China’s demographic time-bomb is ticking faster

The latest warning was stark – that China’s population will shrink this year, more than a decade faster than forecast, and the country will become a ‘super-aged’ society by 2035. The economic implications will be a ‘huge thing’.

This came not from what Beijing has dismissed as ‘western doomsayers’, but from Zheng Bingwen, director of the Center for International Social Security Studies at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, and one of China’s most respected observers of population trends. He said the ratio of pensioners to workers will rise to 25 per cent in 2030, is expected to exceed 43 per cent in 2050, and is happening much faster compared with other countries. He warned that the declining workforce will hit savings and investment and that China’s welfare system is unable to cope.

Bingwen was speaking at a Tsinghua University financial forum, alongside speakers promoting private pensions and commercial insurance, so he was no doubt telling his audience what they wanted to hear.