China is looking at a massive shift in its demographics over the next few decades as the fallout of the one child policy works its way through China’s economy and Chinese society.
A couple of generations of the one child per two parents policy and even, in many cases, one child per four grandparents, along with a very significant extension of life expectancy, is going to result in a huge bubble of older people, who can no longer work as they once did along with a shrinkage in the labour supply to underpin the social supports required for the income and medical needs of this older generation.
A possible solution to this demographic shift will be to import workers from a place with a higher birth rate and low employment prospects.
China has vast under populated areas in its interior, areas that it is seeking to connect with the coast as quickly and as efficiently. These connections are also designed to make it easy for the central government to control as it possibly can. Far easier to control the movement of people if they have to get on a train, be that high speed or slow, than if they can simply get in a car and hop on the road system and drive anywhere they please.
While much attention on China’s investments in Africa has focused on China seeking to gain advantage in the contest for Africa’s physical raw materials, considerably less attention has been devoted to whether China is looking at the greatest African resource of all, her people.
Yet, Africa’s falling infant mortality, widening access to foundational education and a lack of rewarding work for a more educated workforce may combine to provide China with the answer to its problems.
It’s likely they would start with offers of further education in China, There’s a huge cohort of smart, diligent African youth, male and female, who simply never get the chance to fulfil their potential due to the lack of educational opportunities in their home countries, Being offered the chance of an education in China with the trade-off being that you will work in China for X number of years will seem like a good prospect. However, I think it likely that their education visas will be tied to a specific locale or region, and will be tied to working in certain Chinese regions or for certain corporate entities.
Japan instituted a similar effort in the 80s and 90s as the industrial base outgrew the available population to make the manufactured goods that feed her booming export economy. A combination of visas for South Americans of Japanese descent and guest worker programs for people from a variety of countries from Iran to Ireland (I was one of the latter) plugged an emerging and potentially critical gap in Japanese manufacturing.
The collapse of the bubble economy and the opening up of China to Japanese manufacturers meant that this program never quite become the societal change it might have. As a consequence Japan is well ahead of where China is headed, with a falling population and very real pressures of social cohesion whereby a shrinking working population is expected to maintain a much longer lived older generation in the fashion that the 20th century social contract has promised them. This inversion of the population pyramid is economically and socially unstable. It’s a form of societal deflation as the younger generation becomes less and less inclined to work harder, invest and innovate knowing that they are less and less likely to benefit from their efforts while those currently benefiting were the ones who pulled up the drawbridge on those same younger people in terms of buying a home or having a stake in the society.
While Japanese families of the later 20th century were small by choice, the mandated Chinese one child policy was far more invasive and fast acting in its consequences. China will likely accelerate past Japan in the next 20/30 years in turns of flipping its population pyramid.
There will be other enticements for these newcomers. They will have free accommodation included as part of their work package, or if not free then at a reduced rate, and potentially other subsidies for food and other essentials. They may even provide early years educational access for the children of their imported labour pool if they believe it would be advantageous to maintaining a stable labour pool.
These will depend on whether China wants to effectively host generations of guest workers or whether their preference is that they would return home at the end of their working lives. However, similar to the Gastarbeiter programs in Germany and elsewhere, it is highly unlikely there will be any path to citizenship or the ability to participate fully in wider society.
China will ensure that there are travel restrictions in place such that these African workers can’t move around the rest of the Chinese countryside without permission.
It won’t happen suddenly or most likely not on foot of some well flagged public policy change but slowly and incrementally, until there’s many millions of people in this arrangement. The final curious element is that this setup will be lauded in some quarters as a sign of China’s openness and benevolence to the globe’s fellow workers.
With no voting rights, confinement to specific, if quite large, regions except to travel for tourism reasons and a requirement to have ID at all times, it may in time be more obvious what sort of system these workers are living in. A system of separate but not equal.
China won’t call these new areas Bantustans but that’s what they will effectively be. China will have revived Apartheid but with Chinese characteristics.
Daniel K Sullivan grew up in Killorglin but currently lives in Dublin. He has been a margin of error candidate in several local and Seanad elections. He holds any number of apparently contradictory views, which he will happily bloviate on before enjoying a hearty breakfast at the Restaurant at the End of the Universe.