Fixated on maintaining the country’s high-powered economic growth, Chinese policy-makers have been soliciting opinions from economists about how to avoid future labour shortages by relaxing and even scrapping the rigid ‘one-child’ policy.

But the effort has generated a debate over a 25-year-old family planning policy that was once considered sacrosanct. Population experts have clashed with economists about what path China - a nation of 1.3 billion with scarce farmland and water supplies - should take to maintain a healthy economic growth and delay the arrival of a greying society without creating another population explosion.

China’s ‘one-child’ policy, implemented from 1979, is widely unpopular inside the country. In the West, it has been criticised for being prone to abuses with local officials using coercion and forced abortions to enforce their state mandated family planning quotas.

But despite popular hostility the government credits the policy for successfully controlling growth of China’s already huge population, and says it would have at least 300 million more people today if it were not for the policy.

The government’s confidence, however, has been dented by a series of studies in recent years and demographic evidence suggesting that because of the low birth rates China is growing old too early and too fast.

Fears have risen that rapid increase in aged people would put a strain on working-age population and slacken economic growth. As China’s baby-boomers of pre-1979 start retiring, there will be fewer young people of working age to take their places and fuel the country’s economic powerhouse.

“For 20 years China benefited from its ‘demographic dividend’ but now we anticipate that around 2015, this dividend would turn into deficit,” says Cai Fang from the Population and Labour Economic Research Institute under the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. Cai’s research credits the surge of number in working-age people, or what he calls the “demographic dividend”, with contribution of 24 per cent to the economy’s growth between 1978 and 1998. But Cai predicts that around 2013 China would see its working-age population growth coming to a halt and might begin experiencing labour force shortages.

Chinese economic planners estimate the country would reach its well-off threshold, or what in Chinese is termed “xiaokang” (comfortable living) in 2020. But a national census conducted in 2000 concluded that China had already crossed into the phase of a rapidly greying nation.

In 2000, people aged 60 composed 10 per cent of the population and their numbers were growing by three per cent a year. The demographic state of China that year fitted nicely the UN definition of an aging society - a country, or a region where people aged 60 make up 10 per cent of the overall population.

What is more, the numbers in China are rising fast. Chinese demographers predict that if current population trends persist, by 2035 people aged 65 and over would compose 20 per cent of the population.

China’s national wealth, however, would not be a match to shoulder the burden of a rapidly greying nation. In 2030, China’s annual per capita income will be about $11,000 measured in current prices, according to a study by Goldman Sachs Group in Hong Kong. — IPS