The calibre of a workforce prevails over its size

By Ma Ke

The United Nations Population Fund has released the 2023 World Population Report this week, projecting India to surpass China as the world's most populous country by mid-2023.

It was released on Wednesday but was quickly used by some Western media as a tool to sow discord. They’ve managed to distort the UN report into a grim forecast of the Chinese economy, saying that India will replace China as Asia’s growth engine.

Radio Free Asia released an editorial saying that in the future, India and China will have to “scramble for” foreign investment, “especially from Western countries”.

The logic is this: A bigger population means a tighter job market, which lowers labour cost and attracts foreign companies (but strictly in labour-intense industries), which would finally lead to economic growth.

This kind of rhetoric let on a mindset among some Western media editors, thinking that China and India are still highly, if not completely, dependent on Western money for growth, while in fact they are two self-reliant economies who choose to work with qualified companies, Western or not, and two visionary states who have been conducting cooperation in high-tech industries under the framework of BRICS, in order to break the cheap-labour growth model.

Back to the report, in response to the media hype it has rippled, the country’s foreign ministry spokesperson said that “while the demographic dividend of a country depends on the quantity of population, the quality is more important”, adding that the scale of high-calibre workforce is more important than the size of the population.

The gross enrolment rate of China’s higher education was 57.8 percent in 2021, compared to 30 percent in 2012.

The country has made sure to invest no less than 4% of its GDP on education for nine consecutive years, even during the Covid-19 pandemic.

True, China has been the world’s largest population since the 1950s; true, China’s economy quickly thrived around the millennium through profits out of labour-intensive industries.

But since 2017, policymakers in China have announced a switch from high-speed growth to high-quality, releasing a package of policies to stimulate domestic consumption instead of lowering its bars to attract as many foreign investments as possible.

It is a fact that China’s birth rate hit record low in 2021, but to equivalate the drop of birth rate with the drop of demographic dividend is unconvincing. China still has nearly 240 million workforce that have received higher education in the market.

On the contrary, to equivalate the rise of population with economic importance is also premature. According to research from the University of Delhi, the country’s wage level has been stagnant for eight years. New York Times also pointed out that higher population means higher demand for the job market. An annual 9-million-job gap needs to be filled for India to be able to provide enough for its working population.

China and India will need to deal with their respective internal issues to grow in a sustainable way. Demographic dividend is only one piece of the puzzle.

It is obvious that by distorting a purely scientific report by the United Nations, some Western media once again hope to see the confrontation between the two leading powers of the Asia-Pacific region, if not the world.

Perhaps what’s truly worrying is not the end of China’s demographic dividend, but the end to the Western exploitation of the demographic dividend in Asia.

* Ma Ke is a Nairobi-based journalist for CGTN.