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【原文标题】The most surprising demographic crisis：A new census raises questions about the future of China’s one-child policy
【中文标题】最惊人的人口危机：最新人口普查对中国独生子女政策的未来提出质疑
【登载媒体】经济学家
【来源地址】http://www.economist.com/node/18651512?story_id=18651512&fsrc=rss
【译 者】朱朱
【翻译方式】人工
【声 明】 本翻译供Anti-CNN使用，未经AC或译者许可，不得转载。
【译 文】
中国的人口足够多了吗？这个问题也许看起来很荒唐。中国因有着世界上最多的人口和为限制人口增长而采取严厉措施而闻名。尽管许多中国人和外国人对执行独生子女政策时的粗暴和强制表示惊骇，但又不得不承认，中国确实需要采取些措施来控制它庞大的人口数量。
过去几年大家都批评中国的人口问题，这一次新的人口普查却揭示出了不同的结论：中国出生率太低。根据去年在全国范围内开展的人口普查得出的最新数据4月28日被公布出来，这个最新数据显示中国大陆现有总人口为13亿4千万。数据还揭示出中国年均人口出生率的急转直下的趋势，21世纪第一个十年的年均出生率为0.57%，只有20世纪最后十年1.07%的一半。这个数据暗示出，中国的生育率仅为1.4，即育龄妇女的一生生育子女的数量平均为1.4个，远远低于能保证人口稳定的2.1的人口替换率。
伴随人口低增长而来的是严重的老龄化。现在中国超过60岁的老人占到了人口总数的13.3%，这个比例在2000年的时候只有10.3%。而同期年龄低于14岁的孩子在总人口中所占的比例却由23%下降至17%。这种趋势如何持续下去会让正在工作的年轻人在抚养老人方面背上更重的负担，同时，也会给政府负责的养老金及医疗体系增加更重的负担。过去，中国由于拥有不断增加的可工作的成年人而获得很大好处，那个时代基本要一去不复返了。
独生子女政策不仅使中国人口分布不均匀，而且还很有可能加剧性别比例的失调情况。在中国，出生的男婴数量比女婴多很多。在这方面，中国并不是唯一的例子，其他国家，如印度，虽没有采取人口控制措施但也面临着性别比例失调的问题。但是，中国官员认为独生子女政策与这个问题无关。中国具有根深蒂固的文化传统是男子传宗接代，因此这导致许多家庭为保证唯一允许出生的孩子是个男孩而不择手段。在独生子女政策实行的早期，有时候有些家庭会对女婴采取溺婴。而随着超声波技术的推广，选择性别的堕胎行为开始更流行了。
根据新的人口普查数据，中国在应对这个棘手的问题方面鲜有进展。在2010年，新出生的婴儿中每出生100个女婴就有118个男婴出生。这个比例比2000年的水平有轻微的提升。这意味着，在未来20年至25年的时间里，现在出生的这些男婴中将有五分之一没有新娘，这很可能会造成严重的社会不稳定的后果。
人口普查结果很可能会在中国引起一场大辩论，辩论双方分别为：主张人口控制的官方机构与越来越多的主张放宽独生子女政策的人口统计方面的学者团体。他们的分歧不只体现在独生子女政策的未来，也体现在这项政策过去的执行方面。
清华布鲁金斯公共政策研究中心的主任王峰，是这样的学者之一，他认为，中国现在的人口格局与刚开始实行独生子女政策的1980年相比已经发生了巨变。1950年中国的人口生育率为5.8，但1980年已经剧降至2.3，这个数字刚刚高于人口替换率。
其他国家的人口生育率同期也出现了类似的下降。王峰认为，这一现象主要得益于国家的发展，包括更好的医疗水平和婴儿死亡率的剧降，从前，婴儿死亡率极高，因此人们不得不多生几个孩子以保证能有部分孩子存活下来。言外之意就是，严格的人口控制与生育率降低没有关系，因为无论怎样生育率都会降低。如泰国、印尼之类的国家放宽了对避孕药的限制，这些国家也与中国一样采取了人口控制政策，以降低人口生育率。被北京视为中国一部分的台湾也差不多与中国（大陆）一样降低了生育率，但却没有采取人口控制措施。
政府认为独生子女政策并非与生育率降低毫无关系。它坚持认为，正是由于采取了这项政策，才避免中国多出生无法养活的4亿人。中国国家统计局局长马建堂认为，是计划生育政策有效地控制了我国人口快速增长的势头。
中国政府对独生子女政策如此强硬的维护是有许多理由的。一个理由可能是那种易懂的观点，说中国是独特的，其他国家的经验与中国无关。第二个理由是，尽管政策实行初期可能没有对生育率降低起到太大作用，但是现在这个政策却能保证生育率处于较低水平。第三个理由是，如果不再采取人口控制措施，，人口增长水平也许会提升。事实上，对这样的担心是多余的，因为独生子女政策在实施过程中也常常因区域不同而不一致，而且这个政策在中国的少数民族地区很少实行，在农村政策也很放宽，但事实是，这些人口政策执行不力的地区没有出现人口激涨。
布兰迪斯大学海勒社会政策与管理学院的琼高夫曼认为，政府对这项政策如此支持是因为这项政策能带来的利益：因为这项政策也是国家计划生育管理局抵制的结果。这有巨大的制度问题（地方政府在对违反者征收罚款过程中获得了既得利益）。高夫曼说：“政策是他们存在的理由。”
王峰与他的同事认为，独生子女政策应该终止了。降低生育率的目标很久以前就达到了。他说，现在的生育率已经低于人口替代率并且难以为续了。是时候向前迈出一大步了：从独生子女政策转向两个孩子的政策。王峰的团队研究认为，中国很少有家庭会选择生两个以上的孩子。
有迹象表明，这些学者在使关于人口问题的辩论更加以事实为依据而非政治化方面取得了成功。国家统计局局长马建堂谈到遵守计划生育政策时，也说，要“谨慎并逐渐的改善政策来促进国家人口增长更加平衡。”胡锦涛对人口普查结果作出评论时透露出一个模糊的信号：不久的将来政策可能要发生改变。他说：“中国应该维持一个较低的出生率，但也要既遵守又改善目前的计划生育政策。”这并非是同意随便生孩子，但也许每个家庭生两个孩子应该不成问题。
【原文】
DOES China have enough people? The question might seem absurd. The country has long been famous both for having the world’s largest population and for having taken draconian measures to restrain its growth. Though many people, Chinese and outsiders alike, have looked aghast at the brutal and coercive excesses of the one-child policy, there has also often been a grudging acknowledgment that China needed to do something to keep its vast numbers in check.
But new census figures bolster claims made in the past few years that China is suffering from a demographic problem of a different sort: too low a birth rate. The latest numbers, released on April 28th and based on the nationwide census conducted last year, show a total population for mainland China of 1.34 billion. They also reveal a steep decline in the average annual population growth rate, down to 0.57% in 2000-10, half the rate of 1.07% in the previous decade. The data imply that the total fertility rate, which is the number of children a woman of child-bearing age can expect to have, on average, during her lifetime, may now be just 1.4, far below the “replacement rate” of 2.1, which eventually leads to the population stabilising.
Slower growth is matched by a dramatic ageing of the population. People above the age of 60 now represent 13.3% of the total, up from 10.3% in 2000 (see chart). In the same period, those under the age of 14 declined from 23% to 17%. A continuation of these trends will place ever greater burdens on the working young who must support their elderly kin, as well as on government-run pension and health-care systems. China’s great “demographic dividend” (a rising share of working-age adults) is almost over.
In addition to skewing the country’s age distribution, the one-child policy has probably exACerbated its dire gender imbalance. Many more baby boys are born in China than baby girls. China is not unique in this; other countries, notably India, have encountered similar problems without coercive population controls. But Chinese officials do not dispute that the one-child policy has played a role. China’s strong cultural imperative for male offspring has led many families to do whatever they must to ensure that their one permissible child is a son. In the earliest days of the one-child policy, this sometimes meant female infanticide. As ultrasound technology spread, sex-selective abortions became widespread.
The new census data show that little progress is being made to counter this troubling trend. Among newborns, there were more than 118 boys for every 100 girls in 2010. This marks a slight increase over the 2000 level, and implies that, in about 20 or 25 years’ time, there will not be enough brides for almost a fifth of today’s baby boys—with the potentially vast destabilising consequences that could have.
The census results are likely to intensify debate in China between the powerful population-control bureaucracy and an increasingly vocal group of academic demographers calling for a relaxation of the one-child policy. Their disagreement involves not only the policy’s future, but also (as so often in China) its past.
One of the academics, Wang Feng, director of the Brookings-Tsinghua Centre for Public Policy, argues that China’s demographic pattern had already changed dramatically by the time the one-child policy began in 1980. The total fertility rate had been 5.8 in 1950, he notes, and had declined sharply to 2.3 by 1980, just above replacement level.
Other countries achieved similar declines in fertility during the same period. The crucial influences, Mr Wang reckons, are the benefits of development, including better health care and sharp drops in high infant-mortality rates which led people to have many children in order to ensure that at least some would survive. By implication, coercive controls had little to do with lowering fertility, which would have happened anyway. Countries that simply improved access to contraceptives—Thailand and Indonesia, for instance—did as much to reduce fertility as China, with its draconian policies. Taiwan, which the government in Beijing regards as an integral part of China, cut its fertility rate as much as China without population controls.
The government denies the one-child policy was irrelevant. It insists that, thanks to the policy, 400m births were averted which would otherwise have taken place, and which the country could not have afforded. Ma Jiantang, head of China’s National Bureau of Statistics, insisted “the momentum of fast growth in our population has been controlled effectively thanks to the family-planning policy.”
There are many reasons for the government’s hard-line defence of its one-child policy. One is a perhaps understandable view that China is unique, and that other countries’ experience is irrelevant. A second is that, though the policy may not have done much to push fertility down at first, it might be keeping it low now. A third is that, if controls were lifted, population growth might rise. In fact, there is little justification for such fears: in practice, the one-child policy varies from place to place; it hardly applies to China’s minorities and is more lightly applied in rural areas—and there is no population boom in those parts.
Anyway, argues Joan Kaufman of the Heller School for Social Policy and Management at Brandeis University, official support for the policy is only partly to do with its perceived merits: it is also the product of resistance by China’s family-planning bureaucracy. This has massive institutional clout (and local governments have a vested interest in the fines collected from violators). “The one-child policy is their raison d’être,” says Ms Kaufman.
Mr Wang and his colleagues argue the one-child policy should go. The target reductions in fertility rates were reached long ago. Current rates, he says, are below replacement levels and are unsustainable. The time has come for the first big step: a switch to a two-child policy. Research by his group suggests few families in China would choose to have more than two.
There are signs that the academics are succeeding in their campaign to make the population debate less politicised and more evidence-based. Mr Ma of the National Statistics Bureau spoke not only of adhering to the family-planning policy, but also of “cautiously and gradually improving the policy to promote more balanced population growth in the country”. In his comments on the census, President Hu Jintao included a vague hint that change could be in the offing. China would maintain a low birth rate, he said. But it would also “stick to and improve” its current family-planning policy. That hardly seems a nod to a free-for-all. But perhaps a “two-for-all” may not be out of the question. |
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发表于 2011-5-6 15:26
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