Of all world regions, only Europe has a lower rate of natural increase than that of East Asia (less than 0.0 percent increase per year, compared to East Asia’s 0.4 percent). In China, this is partially due to the legacy of government policies that harshly penalized families for having more than one child. But in China as well as elsewhere, urbanization and changing gender roles are also resulting in smaller families, regardless of official policy. Only in the two poorest countries—Mongolia (with 2.9 million people) and North Korea (with 24.6 million)—are women still averaging two or more children each, but even there family size is shrinking.

Low birth rates mean that fewer young people are being added to the population, and improved living conditions mean that people are living longer across East Asia. The overall effect is that the average age of the populations is rising. Put another way, populations are aging. For Mongolia, South Korea, North Korea, and Taiwan, it will be several decades before the financial and social costs of supporting numerous elderly people will have to be addressed. China faces especially serious future problems with elder care because the one-child policy and urbanization have so drastically reduced family kin-groups. Japan, on the other hand, has already been dealing with the problem of having a large elderly population that requires support and a reduced number of young people to do the job.

Japan’s Options Japan’s population is growing slowly and aging rapidly, raising concerns about economic productivity and humane ways to care for dependent people. The demographic transition (see Chapter 1) is well underway in this highly developed country, where 86 percent of the population lives in cities. Japan has a negative rate of natural increase (-0.2), the lowest in East Asia and on par with that of Europe. If this trend continues, Japan’s population is projected to plummet from the current 128 million to 95.5 million by 2050.

At the same time, the Japanese have the world’s longest life expectancy, at 83 years (Figure 9.23). As a result, Japan also has the world’s oldest population, 24 percent of which is over the age of 65. By 2055, this age group will account for approximately 40 percent of the population. By 2050, Japan’s labor pool could be reduced by more than a third, but it would still need to produce enough to take care of more than twice as many retirees as it does now. Clearly, these demographic changes will have a momentous effect on Japan’s economy, and the search for solutions is underway. One possibility is increasing immigration to bring in younger workers who will fill jobs and contribute to the tax rolls, as the United States and Europe have done.

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In Japan, recruiting immigrant workers from other countries is a very unpopular solution to the aging crisis. Many Japanese people object to the presence of foreigners, and the few small minority populations with cultural connections to China or Korea have for years faced discrimination. The children of foreigners born in Japan are not granted citizenship, and some who have been in the country for generations are still thought of as foreign. Today, immigrants must carry an “alien registration card” at all times.

Nonetheless, foreign workers are dribbling into Japan in a multitude of legal and illegal ways. Many are so-called guest workers from South Asia brought in to fill the most dangerous and lowest-paying jobs, with the understanding that they will eventually leave. Others are the descendants of Japanese people who once migrated to South America (Brazil and Peru). Regardless, Japan’s foreign population remains tiny, making up only 1.7 percent (2.2 million people) of the total population. A recent UN report estimates that Japan would have to admit more than 640,000 immigrants per year just to maintain its present workforce and avoid a 6.7 percent annual drop in its GDP.

In a novel approach to Japan’s demographic changes, the government has invested enormous sums of money in robotics over the past decade. Robots are already widespread in Japanese industries such as auto manufacturing, and their industrial use is growing. Now they are also being developed to care for the elderly, to guide patients through hospitals, to look after children, and even to make sushi. By 2025, the government plans to replace up to 15 percent of Japan’s workforce with robots.

China’s Options The proportion of China’s population over 65 is now only 9 percent, but this will change rapidly as conditions improve and life expectancies increase by 5 to 10 years to become more like those of China’s affluent East Asian neighbors. However, a crisis in elder care is already upon China for two other reasons: the high rate of rural-to-urban migration and the shrinkage of family support systems because of the one-child policy (discussed below).

When hundreds of millions of young Chinese people were lured into cities to work, most thought rural areas would benefit from remittances, and this has happened. However, few anticipated that the one-child family would mean that for every migrant, two aging parents would be left to fend for themselves, often in rural, underdeveloped areas. China’s parliament passed a law in 2013 that requires family members to visit and support their elderly relatives. While such a law may be unenforceable, it shows how worried the government is about the social consequences of the prospect of an aging society, including the increasing spatial mismatch between the elderly who need care and their younger relatives who often have moved elsewhere in search of employment.

In response to fears about overpopulation and environmental stress, China had a one-child-per-family policy from 1979 to 2013. Since 2013, when China also instituted broader economic reforms, couples have been allowed to have two children, so long as one of the people in the couple is an only child, which is the case in most couples. The policy was enforced with rewards for complying and with large fines for not complying. As a result, China’s rate of natural increase (0.5 percent) is the same as that of the United States, and less than half the world average (1.2 percent). The policy was relaxed because of growing concern about the forecasted shrinking of China’s population, which should begin sometime between 2025 and 2050 (Figure 9.24B), creating many of the same economic and social problems that Japan is now facing. The one-child policy will be abandoned completely by 2020.

The one-child policy has transformed Chinese families and Chinese society as a whole. For example, an only child has no siblings, so within two generations, the kinship categories of brother, sister, cousin, aunt, and uncle have disappeared from most families, meaning that any individual has very few, if any, related age peers with whom to share family responsibilities. Most children are doted on by several adults and children are not taught to share by their siblings. Conscious efforts must be made to instill self-sufficiency in only children.

The one-child policy has sometimes been enforced brutally. At various times and in places, the government has waged a campaign of forced sterilizations and forced abortions for mothers who already have one child.

Gender Imbalance and the Cultural Preference for Sons: Missing Females and Lonely Males The one-child policy, combined with an ancient cultural preference for male children, resulted in a severe gender imbalance. For many couples, the prospect of their only child being a daughter, without the possibility of having a son in the future, was devastating. The preference for sons relates to deeply patriarchal Confucian values that have prevailed throughout this region for millennia. Indeed, gender imbalance has emerged in the Koreas and Taiwan even without the one-child policy, which suggests that the influence of Confucian values is strong.

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China’s more severe gender imbalance is illustrated by its population pyramid (Figure 9.24A). The average global sex ratio at birth is 105 boys to 100 girls, which evens out to 101 boys to 100 girls by the age of 5. In China, however, there are 113 boys for every 100 girls born. In fact, for nearly every category until age 70, males outnumber females. The census data show that there are already 50 million more men than women.

What happened to the missing girls? There are several possible answers. Given the preference for male children, the births of these girls may simply have gone unreported by families hoping to conceal their daughters as they tried to conceive a male child. There are many anecdotes of girls being raised secretly or even disguised as boys. Also, adoption records indicate that girls are given up for international adoption much more often than boys are. Or the girls may have died in early infancy, either through neglect or infanticide. Finally, some parents have access to medical tests that can identify the sex of a fetus. There is evidence that in China, as elsewhere around the world, many parents choose to abort female fetuses.

There is some evidence that attitudes may be changing. For example, in Japan, South Korea, and Mongolia, the percentage of women receiving secondary education equals or exceeds that of men. In Japan, there is a slight gender imbalance in favor of females. In China, the makers of social policy have tried for decades to eliminate the old Confucian bias toward men by empowering women economically and socially. In some ways, they are succeeding, as Chinese women now participate in the workforce to a large degree. Nevertheless, the preference for sons persists.

A Shortage of Brides A major side effect of the preference for sons is that there is now a growing shortage of women of marriageable age throughout East Asia. In 2012, China alone had an estimated deficit of 11 million women aged 20 to 35. Females are also effectively “missing” from the marriage rolls because many educated young women are too busy with career success to meet eligible young men.

Research suggests that at least 10 percent of young Chinese men will fail to find a mate; and poor, rural, uneducated men will have the most difficulty. The shortage of women will lower the birth rate yet further, which will contribute to the expected shrinkage of the population over the next century. Without spouses, children, or even siblings, there will be no one to care for single men when they age. Furthermore, China’s growing millions of single young men are emerging as a potential threat to civil order, as they may be more prone to drug abuse, violent crime, HIV infection, and sex crimes. Cases of kidnapping and forced prostitution of young girls and women are already increasing.

In East Asia, people are not evenly distributed across the land (Figure 9.25). China, with 1.35 billion people, has more than one-fifth of the world’s population. However, 90 percent of these people are clustered on the approximately one-sixth of the total land area that is suitable for agriculture, and roughly half of these live in urban areas. The population is concentrated especially densely in the eastern third of China in the North China Plain, the coastal zone from Tianjin to Hong Kong that includes the delta of the Zhu Jiang (Pearl River) in the southeast, the Sichuan Basin, and the middle and lower Chang Jiang (Yangtze) basin.

The west and south of the Korean Peninsula are also densely settled, as are northern and western Taiwan. In Japan, settlement is concentrated in a band that stretches from the cities of Tokyo and Yokohama on the island of Honshu, south through the coastal zones of the Inland Sea to the islands of Shikoku and Kyushu. This urbanized region is one of the most extensive and heavily populated metropolitan zones in the world, accommodating 86 percent of Japan’s total population. The rest of Japan is mountainous and more lightly settled. Mongolia is only lightly settled, with one modest urban area.

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