Wendt Scholar Nicholas Eberstadt

In these few pages I will not be trying to drum up support for the proposition that "demography is destiny"--that famous aphorism often attributed to Nineteenth Century French social scientist Auguste Comte. For strategic thinkers, and other students of human agency, surveying an international chessboard over a time horizon measured in decades rather than eons, Comte's dictum promises far too much and delivers too little. I will instead be making what I regard as a more modest but also more defensible argument: That demography changes the realm of the possible. Demographic trends are doing just that before our very eyes today in Northeast Asia today, methodically and inexorably. Indeed: I submit that over the coming generation, it is entirely likely that demographic trends are going to change the realm of the possible in the Asia Pacific in unprecedented and absolutely revolutionary ways.

Dependable Demographics

How can I make such a confident pronouncement about so very bold an assertion? The reason, quite simply, has to do with the inherent reliability of relatively long-term demographic projections. By their very nature, demographic projections can be made with rather more confidence than many other sorts of long term projections from the social sciences.

Let's say the scope for long-range projections should be a quarter century. If we look backward 25 years, we'll get some sense of the recent performance of various varieties of long-range prognostication. A quarter century in the past takes us back to 1982. We now know that social scientists and other systematic surveyors of the Northeast Asian scene did not generally anticipate some of the most momentous events that were to unfold in the region over the past generation.

In 1982, for example, the former Soviet Union was a major player in Northeast Asia--yet at that time practically no political scientists or regional specialists were contemplating the possibility of a wholesale Soviet collapse. With respect to economics, Harvard University's Dwight Perkins, makes the point that longer-term projections may actually be superior to very short-term projections because the relative error factor (from shocks and unpredictable events) will be smaller. And Prof. Perkins' own predictive record on the Chinese economy is very good. But if we look at the profession as a whole, we can see that some fairly major developments in Northeast Asia came as an almost total surprise. Suffice to say that few economists back in 1982 were writing about the coming decade of stagnation in what was then Asia's largest economy: Japan.

Among all the social sciences, it is quite possibly demography that enjoys the greatest intrinsic disciplinary advantage in attempting to peer into the world a generation hence. Why should this be so? Quite simply, because the process of population change is governed by a powerful and biological regularity--and its annual tempo, in comparison to many other sorts of change in our modern era, is rather gradual and slow. Furthermore, when both fertility and mortality levels are quite low, as is the case throughout Northeast Asia today, the plain fact of the matter is that the overwhelming majority of the people inhabiting some region a generation from now will be people who are already there today--and the overwhelming majority of people here today will be alive in the region a generation from now. Barring only catastrophe of truly Biblical proportion, in other words, we already have a fairly good reading on Northeast Asia's population profiles out to the year 2030.

The very most important "driving factor" altering the region's population profiles over the coming generation will be patterns of childbearing: that is to say, birthrates or fertility levels. This is not a normative judgment--it is a statement of arithmetic. In purely quantitative terms, the impact of fertility trends on the impending changes in Northeast Asia's population structures looks to be vastly greater than any corresponding contribution from mortality or migration trends (excepting again only the contingency of world-shattering cataclysm)--and the transformations of population structure throughout the entire Northeast Asian region over the next 25 years promise to be dramatic, and in many important respect, without historic parallel.

Throughout Northeast Asia--for that matter, throughout all of East Asia--fertility levels today are not only below the level needed for long-term population replacement, but lower than have ever before been recorded during times of peace and order.

Today's birth levels are amazingly low--and they seem to be heading even lower. In Japan, according to the latest reports, if current fertility patterns were to continue, Japanese women could expect an average of less than 1.3 births; considering that roughly 2.1 births are needed for population stability, this is a big gap. But, it is not the biggest gap in the area – in Taiwan, the total fertility rate (TFR) is reportedly now down to 1.12 births per woman per lifetime. In South Korea, the fertility level hit just 1.08 in 2005, and in Hong Kong it is actually below 1.0 since 2001. There are also major cities in mainland China where the reported TFR is now far below 1.0 (Beijing and Shanghai among them), although under-reporting of births may also be at work here owing to China's antinatal population policies. For China as a whole, an apparently pervasive underreporting of births makes it difficult to pinpoint current fertility levels and trends. Nevertheless the consensus among demographers today is that China's fertility has been below the replacement level for a decade and a half or more, with current TFRs of around 1.7. And there are some analysts who make a plausible case that China's true total fertility rate may be well below that level today--may indeed have been well below that level for some considerable period of time.

Grave Implications

What do such birth patterns mean for population replacement? Estimates of Northeast Asia's net reproduction rates, or NRR--technically, the expected number of surviving daughters per woman under current childbearing patterns in the absence of immigration; more intuitively, the proportional replacement of one generation by the next. If we accept the 1.7 estimate for current TFRs in China, it would imply that China's subsequent, upcoming generation would be shrinking by 25%. But net reproduction rates are even lower throughout almost all the rest of Northeast Asia--and for that matter, East Asia. By the United Nations Population Division's estimates, for example, the NRR in Japan in the first half of this decade was just 0.64--meaning each new generation would be about 36% smaller than the one before it. In South Korea, the estimated NRR from 2000 to 2005 was less than 0.6, implying generational shrinkage of over 40%. And net reproduction rates are even lower in some other Asian locales: In Taiwan it is 0.53 as of 2005; in Hong Kong in 2004, just 0.44. Incredible as this may sound, current childbearing patterns in places like Hong Kong--and perhaps also in places like Beijing, Shanghai and Tianjin--are today consonant with a halving of each successive generation, all other things being equal. There may be some upward movement in fertility in these diverse societies in the years ahead (especially in China, if coercive population programs are amended). But I do not think we will see a return to pre-industrial levels of fertility--and it is possible instead that fertility trends will continue further on their current downward course.

Asia's new fertility patterns have inescapable consequences for national population profiles over the coming generation. Over the next 25 years, these extraordinarily low birth rates will force a pervasive and very rapid population aging across the East Asian expanse. They will also conduce to a peaking, and thereafter and more or less indefinite decline, in the size of the working age population, i.e, those between age 15 to 64 year olds. (The working-age population is already declining in Japan and in Russia--and it is set to peak and decline in both China and South Korea in les than a decade.) A little further out on the horizon is the prospect of population decline--not just for Northeast Asia, but for virtually all of East Asia.

Beast of Burden

As a practical matter, these trends stand to complicate the prospect of maintaining rapid economic growth--perhaps severely. They obviously beg the question of the pension burden on economies and societies--burdens which could prove to be truly enormous. But they also raise issues about improving labor force skills and technological standards in a rapidly aging workforce with fewer and fewer young entrants. And there is the obvious prospect that rapid population aging may place severe pressure on local savings rates, making the goal of maintaining high investment rates progressively more difficult.

The dimensions of population aging will not be as extreme in China over the coming generation as in Japan. Yet coping with population aging in the years ahead may be no less challenging for China than for Japan, as China's population aging is unfolding at a much lower of per capita income than Japan enjoyed when it faced comparable demographic trends.

Will population aging affect the tenor of international relations? It is difficult to say. In recent years there has been some speculation that elderly societies will be more risk averse, and therefore more peaceable. But remember--in the 1930s Nazi Germany was one of the contemporary world's "greyer" societies. More recently, we have the example of Serbia: a place in the mid-1990s where median age of 35 and one citizen in eight older than 65. The fact that Serbia was one of the world's more elderly societies--greyer at that time than either Canada or Iceland--did not spare her neighbors from military aggression and genocidal atrocities.

Much less debatable than the prospective impact upon foreign policy is the impending impact on family structure of the coming demographic changes in East Asia. To exaggerate, although perhaps less than one might think: 2,500 years of East Asian family tradition stand to come to an end with the region's rising generation. Why do I suggest this? Quite simply, because current demographic trends are deeply subversive of the Confucian ethos--and prospective trends are more unfavorable still.

While the elderly in East Asia today may still be venerated, they are not exactly a scarce resource any longer. A generation hence, the situation looks to be even starker. Projections for 2030 suggest China may have nearly as many senior citizens 65 years of age or older as children under 15. As for Japan: a generation from now, there could be more Japanese 80 or older than Japanese children. Note that this unimaginable circumstance stands to characterize social--and familial--reality in Japan during the lifetimes of most of the Home Islands' present inhabitants. And extreme sub-replacement fertility--levels down as low as those now witnessed in Hong Kong--has other far-reaching implications for the Asian family. Under patterns of childbearing now prevailing in Hong Kong, a very new sort of society is being born: a society in which many--maybe most--people no longer have brothers; no longer have sisters; no longer have uncles or aunts or cousins. Think what that would mean for social and economic interactions in the East Asian context. As Francis Fukuyama, among others, has argued, the societies of East Asia are, by and large, "low trust" societies. One of the critical repositories of social capital in East Asia has been the family. If and when Asian family structures seriously atrophy, or if the scope and role of the family is severely attenuated, social and economic life in Asia will require reliable and sturdy institutional alternatives or complements to perform functions previously assumed by family networks. Given the region's demographic prospects, those structures and arrangements will have to be developed very quickly.

There is yet another aspect to demographic change impending for East and Northeast Asia, and this takes us almost into the realm of science fiction. I refer here to the unnatural but increasing disparities between the number of baby boys and baby girls--the eerily rising sex ratios at birth. For China, recent data that suggest that there may over 120 baby boys being born for every 100 baby girls--whereas in any biologically regular population one might expect a ratio 103 to 106. This is a huge discrepancy. And when generations are shrinking in size, as they soon will be in China, the whole possibility of potentially imbalances in marriage markets looms increasingly large. If China is raising a huge cohort of essentially unmarriageable men in a culture that has put a premium on honoring ancestors through a continuation of the male line, what will this mean for social order, economic development, and external relations? I don't know--no one knows. But we will be finding out: the trend is already set, and will be playing out in the decades immediately ahead.

America Exceptionalism

Surveying the horizon of Northeast Asia, East Asia and the Pacific, there does happen to be one major regional actor that happens to be relatively unafflicted by the demographic complications just described. That country is the United States. In other contexts, scholars talk of "American exceptionalism," but there also appears to be an American "demographic exceptionalism". Today, the U.S. is virtually the only developed society--certainly the only large developed society--that registers fertility levels roughly at the replacement level. The U.S. has also been distinguished by its disposition, and facility, for welcoming immigrants from abroad making new Americans out of them. With relatively high fertility and continuing net inflows of immigrants, population prospects for the U.S. look to be fundamentally different from those of the other countries we have just discussed. The U.S. can expect steady and continuing population growth over the coming generation. The outlook in America, moreover, is for gradual modest growth in working age manpower. And America can expect a much milder and gentler trajectory of population aging that any of the other countries of Northeast Asia.

By 2030, for example, "medium variant" projections by the U.N. Population Division envision the U.S. to have a median age two years younger than China; eight years younger than South Korea; and a good 12 years younger than Japan. In fact, this America of 2030 would be more youthful than Japan today.

Needless to say, there are plenty of factors that may complicate America's prospect over the coming generation. But to the extent that demographic factors actually matter, population trends weigh in the direction of a measure of cautious optimism for the U.S. The realm of the possible is changing in the Asia-Pacific region: and those impending changes look as if they may be relatively auspicious for the U.S.

Nicholas Eberstadt is the Henry Wendt Scholar in Political Economy at AEI.