. But aggregate logic often obscures who actually bears the cost.
The difference between a white-collar worker in Shanghai and a construction worker in Gansu illustrates this clearly. For the former, working a few extra years may be perfectly manageable, even welcome. For the latter, it means extending physically grueling labor into years when the body genuinely cannot sustain it. The health consequences of this reform are likely to be deeply regressive, falling hardest on the workers who were already getting the worst deal from China’s pension system. Rural workers have long received far less pension coverage than their urban counterparts, and this reform does nothing to close that gap.
There is also a generational dimension that deserves more attention. Youth unemployment in China is already a politically sensitive issue. When older workers stay in the labor force longer, there is at least some displacement effect on entry-level positions. The relationship is not as mechanically simple as a fixed pool of jobs, but it is not zero either. Beijing is essentially asking young people, who are already skeptical about their economic prospects, to wait a little longer while their parents and grandparents hold on to positions. That is a difficult political message to send at a moment when youth disillusionment is already driving some of the cultural trends we can talk about shortly.
Beijing can call it a necessary reform. That does not make it a fair one.
IL: South Korea has the lowest fertility rate globally, and some South Korean companies have begun to offer large sums to employees for having children— quantities that are often larger than China’s subsidies. Do you see a place for targeted action that doesn’t necessarily come from the Chinese government?
EZ: The Booyoung case is one of the most striking demographic stories in recent years. The Seoul-based construction firm is handing out $75,000 every time an employee has a baby, even backdating payments to those who started a family before the policy came into place. And remarkably, births among employees have increased about 60% since the program began, and job applications jumped fivefold. So at the firm level, it appears to be working.
The challenge, however, is scaling this model. South Korea had a total fertility rate of 0.75 in 2024, the lowest in the world, and this is after the government has already spent staggering sums trying to reverse the trend. The costs of childrearing are not primarily a cash flow problem — they are a time, career, and cultural problem. A one-time bonus does not compensate for years of career penalty, the disproportionate domestic labor burden that continues to fall on women, or the broader anxiety about economic precarity. Corporate pronatalism also only reaches employed workers at participating firms, which leaves out the most economically precarious young people entirely.
That said, I don’t think employer-side action is irrelevant. The more interesting question is whether companies can go beyond cash toward structural changes: genuine flexibility, meaningful parental leave that fathers actually take, on-site or subsidized childcare. My own research on workplace flexibility suggests that how work is organized is deeply implicated in fertility decisions. China’s corporate culture has trended in the opposite direction — the “996” phenomenon is hardly a backdrop against which family formation feels manageable. Whether Beijing can or will push firms to change that calculus is one of the more interesting open questions in Chinese demographic policy right now.
IL: Your research often highlights the uneven impacts of policy solutions, and provides a closer look at the inequalities faced by specific groups. Top-level averages can often obscure experiences along gendered or rural-urban lines. Could you share more about how different communities are impacted by China’s demographic crisis?
EZ: Much of my research is motivated by a frustration with how aggregate statistics flatten the inequalities that actually shape behavior. When you look at an average fertility rate or an average pension benefit, you are seeing a number that tells you almost nothing about who is actually bearing the weight of demographic transition. This is exactly what I try to capture in my work on workplace flexibility and parental well-being: the distributional question underneath the headline figure.
Take the rural-urban divide. China’s household registration system, the hukou, has historically tied social entitlements to place of birth. Rural migrants working in cities have had severely limited access to urban public services, including schools for their children, even while constituting an enormous share of the urban labor force. When Beijing rolls out pronatalist subsidies or childcare programs that flow through urban welfare systems, they effectively bypass a huge portion of the population that is already the most economically precarious.
Gender is where I think the analysis gets most revealing. Falling fertility in China is not simply a preference shift or a cultural mood. It reflects a very rational calculation that educated women in particular are making about what motherhood actually costs them. China continues to expect women to shoulder the primary burden of domestic and caregiving labor, while simultaneously subjecting them to labor market discrimination the moment they have children or are perceived as likely to. The “lying flat” discourse, the fertility decline, the retreat from marriage: these are rational responses to a constrained reality, not symptoms of generational apathy. My research on workplace flexibility keeps returning to this same finding: when the structure of work makes combining employment and motherhood feel impossible, women respond accordingly. Any demographic policy that treats gender equity as an afterthought rather than the central mechanism is going to fail.
IL: It would be fascinating to look more into the predicament faced by Chinese youth, especially given how automation has destabilized entry-level career prospects. How are youth responding to the situation?
EZ: In my piece for the South China Morning Post, I argued that policymakers are treating these as two separate crises when they are actually the same crisis with two faces. Automation is eliminating precisely the entry-level jobs in manufacturing and routine service work that historically absorbed young workers without elite credentials and gave them a foothold to build a life on. At the same time, the expansion of higher education has produced far more degree-holders than the knowledge economy can absorb. The result is a structural squeeze: young people are over-credentialed for the jobs that exist, but face enormous social stigma if they take a step down the occupational ladder. The degree becomes simultaneously necessary and insufficient.
I’d push back on the “cultural pessimism” framing. What we’re really looking at is structural pessimism: a generation doing a rational cost-benefit analysis and coming up with an uncomfortable answer. The social contract that previous generations internalized, such as work hard, get promoted, buy a house, start a family, no longer reliably delivers. Housing prices in major Chinese cities have made ownership a near-impossibility for young graduates. Job security in a rapidly automating economy is genuinely uncertain. And the marriage and fertility decisions young people are making reflect those realities directly. The more interesting and urgent question is not why Chinese youth are responding this way, but what it would actually take to change the underlying incentive structure that is producing these responses. That is a much harder conversation, and one I suspect Beijing is not fully ready to have.
IL: Describe the “cultural pessimism” and disinterest in marriage and childbirth that increasing volumes of Chinese youth are experiencing. What would it require to restore hope and a sense of purpose for Chinese youth?
EZ: Let’s take the framing at face value for a moment, because even if cultural pessimism is downstream of material conditions, it does develop its own momentum, and that matters for policy. When it becomes socially normal not to marry or have children, the quiet social pressure that once nudged people toward family formation weakens, and the alternatives become not just acceptable but actively celebrated. The “4B” movement in South Korea, “tangping” and “bai lan” in China: these are not just individual choices, they are cultural currents that reinforce each other. And normative shifts of this kind are genuinely slow to reverse, even after material conditions improve. That lag is actually one of the more underappreciated demographic risks— you could fix the housing market and the labor market tomorrow and still be waiting a decade for fertility to respond.
So what would it actually take to restore something like demographic hope? The material substrate has to come first: housing affordability, labor market security, genuine workplace flexibility, a more equitable distribution of domestic labor between men and women. What does not work, and the evidence here is pretty clear, is top-down campaigns asking young people to embrace motherhood as a patriotic duty. Young people are not naive. They can see the gap between what the state is asking of them and what the state is actually delivering in return. That gap is what fuels the disillusionment, and slogans do not close it.
IL: How is the public reacting to the government’s expanding role in their personal lives— from pro-natalism campaigns to collective weddings as incentive? Could these increased involvements be harmful towards building trust in institutions or addressing cultural disinterest more broadly?
EZ: There is a deep historical irony at the center of this question that I think gets overlooked. The One-Child Policy spent four decades training Chinese citizens to understand reproductive decisions as something the state controls and disciplines. Now Beijing has essentially reversed course and is asking those same citizens, and their children, to trust that state intervention in their reproductive lives is now benevolent and enabling rather than restrictive. That is a significant legitimacy ask, and I am not sure the government has fully reckoned with how much credibility it burned during the OCP era.
The collective weddings and pronatalist campaigns that have proliferated in recent years illustrate the problem vividly. When young people’s actual anxiety about family formation is rooted in housing costs, job precarity, and the career penalties women face after having children, a state-sponsored wedding ceremony reads as not just unhelpful but faintly insulting. It signals that the government understands the problem as one of attitude rather than structure. And young people, who are not lacking in either intelligence or internet access, can identify that mismatch immediately. Survey research consistently shows that institutional trust is lower among younger Chinese cohorts than older ones, and performative pronatalism of this kind is more likely to deepen that cynicism than to dissolve it.
What actually works, when anything does, is infrastructure that changes the material reality of having children rather than the symbolic framing around it. Affordable and accessible childcare. Parental leave policies that are designed so fathers actually take them, not just policies that exist on paper. Housing subsidies that address the front-loaded costs of family formation rather than modest cash bonuses that barely register against the price of an apartment in a tier-one city. These interventions work because they meet people where they are. They do not ask anyone to override their own rational assessment of their situation. They change the situation itself. That is a much harder and more expensive project than running a campaign, which is probably why governments keep reaching for the campaign first.
IL: China’s demographic crisis is exacerbated by this disillusionment, but pessimistic sentiment is not necessarily unique to China. Moreover, as societies around the globe experience economic or social conditions precluding a desire for children, what might our world look like if multiple nations— including the U.S.— see intensified fertility decline?
EZ: China’s case is extreme in its speed and scale, but the underlying dynamic is not unique to China at all. Educated populations in urbanized, high-cost environments are concluding that children are financially and professionally incompatible with the lives they are trying to build; that is a global phenomenon. Sub-replacement fertility now characterizes most of Europe, East Asia, and increasingly Latin America. The United States has remained somewhat more demographically resilient, partly through immigration, but fertility among native-born Americans has declined substantially across virtually every demographic group.
What does a world of simultaneous demographic contraction across major economies actually look like? Some of the implications are not as alarming as the headlines suggest. Labor scarcity tends to drive productivity growth and put upward pressure on wages. The old geopolitical assumption that raw population size translates directly into economic or military power is increasingly disrupted by automation. A smaller population does not necessarily mean a weaker or poorer society.
But the transition costs are real and should not be minimized. Sustaining pension systems, elder care infrastructure, and public services with a shrinking contributor base is a genuine fiscal challenge that requires deliberate policy choices.
The more important issue is how societies choose to manage demographic decline, because that choice reveals everything about the kind of social contract they are willing to sustain. Countries that invest in automation-augmented productivity, gender-equitable labor markets, and serious immigrant integration may navigate this transition with relative resilience. Countries that respond with austerity, cutting welfare and pushing more unpaid work onto families and especially onto women, risk making the underlying problem worse. Low fertility is partly a product of social pessimism. Policies that increase the burden on young families intensify that pessimism, which further suppresses fertility, which worsens the fiscal situation, which produces more austerity. The demographic question, in the end, is a social contract question. And how countries answer it will define a great deal about what the second half of this century looks like.