While reading chapter six in The Heritage of Chinese Civilization, I found some parts very interesting. One of the sections discussed the economic growth that China has gone through in recent years. Craig mentioned that “by most measurements, in 2010, China’s economy will be the second largest in the world”, as this book was published before 2010. I wanted to see if this prediction was accurate so I found this article by CNN from January of 2011 that confirms the prediction. In 2010, China’s economy had a 10.3% growth surpassing Japan with $6 trillion following behind the United States with an estimated $14.6 trillion GDP in 2010. CNN also presented an interesting visual that displays economic growth for fifteen different countries that I found interesting.
Another topic from this reading I found interesting was the population growth that Craig discussed. Craig mentions that China’s population was estimated to peak in 2030, and this would lead to “too few workers to support the many who have retired”. I thought this was an interesting statistic and wanted to see if it was true. I discovered that China’s population is now expected to peak in 2023, instead of the estimated 2029, according to a study done by and online database company, Global Demographics and analytics firm Complete Intelligence. Part of this will be attributed to the “maternity cliff”, which is described as a decrease in the number of women who are of childbearing age (defined as between 15 and 49). The fewer women who can give birth will lead to fewer births unless each woman has significantly more children, which is unlikely according to Tony Nash, the chief executive and founder of Complete Intelligence. One cause of this “maternity cliff” and the peak of population is the one-child limit. It is believed that China lifted this policy was lifted too late as now, all the women who will have a child before 2035 have all been born. The effect of the population peak will last for many years, as there will be a large “baby boom” then it will decrease significantly effecting schools, toy production and dependency rates in the future.