President Xi Surprises

I like to think that I am the first to admit when I am wrong.  When I penned my open letter to President Xi (pg. 277) in the Spring of 2019, there were many indicators that China might swing to a pronatalist policy in the face of declining rates of population growth (https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/03/05/beijing-wants-babies-xi-jinping-natalism-china/).  Not declining population growth, because China’s population was and is still growing.  It is just growing at a lower rate of increase.  Stabilizing population growth was the intentional goal of China’s One Child Policy instituted more than 40 years ago, in 1979 - as unethical and inhumane as its implementation ended up.  Yet, with the rise of China's behemoth capitalist economy, the obsession over GDP growth has managed to reshape the narrative around fertility.  Economic advisers, including Chinese government economic advisers, as I say in my book, have a tendency to advocate for higher rates of population growth in order to drive GDP.  

Yet, later in 2019, the Chinese government appears to have taken a very different tack.  In the face of declining positive rates in population growth, rather than embrace a pronatalist policy, the Chinese government decided instead to face the reality of an aging population head on, and instead launch a comprehensive set of initiatives focused on reorganizing and investing to thrive under an aging population.  It is a vision for providing an aging population with a life of dignity that supports China’s long term success as a society and economy.  This pronouncement was made in November 2019 (http://www.gov.cn/xinwen/2019-11/21/content_5454347.htm - CCP Central Committee and State Council issue Medium and Long-Term Plan for Proactive Response to Population Aging, Xinhua, 21 November 2019.), and since it is in Mandarin on a Chinese government website, I am going to forgive myself for missing it until this article by the US Army Foreign Military Studies Office (https://madsciblog.tradoc.army.mil/207-china-issues-new-plan-to-address-aging-population/) came across my inbox in February.  USA FMSO is a rather obscure place for me to run across this topic, if you ask me.  But, for some reason I did not see this covered in the wider mainstream press, despite the fact that this could very well be one of the most consequential public policy decisions regarding global population we will see anytime soon.

This leaves me to wonder.  Did President Xi decide that China's population should not exceed a certain size, given the challenges of securing vital resources, from across the globe, to sustain such a vast enterprise?  Or, did he decide that it is indeed time for fertility growth to drop "below replacement value", and to steer China through an era of population degrowth?  Or, did he actually ask himself the question "How Many People Can The Earth Support?" and realize that China's (declining rate of) population growth was enough to cripple our planet?

Regardless, it appears that China's official policy has shifted to contribute to a larger zeitgeist, where we all shake off the insatiable need for population growth.  If China could bend its own population curve, as Japan has, we would be taking one more step toward a more sustainable planet where humanity could thrive without undermining the ability of our planet to support us.

We'll see.  Still, i would love to hear President Xi's answer to the question posed to him in my open letter.  How many people does President Xi believe the Earth can support without incurring long term ecological debt?