PubMed1991
China will encounter 3 challenges of its population problem in the 1990s. The 1st is the huge number of people born or population increase each year. The 3rd baby boom, which started at the mid-1980s, will last until abound 1997. The women entering into the age of peak childbearing (23 years old) exceed 11 million each year with an upper range of about 13 million. IN 1992, the number of women of fecund ages (22-29) in the whole country will reach 124 million, the largest number of fertile women in history. The net increase of population will be from 15.5 to 17.0 million for each hear. What is more serious is that the momentum of population increase will continue, instead of being checked by the year 2000. The next are the continuous increase of the aged population of 65 and over and the growing tendency of population aging ahead of economic development. China is a developing socialist country, huge in population, weak in economic development, with less-developed science, culture, and education. However, as a result of the decline in the proportion of children to the total population due to the decline in the birth rate in the 1970s, China's population has become an adult population from a young one in terms of the age structure, and will be an aged one very soon. China is facing the challenge of aging under economically less developed conditions. For developed countries, it took 80 years for the proportion of the aged population of 65 and over to increase from 7% to 17%; for China, it has taken only 40 years. It will certainly bring about a series of problems and difficulties upon the society to cope with such a huge number of elderly in an underdeveloped economy. The 3rd challenge is the increasing pressure on employment due to the continuous growth of working-age population (15-64). It is estimated that the working-age population will increase to 858 million by 2000, 20 million more than the sum of working-age population in all of the developed countries; and to 977 million by 2020. Since in a short period of time it is difficult to change the situation of labor supply greater than demand, the pressure on employment will continue to increase, with more than 15 million people entering the labor force or waiting for jobs each year. In particular, the rural surplus labor force will reach 233 million by 2000. This is signaled by the huge number of farmers who have rushed into big cities for work in recent years. It is far beyond the capability of the government to employ such a huge number of laborers because it would require an investment of at least 3600 billion yuan for fixed assets. It seems to me that the 3 population challenges stated above are not isolated but interact to restrict the process of China's economic and social development. The way out lies in developing production and doing a better job of economic construction, while also adopting comprehensive measures to make further efforts in practicing family planning to better control the overrapid growth of population and improve the quality of human resources.