Square Face Says: The Debt of the One-Child Policy Is Coming Due! The One-Child Policy, an Absurd Policy’s Origins | Impacts | Consequences | Future! China’s Population Crisis!
Toronto Fang Lian posted a video: Fang Lian says: The debt of the family planning policy is coming due! Family planning, the antecedent, impact, consequences, and future of an absurd policy! China’s population crisis!
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1961 was the most brutal year of the three-year natural disaster period. That year, more than 10 million Chinese died of starvation, and in rural areas there were even instances of people eating a single child. Yet in that same year, China still recorded 9.49 million newborns. After the great famine ended, in 1963 China set a record of 30 million births.
But in 2025, present‑day China can have food delivery arrive at your doorstep in 30 minutes, and a meal from a delivery service costs just 10 yuan. Yet the number of births has plummeted to 7.92 million, far lower than during the three‑year famine.
Of course, China’s population crisis has reached this point due to involution, deflation, and other issues. It also cannot be separated from a policy familiar to every Chinese person: family planning. Hello, I am Duo Fang Lian, and today we will discuss this policy that has affected several generations of Chinese people.
If you were asked to pick the most far‑reaching policies since the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949, I believe family planning would certainly be on the list. Yet the birth of such an influential policy was extremely absurd.
In 1978, reform and opening up arrived, and with it China finally ended its isolation. Many scientists regained the opportunity to travel abroad for exchange and learn new technologies. Among those who went abroad was a figure who must be mentioned: Song Jian, later hailed as the chief architect of family planning.
Song Jian was a technical specialist whose expertise had nothing to do with population. He worked for the then Seventh Ministry of Machinery Industry, the predecessor of China’s aerospace industry, focusing on missile trajectory control. In 1978, with reform and opening, as a core technologist he traveled to Europe to attend an academic conference—indeed, a missile conference.
While scholars were drinking in a bar, amid the clinking glasses, a Dutch mathematician named Arsdé casually mentioned an article he had just published. The paper discussed how, on a fictional island, one could control the total population by regulating the birth rate. This was a wildly imaginative mathematical exercise, but Song Jian saw it as a treasure.
Song thought, if we can calculate missile trajectories, we can certainly calculate population. Upon returning to China, he stopped worrying about missile paths and gathered a group of Chinese scientists, including Tian Xueyuan, to compute a now‑seemingly abstract and outrageous figure: if China did not control its population, by 2080 the population would swell to 4.264 billion.
Tian Xueyuan then seriously extended the analysis. He defined population as a burden on economic development and, based on China’s land area and grain production, set a theoretical upper limit for China’s population at 650–700 million. He argued that over the next 100 years, China should strive to keep the total population within that range by controlling the birth rate.
Tian’s claim has had a profound impact. I believe most people have once thought that our current intense schooling, China’s underdevelopment, are all because the population is too large. If the population were a bit smaller, things would be better.
Ironically, because China’s birth rate is now so low, according to the latest United Nations projections, by 2080 China may indeed have only about 700 million people. In terms of population planning, Tian’s answer was right, but the process was completely wrong.
Thus a missile expert, together with a bunch of scholars, did some reckless calculations, and that became the accepted narrative of Chinese demography, unchallengeable. We also know that during Mao Zedong’s era, the slogan “students are stinky old nine” reflected the lowest respect for intellectuals. By the time of Deng Xiaoping, there was a 180‑degree turn, and the status of intellectuals rose dramatically.
Deng highly respected technocrats and scholars, and the same applied to population issues. When Deng saw experts all saying China needed to control its population to 650–700 million, he, not being a population expert himself, simply decided to implement what they said. In this absurd context, the family planning policy was launched.
Its implementation produced three extremely far‑reaching effects: gender relations, a generational dividend, and the overdraft of national destiny. Let’s discuss them one by one.
First, gender relations. Today’s gender relations in China are fiercely antagonistic, unprecedented in history. Even within Chinese culture, friends from Taiwan and Hong Kong may find it hard to understand the distorted gender dynamics in mainland China, especially the phenomenon of extravagant bride price that can run into hundreds of thousands of yuan. The prevalence of such bride price and the intense gender antagonism stem, to a significant extent, from the gender imbalance caused by family planning.
In 1982, before family planning was widespread, China conducted a census. At that time, the male‑to‑female newborn ratio was 108.5 to 100. Although China already exhibited a cultural preference for sons, this ratio was still within normal bounds. Because births are not naturally 1:1—male infants have a higher mortality rate—human societies without external interference typically have a birth ratio around 105 to 100.
Thus the 108.5‑to‑100 ratio in 1982 would have remained only a slight imbalance if left to its own course. Unfortunately, the power of the Communist Party overwhelmed natural evolution. After the family planning policy took effect, the newborn ratio quickly became distorted.
In 1990 the ratio rose to 111 to 100, in 2000 to 117 to 100, and by 2004 it surged to 121 to 100, creating a serious gender imbalance. The seventh national census in 2020 showed 34.9 million more men than women nationwide, with 17 million more men than women in the 20‑to‑40 age group eligible for marriage.
At the same time, soaring housing prices added fuel to the fire, inflating bride price to astronomical levels. The bride‑price culture really took off after 2005, coinciding with high housing costs and the generation born under family planning reaching marriage age. Family planning thus gave rise to exorbitant bride prices and directly reinforced the nation’s gender dynamics.
Although Chinese and Taiwanese cultures share roots, the current gender relations in mainland China are completely different from those in Taiwan. Of course, family planning also has a benefit, but that benefit is a “blood‑sacrifice” or “poison‑sacrifice” type of benefit.
What is that benefit? It is that, to some extent, family planning helped enable reform and opening up, providing a generational dividend. Over the past 30 years, family planning has been, aside from WTO accession, China’s biggest engine of economic growth.
How exactly did family planning stimulate growth? In short, it released labor. Many people may not realize that having children is a huge labor loss for both individuals and society. A woman who is pregnant, nursing, and raising a child typically cannot work for one to two years. If she has three or four children, she may be unable to work for most of her life, representing a direct loss of labor.
Because of family planning, China’s labor force—especially female labor—was dramatically liberated. From the data
Since the 1980s, the labor participation rate of Chinese women has consistently been above 60%, reaching as high as 70% at its peak. In contrast, India, which has not implemented a one‑child policy and faces massive fertility pressure, has a female labor participation rate of just over 30%.
That 30% female labor participation rate means that even though India and China now have similar population sizes, China still has 200 million more workers. The 30 years of the one‑child policy coincided exactly with the golden 30 years of reform and opening up. Driven by the one‑child policy, China was able to supply the world with an almost unlimited pool of young labor, which pushed down wage costs and supported China’s position as the “world’s factory.”
At the same time, from a state perspective, the one‑child policy dramatically reduced the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) government expenditures, freeing up fiscal capacity. Economists use a metric called the dependency ratio, which measures the proportion of a population that must be supported. A dependency ratio of 40% means that each worker, on average, supports 1.4 people. A high dependency ratio also implies larger government spending on pensions, education, and healthcare.
China’s dependency ratio is generally around 55%. In 1980, because of an early retirement age and the three‑year Great Famine that caused an unexpected loss of a generation, the ratio was 62.6%. As the one‑child policy took effect and newborn numbers fell sharply, the ratio began to drop rapidly, reaching only 34.2% in 2010 and remaining around 45% today.
In this context, combined with the CCP’s low‑welfare principle, China was able for a long period to maintain its medical, education, and pension systems with an extremely low fiscal budget. Because fewer newborns meant controlled education spending, China’s education expenditure as a share of GDP has long been under 2%, whereas India’s is about 4%.
Against this backdrop, the CCP could also pour massive funds into infrastructure; money that India spent on building primary schools and kindergartens was instead used by China to build high‑speed rail and highways. Chinese economist Cai Fang once argued that the one‑child policy alone increased China’s GDP by at least 25%.
The development dividend brought by the one‑child policy comes at a cost, and that cost is severe. Now we are at the point of repaying that cost. This is the third impact of the one‑child policy: over‑borrowing the nation’s future.
In the early years, the one‑child policy liberated the labor of the previous generation of Chinese women, but the price was a collapse in the size of the labor force over the next 30 years. The labor force that was freed in the past 30 years will have to be repaid in the next 30 years. Because of the long‑term one‑child policy and the resulting decline in newborns, current trends suggest that 20 years from now, even if China’s total population matches India’s at 1.4 billion, China will have 200 million fewer workers due to the one‑child policy.
Women who were liberated 30 years ago will become elderly in 30 years. The labor that was “borrowed” through the one‑child policy in the first 30 years will need to be repaid in the next 30 years. The same applies to the government. The first 30 years of the policy dramatically reduced the CCP’s pension costs, especially the cost of supporting children. In the future, the previously incurred child‑support costs will turn into pension costs.
Based on China’s current birth rate, when our generation ages, China in 2050 will face a dire scenario. The ultra‑low 34.2% dependency ratio in 2012 starkly contrasts with the latest UN population projections, which estimate China’s overall dependency ratio will reach 80% by 2050, with the elderly dependency ratio climbing to 65‑70%, meaning each worker will support 1.8 people.
By 2060, China’s dependency ratio will exceed 100% directly, meaning a worker will not be working for themselves alone but will have a “ghost” sharing their labor output. By 2090, it could soar to 180%, with each worker needing to support 2.8 people.
Such an outrageous and extreme situation exceeds modern human imagination. The current upper limit for dependency ratios is Japan, whose elderly dependency ratio is only about 50% and total dependency ratio is under 70%. If China truly reaches a 180% dependency ratio, can we still expect any pension system?
China’s pension system operates on a pay‑as‑you‑go basis, meaning current workers fund current retirees. Under this system, I believe our generation cannot rely on pensions for livelihood. Recently, Elon Musk said that within 20 years only 5% of people will need to work, while the other 95% can enjoy life thanks to robot labor. I hope that day truly arrives; otherwise I have no idea how China will solve its pension problem.
Another point: every time you look at China’s population chart, you see a curve that looks like a dog’s bite. Of course, this is a result of the one‑child policy; such a “dog‑bite” curve has the biggest economic impact of causing massive resource misallocation in China.
Because of the one‑child policy’s population curve, China now faces not a smoothly aging population but a rapid aging combined with a sharp decline in newborns—a precarious economic state. In 2025, Chinese kindergartens are closing at a rate of 59 per day, racing toward a wave of bankruptcies.
At the same time, as the population ages, demand for elderly care surges. However, there is a mismatch: the people trained and developed in the past—early‑childhood teachers, secondary school teachers—cannot seamlessly transition into nursing home caregivers.
The artificially engineered, highly uneven demographic changes make it virtually impossible for China to adjust its talent supply to meet these needs. The pension problem will only worsen in the future.
Of course, this is just one facet of over‑borrowing the nation’s future. Another impact is that the demographic and aging issues will also sap China’s creative capacity.
China is about to become an aging society. Recently, the AI wave has arrived, and many mock Japan for lagging behind the AI era. Japan indeed lost much of its innovative drive after the 1990 bubble burst, but it still retains some capacity; however, compared with Japan’s golden age and today’s United States, the gap is large.
Why does this happen? It can be attributed to Japan’s aging. The products a society creates are ultimately driven by demand. What are the characteristics of the elderly? If you look at your own elders, you’ll see that people in their seventies and eighties struggle even with smartphones, let alone AI; most are at a level comparable to Xi Jinping, unable to even press the Enter key.
An aging society reduces market demand for high‑tech products, thereby suppressing domestic innovation. China’s current average age is already about 40, while Japan’s is around 50. That ten‑year gap translates into an innovation gap, but this gap will soon be erased.
As China’s aging accelerates, it will reach Japan’s level by 2045 and could raise its average age to 61.4 by 2080. By 2080, most people on the streets will be over 60. In such a context, China is unlikely to produce significant technological breakthroughs.
The one‑child policy can be described as a flaw. Let’s discuss why such a leaky policy lasted so long and how it arrived at its current state.
When the policy first emerged, observant people quickly realized that China’s population trajectory did not follow the projections made by Song Jian and his colleagues. Around 1991, China’s total fertility rate fell to 2.1, the minimum needed for a stable population; any lower would cause the total population to shrink.
By the mid‑1990s, the total fertility rate dropped to 1.5, entering the low‑fertility range. At that point, China should have paused the policy or at least stopped intensifying it. Yet the policy continued unchanged, like a massive gear turning by inertia and becoming ever more forceful.
One might say the gear kept turning because there were no intellectuals to stop it. On the contrary, as early as 2004, demographers such as Gu Baocang and Wang Feng petitioned the central government to replace the one‑child policy with a two‑child policy. In 2007, prominent demographer Yi Fuxian published “The Empty Nest of a Great Nation,” harshly criticizing China’s population data falsification and arguing that the country’s population growth was unsustainable and that a two‑child policy should be adopted and the one‑child policy abolished.
However, Gu was sidelined, while Wang and Yi were censored and forced abroad. Conversely, academic “stalwarts” rose to prominence. Renmin University demographer Zhai Zhenwu published articles denouncing the two‑child policy, claiming that an immediate full rollout would push the annual birth peak to 49.95 million and destroy decades of family‑planning efforts.
Of course, anyone can brag, but the facts are the ultimate rebuttal. As birth rates continued to fall, despite scholarly opposition, the one‑child policy was eventually abolished. Initially, it became a “castrated version,” allowing two children only with applications.
Reality struck again: in 2017, China’s birth numbers fell rather than rose, missing the forecast by several million. This directly led to the complete abolition of the one‑child policy in 2021.
Even so, the data did not stop Zhai Zhenwu’s rise. He had previously opposed the opening of the two‑child policy, arguing that allowing two children would enable China to produce 49.95 million births in a year, wiping out decades of family‑planning achievements.
But reality hit again: in 2017, China’s births declined instead of increasing, falling short of forecasts by millions, which directly prompted the full repeal of the one‑child policy in 2021.
Zhai Zhenwu, who produced 50 million newborns, now serves as the president of the Chinese Society of Demography and vice president of the Family Planning Association, and remains the top scholar in fields related to Chinese demography.
Scholars who speak the truth flee overseas, while scholars who speak falsehoods become high officials; this is indeed very Chinese. But why do these people jump out to block family planning? That inevitably speaks to the superiority of our Communist Party leadership.
Why is abolishing family planning so difficult? It is because the family planning interest group had already formed in China in the 1990s. When the National Family Planning Commission was established in 1981, it was only a small agency executing policy. However, under an authoritarian system, any agency has a mission to expand itself. After more than 20 years of development, it had become a massive bureaucratic empire.
By 2000, the number of public officials dedicated to family planning in China had reached 800,000. The same year, Song Jian and Tian Xueyuan, who had originally proposed family planning, had become senior technocratic officials, occupying the discourse power of the entire fertility system. Criticizing family planning is equivalent to criticizing the leadership's face.
Of course, these are not the most critical points; the most critical issue is money. Local family planning offices, which have nothing to do with technology, are also actively opposing the abolition of family planning. Why do they oppose it? Because family planning generates sky‑high revenue for local governments, and this revenue is unregulated.
If the family planning policy is a huge machine, the fines for illegal births are the fuel for the whole machine. Many of us probably remember the old sketch "The Illegal‑Birth Guerrilla Team" about fines for illegal births. The sketch reflects ordinary Chinese people dodging fines by hiding everywhere.
The sketch may have been just for laughs, but behind that amusement lie countless wealth and bloodshed. The amount of illegal‑birth fines at the time was indeed huge; Chinese people could barely breathe, and it created massive revenue for local governments. How much was actually collected in fines has been a messy accounting issue until 2013, when Zhejiang lawyer Wu Youshui applied for information disclosure and the data were finally revealed.
According to Wu's calculations, the total scale of illegal‑birth fines in China for the whole year of 2012 reached 30 billion yuan. Further estimates by scholars suggest that after more than 30 years of family‑planning enforcement, the total scale of illegal‑birth fines could have reached between 1.5 trillion and 2 trillion yuan.
That 1.5 to 2 trillion yuan, not accounting for RMB depreciation, would be enough to pay three years of civil‑servant salaries in China today; for local governments at the time it was a huge sum. Moreover, for these local governments, the cost of family planning was not only high in amount but, because of the special nature of the fines, counted as off‑budget revenue, whose use could be completely undisclosed.
Indeed, the whereabouts of those tens of billions in illegal‑birth fines have never been disclosed by local governments. Under this distorted system, early voices opposing family planning were completely suppressed. This is why China's fertility rate fell so low, why a two‑child policy was only opened in 2016, why in 2017 the central government both encouraged childbirth and still imposed fines on a third child. It was not until 2021 that China finally abolished illegal‑birth fines altogether.
In my previous program I have repeatedly said that from an economic‑political perspective, China is now at a critical juncture, stuck in the middle‑income trap. For China to soar and achieve a true "Chinese Dream," the key in recent years is whether China can overthrow the CCP and establish a democratic government, thereby escaping the middle‑income trap.
Latin America at this stage overthrew dictators and smoothly became developed nations. Those that did not overthrow dictators fell entirely into the middle‑income trap. Sometimes time pressure includes not only the middle‑income trap but also aging.
China also needs to quickly reverse the declining birth trend, which requires democratization, deflation reversal, and the establishment of a high‑welfare society. If this cannot be achieved, I cannot imagine what China will look like in 20 years: economically trapped in the middle‑income trap, fully "Latin‑Americanized"; demographically aging even more severely than Japan, sinking into an unprecedented aging crisis.
In such a situation, what potential does China still have? In the first 30 years we already made a mistake, watching the CCP bury a massive landmine for the Chinese people through family planning. Should we now continue to watch the CCP, watch Xi Jinping, destroy China again? If we keep watching with our eyes open, China is destined to sink for a century, just like the Qing dynasty in the 1990s.
We now stand at the same historical point as the late Qing. If we choose wrongly, the second half of the 21st century will have no Chinese story left. Finally, thank you all for watching today's program. I am Duofang Lian. Please like and support my video, which will increase YouTube's recommendation weight for me. See you in the next episode.