Commenter “Snow on Pine” recently started a discussion about people claiming China’s population is less than officially reported. That rang a small bell for me; I believe such rumors/reports are mostly based on the work of this guy:
China has long been over-reporting its population, over 100 million people fewer than officially claimed, a Chinese scientist told Newsweek, a claim met with strong resistance from demography circles.
Yi Fuxian, an obstetrician at University of Wisconsin-Madison who conducts demography research, said the censuses China carries out every 10 years are “seriously overestimated” in an effort to match official estimates. The annual data should be corrected with the census data, he said. …
… [A] closer look at demographics showed a glaring disparity, Yi said. Around 164.24 million babies were born between 1991 and 2000. After accounting for these births and subtracting deaths and net migration, there were about 40 million fewer Chinese than reported.
However, Yi is apparently pretty much alone among scientists in thinking that.
What is not disputed is China’s very low birthrate, shared by other Asian nations such as South Korea and Japan. Here’s a handy chart in which countries around the world are listed by birthrates in descending order. It’s readily apparent that different areas of the world have very different birthrates, with Africa the highest (for example Niger, number one, has a rate of 6.7), then countries in the Arab world and Latin America, as well as places like Tajikistan. Then come the nations of the West, with the US fairly high in that category (1.7). Bringing up the rear is some of Asia, minus Laos (2.36), Cambodia (2.51), and Vietnam (1.88). Here are the large countries in Asia with the very low birthrates: China at 1.02, Japan at 1.23, and South Korea at .75.
One of the outliers is Israel, a highly developed country with a birthrate of 2.9. This is not due, as most people might assume, to very high birthrates among the very religious. Although the latter phenomenon does exist, there are not enough ultra-Orthodox people in Israel to account for the highrate, which exists in all groups to varying degrees. Nor is it due to the 20% of Israel’s population that is Arab. See this:
… [I]n recent years, Muslim women in Israel have almost the same number of children, on average, as Jewish women in Israel do. In contrast, fertility remains very high among the Haredi Jewish population, who are at the same 6.5 rate of pre-Revolution Iran. Even Jewish Israelis outside the Haredi community have higher fertility than their counterparts in other countries. …
… [E]ven though Haredi [ultra-Orthodox] fertility is high, it is far below maximal levels observed in other populations (10 children per woman on average), and it is consciously limited and controlled by married couples, implying that family planning and family limitation in this population is widespread.
Beyond the wide disparities in fertility among various Jewish subpopulations, Israel is also unique in the value placed on having children among self-described secular Jews, who most commonly have three children by the time they complete their families, a markedly higher rate than their Diaspora counterparts. Why?
It’s that phenomenon – the secular Jewish birthrate in Israel – that is unusual. Here’s the explanation the article gives (in addition to a generally “pro-natalist” policy by the government):
The collectivist and communitarian core of Israel’s social philosophy places a family-shaped framework around its mores at all levels of society. Individuals rely to a great extent on their families within and across generations, strengthening family bonds and engendering a broad and expanded conception of the family: in size, relational lines, and responsibility. Put another way, cultural codes for family behavior and commitment are rather extensive because familial feeling extends beyond the boundaries of the nuclear family. Taking this into account, we can understand Israel’s high fertility in part as springing from the institution that serves as the foundation of family life: marriage.
The author points out that over time there’s been a slow and slight reduction in the Israeli birthrate among secular Jews, and that may or may not continue. But what I don’t see emphasized in the article, and what I think are also large factors, are two other things. The first is that about half of Israel’s Jewish population is descended from Jews from Arab and/or North African countries, and they may be following their own cultural heritage that somewhat resembles that of those countries. The second is that much of the other half of Israel’s Jewish population descended from Holocaust survivors, for whom every Jewish child born represents a triumph over the forces – then and now – which would destroy the Jews. Therefore I don’t think the Israeli experience can speak to that of other Western or Asian countries; it’s significantly different.
I’ve put up other posts – including videos focusing on China – about the falling birthrates in Asia and around the developed world, so I won’t go into a huge analysis of that now. This post just scratches the surface. But it’s a very important topic that I’ll probably revisit, one that doesn’t seem to be going away.
