At the 2024 Global Times Annual Conference in Beijing on Saturday, experts emphasized that China’s demographic dividends, particularly the qualitative aspect such as a high-quality labor force, continue to play a pivotal role in the country’s development.
In the past, China’s social and economic progress relied on quantitative demographic dividends. Looking ahead, there is a need to leverage qualitative demographic dividends to propel economic development and support Chinese modernization through the cultivation of a high-quality population, as noted by Lu Jiehua, a sociology professor at Peking University.
As part of the ongoing process of Chinese modernization, the country’s demographic landscape has undergone significant changes, including a low birthrate, an aging population, and regional population divergence, influencing future social and economic development, according to Lu.
He highlighted that current measures to encourage a higher birthrate are insufficient, emphasizing the necessity for comprehensive measures in areas such as education, retirement, healthcare, and employment.
While acknowledging the challenges in China’s demographic situation, Lu also emphasized the opportunities, citing the country’s 376 million floating population, constituting over one-fourth of the total population, as a potent force driving social and economic development.
Yuan Xin, a professor from the Institute of Population and Development at Nankai University’s School of Economics, presented insights on addressing demographic challenges. China’s elderly population, aged 60 and above, reached 280.04 million at the end of 2022, accounting for 19.8 percent of the total population. Yuan suggested that increasing the number of children per household could help maintain China’s population at around 1.3 billion by 2050.
Highlighting the evolution of China’s demographic landscape since the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, Yuan emphasized the decline in fertility rates and the rise in life expectancy. Despite changes, he affirmed that China’s demographic dividends persist as the quality of the population continues to rise, driven by millions of university and college graduates and secondary vocational school graduates.
Yuan underscored that the transformation of demographic characteristics into demographic dividends hinges on economic policies and the broader economic development environment, with employment being a crucial factor in this transition.