China economy development in the next 10 years may slow at 5% living consumption soars continuously

China has entered a new demographic era. Its mortality rate has dropped to a level not very different from that of the developed countries. It fertility has dropped to a level lower than that of many developed countries, including the United States, Britain, and France—indeed, it is among the lowest in the world. And China has witnessed the largest flow of internal migrants in world history, resulting in an urbanization process that is of comparable historical proportions. These forces combined have created a population that is rapidly aging and rapidly urbanizing. China’s demographic future— is declining fertility. For nearly two decades, the average number of children a couple is expected to produce has been less than 2, recently falling as low as approximately 1.5. Such a number is below the replacement level (the level required for a population to maintain its size in the long run). China’s low fertility, however, is a fact that has been established as real only relatively recently, in part because of problems associated with deterioration in the country’s birth registration and statistical data collection system, and in part because of the government’s reluctance to acknowledge declining fertility. The current period of fertility decline began quietly and remained unnoticed for almost a decade. When the first signs that fertility had dropped below the replacement level were reported in the early 1990s, they were quickly dismissed in the context of what was believed to be widespread underreporting of births. By the turn of the twenty-first century, China’s demographic transition could no longer be doubted. Today the national fertility level is around 1.5 and possibly lower. In the country’s more developed regions, fertility has been even lower for more than a decade—barely above 1 child per couple, a level that rivals the lowest fertility rates in the world. The ripple effects of fertility decline have begun to emerge everywhere in China these days. In 1995, primary schools nationwide enrolled 25.3 million new students. By 2008, that number had shrunk by one-third, to only 16.7 million. In 1990, China had over 750,000 primary schools. By 2008, due to the combined effects of fertility decline and educational reforms, the number of primary schools nationwide had fallen to about 300,000. In a country where getting into a university has always been a matter of intense competition and anxiety, the number of applicants to universities has begun to decline in the past couple of years. Major fertility reduction in China took even less time. In just one decade, from 1970 to 1980, the total fertility rate (TFR) was more than halved, from 5.8 to 2.3, a record unmatched elsewhere. (TFR extrapolates an average woman’s fertility over her lifetime from a society’s fertility rate in a given year.) In contrast to Western European countries, where it took 75 years or longer to reduce TFR from around 5 to the replacement level, in China a similar decline took less than two decades. As a result, in 2008, China’s rate of population growth was only 5 per thousand, down from over 14 per thousand in 1990 and 25 per thousand in 1970. Such a compressed process of demographic transition means that, compared with other countries in the world, China will have far less time to prepare its social and economic infrastructure to deal with the effects of a rapidly aging opulation. And for the People’s Republic the challenge is all the more difficult because the country is undergoing an economic upheaval at the same time that its population is rapidly changing. While China continues to transform itself from an agrarian to an industrial and post-industrial society and from a planned to a market-based economy, it not only will need, for example, to provide health care and pensions for a rapidly growing elderly population that has been covered under government-sponsored programs. It also will need to figure out how to expand the scope of coverage to those who were not covered under the old system. China economy development in the next 10 years may slow at 5% living consumption soars continuously ,for more information about china world news visit site at http://youtube.com/penglaichina as well as business website at http://penglaichina.com