Parents drop off their kids — most of them single children — at an elementary school in Beijing
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Too Few Workers During its decades of double-digit growth, China's competitive advantage came from its huge workforce. Today the country's labor pool is shrinking, and wages are soaring. For years, Wang Jinshi could depend on a constant supply of rural Chinese to make shoes at his factory in southern Foshan city. No more. Worse, the future supply of factory workers is imperiled. Last year, 13,600 Chinese elementary schools closed for lack of students. "The economic cycle is broken," says Wang, who constantly hustles to find workers. He now pays wages that are 35% higher than five years ago--and still his workers often leave after a few months because of better offers from other employers.
Too Few Youths By 2050, 1 in 3 Chinese will be older than 60--a 430 million-strong cohort bigger than the entire population of the U.S. In developed nations like Japan, the elderly explosion is a huge problem. But Japan is far richer than China, and its elderly can expect subsidized, high-quality medical services and caregiving. China, by contrast, has shattered its "iron rice bowl," the socialist term for cradle-to-grave government support. That leaves each single child potentially responsible for six old people--one set of parents and two sets of grandparents--a trend in China that is called "4-2-1." Providing for the elderly is even harder now that hundreds of millions of Chinese are mobile, leaving the farms where the elderly live to work in cities where the jobs are.
Too Few Women At the middle school in Fancheng, a quiet community in central China's Henan province, teacher Yin Le's seventh-grade class has 27 boys and 13 girls. As in other parts of rural China, residents are allowed to have a second child after a few years' wait, if the first baby is female or handicapped. Chinese tradition values boys over girls because sons carry on the family line. Through illegal yet common ultrasounds and sex-selective abortions--plus the occasional case of female infanticide and abandonment--parents have skewed the gender ratio so heavily that in some rural areas, 135 boys are born for every 100 girls. "What shall these boys do in the future?" says Yin. "How can they find a wife if there are not enough girls?"
Chinese men who find no mate to extend their family trees are called bare branches. Their mounting frustration terrifies the Communist Party; young, unattached men are the perfect protest demographic. And they have much more to protest than the scarcity of single women. For instance, they wonder why they graduate from college in record numbers yet cannot find decent white collar jobs because China's economy is still addicted to a labor-intensive model. They worry, too, about real estate. One of the reasons property markets in big cities are so inflated is that young men think that buying a home is the best way to lure a potential wife. Starter apartments in Beijing now go for some 30 times a young worker's average annual income.
The Policy Worked--Too Well