主题：【原创】人口论，计划生育和老龄化 -- 孟词宗

Here are three lessons that we could have helped them to understand. First, the government’s grand demographic plan to bring about an extraordinary reduction of China’s population, for better or worse, had already been accomplished. In the absence of birth planning, by 2060, there might be “two China’s” instead of one. Second, China’s policy-averted population was growing far faster than its actual population, a finding that would draw attention away from the original concern over the latter. Third, and most policy-relevant of all, the reverse momentum built up by the hundreds of millions of births already averted would carry forward to avert their descendants even if the government lifted the program immediately. And if the government did so, without having to spend a single additional yuan on the birth planning program, it could still claim an averted population by 2060 far in excess of the 400 million that they had asserted. In fact, paradoxically, although any fertility uptick following a policy repeal would have reduced estimates of births averted directly resulting from policy, that reduction would have been largely offset by increased estimates of the averted descendants who would have been born under higher assumed fertility.

I attribute the astonishing population averted to China’s birth planning program, which was at some times physically coercive (e.g., the widespread sterilization campaigns of the early 1980s and occasional forced abortions), at all times punitive (with massive penalty increases for noncompliance after the 1991 central decree), and at all times determined to bring preferences into line with official quotas.