The One-Child Policy Supercharged China’s Economic Miracle. Now It’s Paying the Price.

When China launched its one-child policy more than four decades ago, it sped up an evolution toward smaller family sizes that would have happened more gradually.

The policy supercharged the country’s workforce: By caring for fewer children, young people could be more productive and put aside more money. For years, just as China was opening its economy, the share of working-age Chinese grew faster than the parts of the population that didn’t work. That was a big factor in China’s economic miracle.

There was a price and China is now paying it. Limiting births then means fewer workers now, and fewer women to give birth. A United Nations forecast published Thursday shows how quickly China is aging, a demographic crunch that the U.N. predicts will cut China’s population by more than half by the end of the century.

In the late 1970s, China’s leaders feared a population explosion that would drain the country’s resources. When Deng Xiaoping rolled out the one-child policy nationwide in 1980, he said, “We must do this. Otherwise, our economy cannot be developed well.”

A young population has helped drive economic growth in developing countries across the world, including in China’s neighbor Japan starting in the 1950s. Economists call it a demographic dividend—the window, generally of a few decades, when a country has far more working-age people than young and elderly dependents. As such countries grow wealthier, people naturally choose to have fewer children and the population starts to age.

That was also the trajectory in China—just faster.

Knowingly or not, China essentially borrowed from its own future by accelerating its so-called demographic window. How the effects of the policy have sped up China’s demographic bind is scrambling the long-term models demographers usually work with.

“The challenge with China is that from one year to another the situation can change quite fast,” said Patrick Gerland , head of the U.N.’s population estimates and projection section. “Within the last decade, the changes have been very big, both in policy and in the numbers.”

For example, in its just-published global estimates, the U.N. expects China’s population to drop from 1.4 billion today to 639 million by 2100, a much steeper drop than the 766.7 million it predicted just two years ago.

Even so, the U.N.’s prediction looks optimistic compared with other estimates. Researchers from Victoria University in Australia and the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences have predicted that China will have just 525 million people by the end of the century.

It is impossible to say what China’s population trajectory would have been without the one-child policy. But a comparison with a broad group of other countries gives a clue.

Research by U.N. demographers illustrates how China’s demographic window opened faster and more sharply than in other “less developed” countries, and then closed equally quickly. The population of Chinese aged 20-64—the age when people are most likely to work—grew faster than children and the elderly in the years after the one-child policy was implemented. Before the policy ended, the trajectories had already reversed.

The broader group of other countries shows a smoother ride with the demographic window lasting well into the 2040s.

With China’s opening to the West, it became the world’s factory floor with millions of young people determined to work their way out of poverty. For most of the next decades, Chinese growth topped double-digit percentages.

The optimism was on full display during the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympic Games. When the global financial crisis hit soon after, China kept growth humming and was credited with helping to save the global economy. A few years later, China overtook Japan as the world’s No. 2 economy .

But by 2013, China’s demographic dividend was largely over, according to research by Andrew Mason , an emeritus professor of economics at the University of Hawaii, and Wang Feng , a sociology professor at the University of California, Irvine.

Now, slowing economic growth and demographic changes feed off each other for a gloomy outlook.

“People always count on the [Chinese] government to do more to prop up the economy but the reality is that there’s not a lot the government can do,” Wang said.

Over the next decades, China’s population is likely to show a contrast from, say, India, where the age distribution is following a more natural progression, or the U.S., where immigrant inflows help counteract the aging of the population.

By the end of the century, the U.S. population will be about two-thirds of China’s, compared with less than a quarter now, according to the U.N.’s latest projections. And by then, India, which has overtaken China as the world’s most populous country , will have more than twice as many people as China.

The real demographic impact in China won’t fully hit until the middle of the century, when many of those born during the one-child policy will reach retirement—while still caring for aging parents, said Wang.

By 2050, the U.N. now projects 31% of Chinese will be 65 or older. By 2100, the share will be 46%, approaching half of the population. In the U.S., the share is expected to be 23% and 28%, respectively.

The U.N.’s revised forecasts see Chinese births dropping below nine million this year. In 2022, it had predicted that 10.6 million would be born in China in 2024. The U.N. now expects China will have only 3.1 million newborns a year by 2100.

Not only are there fewer women to give birth these days, but many young women, mindful of their mothers’ suffering during the one-child policy, are less interested in marriage and children , driving down the fertility rate.

As births slip, China’s elderly population is ballooning.

China expects a glut of more than 40 million new retirees—more than the population of Canada—over the five-year period ending in 2025.

The old-age support ratio, a rough indicator of the number of workers for each retiree used by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, is projected to decline from more than four now to fewer than two in 2050, according to The Wall Street Journal’s calculations of the U.N.’s latest data. It will likely reach one worker per retiree by the end of the century.

In reality, due to China’s low retirement age , with women clocking out as early as 50 and men at 60, the support ratio could be even lower.

Beijing as well as demographers and sociologists have said a highly educated population and the advancement of technology such as artificial intelligence, could help China weather such shocks, as more jobs will be automated.

The U.N.’s Gerland said that while the one-child policy was the main demographic event in recent decades, the waxing and waning in different Chinese age groups also reflect tumultuous periods in China’s past, such as the Cultural Revolution and Great Leap Forward, which had substantial demographic impact on the size of the various cohorts born during these years.

“Because of China’s history, the population is going to carry over some of these memories of the past and it will take many generations for all of these past stories to be forgotten,” he said.

Former New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu delivered a warning to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent during a recent visit to Washington: Already-high airfares will surge if the war in Iran doesn’t end soon.

Sununu, a Republican who represents some of the biggest airlines as president of the industry group Airlines for America, has for weeks sounded the alarm to Trump administration officials about the economic fallout from high jet fuel prices. The war, Sununu has argued, must come to a close soon, or things will get worse.

Administration officials have gotten the message.

Privately, President Trump’s advisers are increasingly worried that Republicans will pay a political price for the rising fuel costs, according to people familiar with the matter. Many of those advisers are eager to end the war, hoping prices will begin to moderate before November’s midterm elections.

The fallout from the U.S.-Israeli attack in late February has slowed traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, a vital shipping lane, triggering a sharp increase in oil, gasoline and jet-fuel prices.

That means consumers are grappling with high costs ahead of the summer travel season, as they consider vacation plans.

Sixty-three per cent of Americans said they put a great deal or a good amount of blame on Trump for the increase in gas prices, according to a new poll conducted by NPR, PBS and Marist.

More than 8 in 10 Americans said struggles at the gas pump are putting strain on their finances.

Jet-fuel prices roughly doubled in a matter of weeks after the war began, and they have remained high. Airlines have said that will add billions of dollars of additional expenses this year, squeezing profit margins.

U.S. airlines spent more than $5 billion on fuel in March—up 30% from a year earlier, according to government data.

Carriers have been raising ticket prices, hoping to pass the cost along to consumers, and they are culling flights that will no longer make money at higher price levels.

In March, the price of a U.S. domestic round-trip economy ticket rose 21% from a year earlier to $570, according to Airlines Reporting Corp., which tracks travel-agency sales.

So far, airlines have said the higher fares haven’t deterred bookings and they are hoping to recoup more of the fuel-cost increases as the year goes on.

Earlier this week, Trump said the current price of oil is “a very small price to pay for getting rid of a nuclear weapon from people that are really mentally deranged.”

Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters that if Iran got a nuclear weapon, the country would have more leverage to keep the strait closed and “make our gas prices like $9 a gallon or $8 a gallon.”

Trump has taken steps in recent days to bring the war to an end. Late Tuesday, the president paused a plan to help guide trapped commercial ships out of the Strait of Hormuz, expressing optimism that a deal could be reached with Iran to end the conflict.

Crude oil prices fell below $100 a barrel on Wednesday, after reports that Iran and the U.S. are working with mediators on a one-page framework to restart negotiations aimed at ending the conflict and opening the strait.

Sununu said Trump administration officials are conscious of the economic fallout from the war: “They get it…and I think that’s why they’re trying to get through the war as fast as they can.”

But he cautioned that it could take months for prices to return to prewar levels.

“Ticket prices won’t go down immediately” after the strait is fully reopened, Sununu said. “You’re looking at elevated ticket prices through the summer and fall because it takes a while for the prices to go down.”

Since the initial U.S.-Israeli attack in late February, Sununu has met in Washington with National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett, representatives from the Transportation Department and senior White House officials.

A White House official confirmed that Hassett and Sununu have discussed the effect of increased fuel prices on the airline industry. The official said the conversation touched on how the industry can mitigate the impact of high jet fuel prices on consumers.

“The president and his entire energy team anticipated these short-term disruptions to the global energy markets from Operation Epic Fury and had a plan prepared to mitigate these disruptions,” White House spokeswoman Taylor Rogers said, pointing to the administration’s decision to waive a century-old shipping law in a bid to lower the cost of moving oil.

Rogers said the administration is working with industry representatives to “address their concerns, explore potential actions, and inform the president’s policy decisions.”

A Treasury Department spokesman pointed to Bessent’s recent comments on Fox News that the U.S. economy remains strong despite price increases. The spokesman said Treasury officials have met with airline executives, who have reaffirmed strong ticket bookings.

“We’re cognizant that this short-term move up in prices is affecting the American people, but I am also confident, on the other side of this, prices will come down very quickly,” Bessent told Fox News on Monday.

The war has already contributed to one casualty in the industry: Spirit Airlines. Company representatives have said they were forced to close the airline because the sustained surge in jet-fuel prices derailed the company’s plan to emerge from chapter 11 bankruptcy.

The Trump administration and Spirit failed to come to an agreement for the company to receive a financial lifeline of as much as $500 million from the federal government.

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy has argued that the Iran war wasn’t the cause of Spirit’s demise, pointing to the company’s past financial struggles, as well as the Biden administration’s decision to challenge a merger with JetBlue.

Other budget airlines have also turned to the federal government for help since the U.S.-Israeli attack. A group of budget airlines last month sought $2.5 billion in financial assistance to offset higher fuel costs, and they separately wrote to lawmakers asking for relief from certain ticket taxes.

The One-Child Policy Supercharged China’s Economic Miracle. Now It’s Paying the Price.

Revised U.N. data shows the speed of China’s aging after it accelerated its ‘demographic dividend’

Administration officials have spoken to the airline industry, which has voiced concerns about the rising costs.