According to a new report in Foreign Affairs, China’s median age could balloon to over 50 by 2050, making it an ultra aged society.
To add insult to injury, Xi Jinping’s re-embrace of traditional gender norms is likely to turn the clock back on women’s rights by decades and could exacerbate the root causes of China’s cratering birth rates:
China’s birth rates have continued to plummet. In 2021, they fell to the lowest level since the famine-induced years that followed the Great Leap Forward in the late 1950s. As a result, China’s official total fertility rate (TFR)—or the number of children that would be born to a woman if she were to experience current age-specific fertility rates throughout her reproductive years—has declined to 1.3. Some observers believe the true figure to be closer to 1.1, on par with that of other rapidly aging societies in East Asia.
