Despite the cancellation years ago of China’s harsh, Mao-era restriction on families to a single child, and even after more recent incentives urging families to have more children, China’s population is steadily shrinking — a momentous shift that will soon leave India as the world’s most populous nation and have broad rippling effects both domestically and globally.
The change puts China on the same course of both aging and shrinking as many of its neighbors in Asia, but its path will have outsize effects not just on the regional economy, but on the world at large as well.