Many of us grew up being told ours is a country of
abundance.
That is true only when we put aside our huge population.
Otherwise, it is a deceptive illusion that blinds us to quite the
opposite picture when gauged in per capita terms.
For many of our otherwise proud achievements, the 1.3 billion
mouths have proved a frustrating denominator.
We are quickly becoming one of the world's foremost foreign
trade bodies, largest economies, and so on. But our status as a
developing nation has hardly changed.
We all know why. We have too many mouths to feed.
Were it not for the family planning policy, which has been in
place for more than three decades, our country would have 400
million more citizens than it does today.
Given our current pattern of resource and energy use, we cannot
afford to imagine how the nation would sustain itself in that
case.
The Communist Party of China and the State Council's promise to
sustain the family planning program is a timely response to recent
proposals to loosen the grip on population scale.
With all the population control mechanisms in place, the nation
will still see a net annual addition of 8 to 10 million people in
the next dozen years.
And the country's population headaches are far more complicated
than just quantity.
Experts have warned about the triple peaks of total population,
working-age population and aged population in the first half of the
century. Their confluence would be an unbearable weight on our
shoulders.
Except for continuous accent on population control, the outcome
of such endeavors will hinge on how well we do in social
security.
From a shortage of wage earners to a lack of security in old
age, almost every outstanding population problem is related to our
primitive social security network.
We have heard enough vows from the authorities. But after all
the thunder, we need to see the raindrops.
The authorities must come to terms with the Chinese reality that
many people choose to have more children out of an unspoken
distrust of the official rhetoric about guarantees.
Nothing could deliver more sense of guarantee than an inclusive
social security network.
Our State coffer caretakers are scratching their heads over
where to put the country's increasingly redundant foreign exchange
reserves. They can think about social security.
(China Daily January 24, 2007)