Ponnuru: China’s people crash could upend U.S. policy

It isn’t quite true that demography is destiny. But if Nicholas Eberstadt is right, our destiny is going to be shaped by demography in ways we may not expect.

Eberstadt studies demographics for the American Enterprise Institute, and he makes projections in full awareness the field has gotten the future wrong before. In the 20th century, the global population increased to 6.1 billion from 1.6 billion.

“Nothing like this magnitude or tempo of population change had ever previously been witnessed in the history of our species,” he has written.

It was reasonable to fear, as many people did during that period, that the result would be mass famines. Instead, the world saw rising prosperity.

Today’s most important population trend is falling birthrates. The world’s total fertility rate – the number of children the average woman will bear over her lifetime – has dropped to 2.6 from 4.9 in 1960.

As Eberstadt points out, we can make predictions about the next 20 years with reasonable accuracy. Traditional allies of the U.S. in western Europe and Japan will have less weight in the world. Already the median age in western Europe is higher than Florida, the oldest state in the U.S. Japan had only 40 percent as many births in 2007 as it had in 1947.

These countries will have smaller workforces, lower savings rates and higher government debt as a result of their aging.

All these effects certainly make these countries even less willing to spend money on their armed forces. Americans who want Europe to bear more of the free world’s military burden are probably going to be disappointed. So will those who expect Europe to take on humanitarian missions.

But one country that worries American military strategists also will face serious demographic challenges. China’s rise over the last generation has been stunning, but straight-line projections of its future power and influence ignore its birthrate is 30 percent below the replacement rate.

The Census Bureau predicts China’s population will peak in 2026. Its labor force will shrink, and its older than 65 population will rise from 115 million to 240 million in the next 20 years. Only Japan has aged faster, but Japan had the great advantage of growing rich before it grew old.

China, notoriously, has another demographic challenge. The normal sex ratio at birth is about 103 to 105 boys for every 100 girls. In China, as a result of the one-child policy and sex-selective abortion, that ratio has been 120 boys for every 100 girls. From 2000 to 2030, the percentage of men in their late 30s who never have been married is projected to quintuple. Eberstadt doesn’t believe that having an “army of unmarriageable young men” will improve the country’s economy or social cohesion.

Eberstadt concludes, “We might want to have some additional new friends and allies in the world.” America’s growing ties to India, a nation he describes as “aging moderately,” strike him as promising. But he warns that it has not made the most of its population: “India has an appalling education deficit.”

Foreign-policy thinkers often lose sight of demographic trends, Eberstadt says, because from a policymakers’ view, “They tend to look really glacial. If it’s not happening in the next 48 to 72 hours, it’s not in the inbox.” But “population change gradually and very unforgivingly alters the realm of the possible.”

• Ramesh Ponnuru is a Bloomberg View columnist and a senior editor at National Review.