China’s ‘Far East’ Is Emptying Out Faster Than Russia’s

Results of the 2020 Census have been released. Some links:

• Reuters summary
• Chinese state statistics service communique (in Chinese)

Here’s a table of the regional change:

Key highlights:

Population has grown by 5.4% from 1.340B to 1.412B. Its population was 10M higher than projected, entirely due to Guangdong (which has 126M, not 115M). This is obviously a case of internal migrants not being tracked.

North-East China (Dongbei), as expected, is in the throes of severe depopulation. Heilongjiang, which borders Russia, falls from 38.2M in 2010 to 31.9M now. For comparison, this is a faster rate of decline than what the Russian Far East experienced in the 1990s. This is the region from where the neocons and East European Russophobes were telling you that the Chinese would mount their demographic takeover of Siberia from. Meanwhile, Jilin with 24.1M people now has fewer people than North Korea which is creeping up to 26M.

What seems to be happening is that the entire region, only really settled in 19C, is emptying out towards the sunnier south, especially Guangdong and the Pearl River Delta, in a reflection of what is happening in many other countries. On the bright side, I suppose, this suggests that the stagnation in wages and GDP per capita and the ultra-low fertility rates in Dongbei are somewhat exaggerated if the underlying population base has been bleeding out so rapidly.

I was surprised myself… but even as China continued surging in 2010s, Dongbei's GDPcc has barely budged in the past decade even in absolute terms. Even Tianjin plummeted relatively, going from China's richest region, above even Beijing/Shanghai, to <60% of their level. https://t.co/Q270e0JCH9

— 🇷🇺 ANATꙮLY 🤔 KARLIN (@akarlin88) January 2, 2021

NBS statistics head says number of births fell 18% to 12M in 2020, for a total TFR of 1.3 children per woman. China seems to be plummeting to South Korea-tier fertility with a time lag of 20 years. This probably doesn’t have much to do with coronavirus. After all, China only had a short but sharp lockdown which successfully suppressed the epidemic and has since been living in normality. Desired TFR is 1.8 children per woman, and realized TFR is usually at least 0.5 children less than desired, so a recovery in this indicator cannot be expected any time soon. Probably not for decades.

Urbanization rate is at 64%. This is relatively low for a country at China’s level of development and its future rise will be a further dampener on fertility.

So it seems pretty clear that China’s population is close to its all time peak and will start to decline in the early 2020s.

The average age of the population is 38.8 years. For the first time in modern history, it is higher than that in the US.

Source: The Unz Review