China's Population 'Rhinoceros'

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0:30to make those markets work for you. Follow Merentalks Money on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. Welcome to the documentary from the BBC World Service.

0:46Estás escuchando The Fifth Floor. The Fifth Floor, ¿reviéndonos? ¿Vizim le calo? ¿Tú me ha hecho el cuarto de la mitad? Farnak Amidi Sobat. This is The Fifth Floor, at the heart of global storytelling, with BBC journalists from all around the world. I'm your host, Farnak Amidi.

1:15In the early 80s, China became the first country in the world to reach the population milestone of 1 billion. Demographers expected it to rise even higher and reach 1.5 billion by 2030. But in fact, China's population has now been declining for four years in a row, having peaked lower than expected at 1.4 billion. To explore the reasons for the drop and how it might affect Chinese society in the years to come, BBC China journalist Yan Chen joins me from Hong Kong. Yan, welcome to the fifth floor. Yes, very happy to be here. For a number of years, China has been witnessing South Korea and Japan deal with their own population decline.

1:59So this news, how has it been received in China? I think it took us by surprise in a lot of ways. The population has been declining for four years. But just a few weeks earlier, the Chinese government has released the data for last year, 2025. And it turns out the news is that the total fertility rate has dropped under one, which is a milestone, meaning that every two person will produce one child on average. But when you want to maintain a population at the same size, exact size, you need 2.1. So that means China's population will shrink at the end of the century by So we will have the population of 700 million instead of 1.4 billion now in another 70 years, which is a very nervous future in a lot of ways, culturally, economically.

3:00For every country around the world, when there's urbanization and development, the fertility rate will drop. But for East Asia, it's dropped even more drastically compared to other parts of the world. And in this region, China was always the exemption. China is always the country that worries that they have too much population instead of too little. But after COVID, China's population started to drop off a cliff. What are some of the reasons behind this decline? I think there's three reasons. I'd like to take myself as an example. I was born in the northern part of China, mainland China, in the late 1980s.

3:43So I'm the product of the one-child policy. So I'm the only child in the family. And my wife also is the only child. She's from the nearby provinces as well. So for us only child, there's three problems. First problem is we have a family structure right now, what we call is 4-2-1. We have parents and the in-laws and me and my wife and my son. So it's like we have created this upside down pyramid for elder members in our family. Two parents, one child. So this four to one structure is quite hard for us to have a second child because we have four elder members in our family, which in our culture, we need to provide for them and take care of them in a lot of ways.

4:35And for my son, it's even harder for him to get married and build a family and have his son or daughter because he, at some stage of his life, may have to take care of six elder members in the family. Because of that, the little generation have too much pressure. They don't want to take on that kind of pressure. So they will refrain from getting married and have a child for themselves. And the second reason is that for our culture, people prefer sons rather than daughters, prefer male members of family rather than female. Because traditionally speaking, people are thinking that only the sons can carry on the tradition, the bloodline.

5:20So when only child policy introduced, what will the parents then prefer to do? They would abort the daughters and take on sons. So at our generation, we have 30 million more male than female. It's very hard to match them up. So they don't even get to get married and find a partner, let alone have children. And it's even more interesting that in our educational system, when you examine the sex ratio in the college students, girls are much more than boys. So when you have a well-educated woman, she will not take on an educated male. The standards become higher. Yeah. Jan, you mentioned that after COVID, this decline, it was just quite sharp, quite sudden.

6:13Is there a relation between COVID, the economic situation and this decline maybe as well? I think firstly, I think COVID played a role because during COVID, Chinese people postponed their weddings, postponed their decision to have a child. Because there are three years in China, it's very strict lockdown and you couldn't go to hospitals for maternity checkups, those kind of things. So you just postponed those decisions. I think that's played a role. But that kind of decisions could rebound after COVID. Yeah. The problem is that there's a coincidence also, because China has loosened up the one-child policy during the year 2015 and 2016.

7:00So there's like four or five years before COVID. And people were thinking that we should have more children at that time. But during the one-child policy period, there's a lot of illegal births. So government officials would count some illegal births and give a figure which is more closer to the actual population. They used to do that for years, which works. Every one child reported, we have 1.2 child recorded. So this is kind of a habit in the government. But during the time of 2015 and 2016, people are allowed to have the second child or third child. and it should eliminate a lot of illegal births.

7:44But the government officials still counted for some illegal birth babies. And five years after that, during COVID times, when the new primary school enrollment figures come out, people suddenly realized those extra counted illegal babies never existed. People never gave birth to those babies. So the figure was massively miscalculated. and they have to correct the figure. And the problem is that this overlap with COVID and the people have corrected the figure. And with COVID's influence, so the figure drops very significantly. So that is why a lot of the predictions about the population growth in the past few years have turned out to be inaccurate.

8:32Of course. And I think the scholars or the government officials, They didn't imagine how fast people's mindset can change in 10 years, in 15 years. To take my family as an example, my grandparents, they experienced a Mao period, and they have the experience of starvation, famine. So that's my grandparents' memory. My parents, they have the cultural revolution, the memory, which is a very turbulent time of the day. And for myself, I experienced the open and the reform, Deng Xiaoping's era. Life is much more improved. And since I'm the only child in the family, they can concentrate their resources and send me to go to schools in the UK.

9:19So that's the four generations in this country has changed from famine to the first world kind of experience. and people's mindset or their attitude towards family, towards birth, has changed drastically. Young people more focus on the pleasure of themselves rather than the burden of the Confucius culture, carry on the bloodline, those kinds of things. So there's tensions among generations, of course, but the change of mindset is inevitable and which has a direct influence on the fertility rate. Now in China, academics liken this population decline to an animal. Just tell us what animal that is and why and what it means.

10:08The economists often use grey rhino as a metaphor for a financial crisis. And right now, increasingly, a lot of scholars are using this metaphor for the Chinese population crisis. because when you think about the gray rhino, you see it far away, charging towards you, and it's in a slow but inevitable motion that's charging towards you. You see it's coming, and there's very little you can do to redirect it or to avoid it. When you're actually seeing it in front of you, everything is too late. You're going to be knocked down by the gray rhino. That is a perfect metaphor for this population crisis because the baby has already been born, the parents is getting older, and the ratio of the younger generation and the older generation is already being set.

11:01Take my son. When my son was born that year, there's only 8 million or 9 million newborn babies born that year. But me and my wife, when we were born, we were at the peak of the newborn babies of China. So that would be 20 million to 30 million, which is three or four times even more newborn babies than my son's generation. And 20 years later, when my son enters the job market, me and my wife reach the age of retirement. So every person that enters their job market, there will be two or three person retired. That ratio creates a huge social problem because old people, they don't produce, they don't consume very much, but the young people have to produce for the entire society.

11:55The demand will collapse inward for China, which is a huge problem already. And a lot of industries were massively influenced by that. Milk potters, diapers, education. And there are increasingly more kindergartens turning into nursing homes. What is the government doing to deal with this decline or to encourage people maybe to have more children? To be frank, I think they are doing a lot. For the past several weeks, there's a very interesting new policy that China has this kind of tax exemption on condoms. So for a long time, people are encouraged to give birth controls. But from January 1st this year, the tax exemption was lifted.

12:47The condoms in China will have a price increase of 13%. And people are joking that the government is using this way to ask the population to forget of the condoms, let's have more babies. During the past five years, the condom sales are declining year by year, very drastically. And the same five years, the sales of sex toys are climbing up, increasing drastically too. So Chinese social media was joking that now we don't need the other half to have sex because we don't use condoms. We only need to purchase something on Taobao to deliver it at home and have a very satisfied life. So that kind of mindset is, how to say it, the young people, they don't let them think about giving birth, let alone marriage.

13:39They don't even like to date something that dating is too much trouble. Knowing someone, that is a lot of a burden. I think for a lot of countries has proven that it's very hard to improve your fertility rate after it's already on the track of declining. Many thanks to Yan Chen from BBC China in Hong Kong.

14:10Most of you, like me, probably don't like to think back to 2020 and to the restrictions that the global COVID-19 pandemic placed on our lives. The lockdowns, closed schools and public spaces, rules about social gatherings and restrictions on travel all took their toll on our liberty and mental health. Most of us were relieved to return to our regular routines when those rules were lifted. Yet in Azerbaijan, one key restriction introduced during the pandemic is still in place. Its land borders remain closed six years on. Magyram Zainalov, who covers Azerbaijan for BBC News Russian, explains the difficulties Azerbaijanis continue to face as a result.

14:59in the middle of pandemic there were huge restrictions during that time there were two or three weeks that you couldn't leave your house almost at all there were still hospitals if you needed but you couldn't leave the house even to throw your garbage so sometimes it led to clashes with policemen sometimes people threw their bags with garbage from the seventh floor right to the head of policemen. And policemen sometimes ran to the house of somebody and arrested them. That was July 2020. Step by step during 2021, you could go out of your homes. Some people, for instance, who work in state organizations, they had allowance to leave their houses.

15:56than other important businesses. Then regular businesses, finally restaurants were opened. But here's the thing. After all the sanctions left, only thing that still exists till now is land borders. They are still closed by special restrictions. And Azerbaijan is a country with a lot of land borders. We share this border with Russia, Iran, Armenia and Georgia and Turkey. Five countries. But officially, officially states say that border is closed due to coronavirus, due to the pandemic.

16:46Since I wrote my last article about this three years ago, nothing has changed since then. Nothing, because coronavirus is still there. Close borders are still there. It's all the same in Azerbaijan. Azerbaijan's president, Ilham Aliyev, has ruled the country since 2003. Elections are tightly controlled and Alief wields almost unlimited legislative power. Amnesty International reckons that as of 2025, there were at least 25 journalists in prison in the country. And although Azerbaijan's land borders are closed, its airspace is open. This presents people who used to cross the land border regularly with a special set of challenges.

17:336 % of population of neighboring Georgia are Azerbaijanis. Most of them live right near the border with Azerbaijan. So you can fly from Azerbaijan to Georgia and you can fly back. But the thing is, tickets are expensive, 200 euros. Especially for those Azerbaijanis who are mostly, most of them are villagers. they have not enough income. I talk to people who for years don't see their relatives. Some people told me look my father he lives like two kilometers from me on another side on the border. We always cross the border every day. But now I have to take a plane spend huge amount of money go to Baku take a car or a bus right to the border.

18:32So you have to go several hundred kilometers rather than two kilometers and pay a huge amount of money for this. That's why people don't see each other for years. They don't explain it officially, just words of president. And in public, President Aliyev emphasizes security issues. every country including azerbaijan should think about stability around its borders beyond its borders with respect to azerbaijan we do not have any potential risks inside the country all the potential risks can come from outside okay therefore for us stability in our neighborhood is something which we always think about and we've been concerned about.

19:27What are the challenges? Why Iran still has open borders? Ukraine still has open land borders? What bad thing can happen to Azerbaijan? We have a sad joke there that Azerbaijan is the most stable country in the world. We still have the same coronavirus, the same closed borders, and even the same is my article that I wrote three years ago because I cannot add anything to this except some small things. But in a general situation, it's the same. They have closed borders because they can. That's it. They can. Because a territorial country wants to control everything. Magyram Zainalov, who covers Azerbaijan for BBC News Russian.

20:16You're listening to the documentary from the BBC World Service.

20:44really work. And join me for a separate episode where I answer listener questions on how to make those markets work for you. Follow Merin Talks Money on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.

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21:06In the Indian state of Maharashtra, the tiger population has increased in recent years. The most recent census, counting over 400 tigers. It's a win for conservationists, but it also increases the likelihood of human-tiger encounters. So four women in the state have taken matters into their own hands to make sure local children remain safe. Bhagyashree Raut has covered the story for BBC Marathi, and she joins me now. Welcome to the program, Bhagyashree. Thank you. So let's set the scene. Where is the story taking place? Sure. This story comes from a small village in Maharashtra in central India, right next to the Taluba Tiger Reserve.

21:54The village sits at the edge of forest. And here, according to official records, there are 13 tigers in the area. So how did the tigers affect people's lives, especially children's life in the area? They are seen almost every day and there is no way of knowing when one might attack. And with the population in Chandrapulh district rising, even putting tasks like walking to the bus stop or working in the field carried real danger. The day before we arrived to film, a tiger chased a herd of buffalo right to the edge of village at 9 a.m. Villagers had to make commotion to drive it away. So it's very common for people to see the tigers.

22:47When I saw the tiger, I felt a different kind of fear. After going home, I told my mother, how will I go to school? All the boys and girls in the village were very scared. Have there been recent attacks by the tigers? Has anyone been hurt lately? Yes. In last October, one woman was killed in a tiger attack. And what about the children? How do the children feel about the tigers? Local children live with constant fear. They can't freely play outside in the village grounds. They can't go to school alone. For even simple daily activities, they have to rely on adults from the village. And because the threat of tiger, it is always present.

23:31And tiger threat is always present there.

23:38When the tiger came out near that tree, we started shouting and ran back to the village. All the people gathered there. Tigers attack cattle so they can attack us as well. We were with them to film our story. As we filmed, the fear was constant. The school bus arrives at 7pm in the evening and by then it is completely dark. So four women from the village have taken it upon themselves to escort students to and from the bus stop. The students get ready to go to school by 9am. We gather everyone and leave at 9.30. We walk together, chatting along the way and all four of us women stay alert. Two walk in front and two at the back.

24:31We shout as we walk. We have seen tigers once or twice. It is frightening. At that time, we've protected the children. We women surround the children and walk with them. We stay at the bus stop until the bus arrives, usually around 9.45. After about 15 minutes, the bus comes. We put the children on the bus and then return home.

24:58When we go in the evening, around 6pm, we remain alert all around. The fear that a tiger might come from any direction stays constantly in our minds. Only after reaching home do we breathe a sigh of relief. And when did the local women decide to take action against these tigers?

25:28of the village decided to take matters into their own hands. So how do they do that? How do they make the tigers stay away or keep the tigers away? What do they use? When we went to film the story, the women were using wooden sticks. Within three days, the forest department provided them with charged sticks, according to officials. These sticks are standard deterrents. If a tiger comes to closure at night, a light shock from the stick, sending it running without causing any harm. Forest department staff and herders use the same method. And there are no lights along the 400 meter stretch between the village and the bus stop.

26:13So the women also carry torch to spot the tiger, helping keep the children safe. So how have the women changed life for the people in the area? By stepping forward to protect the children, these women have changed life for the entire village. Walking to the school is no longer a moment of fear. And families can carry on with their daily lives, knowing someone is there to keep tigers at bay. And will the scheme be adopted by other areas as well who are affected by tigers? Yes. After the women took initiative, the Forest Department decided to rule out this same scheme in 105 other villages around Taroba Tiger Reserve.

26:59Each member of this group will receive payment of 1 ,000 Indian rupees for their work. Thank you, Bhagyashree. Thank you, Carmen. Many thanks to Bhagyashree Raut from BBC News, Marathi. And if you want to let us know what you think about the show or you have questions for our amazing correspondents, send an email to the fifth floor at bbc.co.uk. That's the fifth floor, all one word, at bbc.co.uk.

27:36You've been listening to the documentary from the BBC World Service. I've spent the last three decades trying to better understand money across the boardroom, the newsroom and the trading floor. That's longer than most podcast hosts have been alive. But even though I've got questions, join me, Merrin's Upset Web, every week for my show Merrin Talks Money from Bloomberg Podcasts, where I have in-depth conversations with fund managers, strategists and experts about how markets really work. And join me for a separate episode where I answer listener questions on how to make those markets work for you.