China-watchers have been sifting through the results of last year’s census, the first of which were made public last week.
One much-discussed number is China’s Total Fertility Rate.
(Imagine a woman living through her entire reproductive lifetime with, at each year of age, precisely the average fertility of that age-year cohort today. At age 20 she’s as fertile as today’s average 20-year-old; at age 30 she’s as fertile as today’s average 30-year-old; . . . and so on. The TFR is the number of kids this imaginary woman would have in her lifetime, on average of course. For a country with normal sex ratios, a TFR of 2.1 means the population is currently just replacing itself. The CIA World Factbook has a comparative table of TFRs by nation here. Among big, economically-significant nations the lowest TFR is Japan’s at 1.21; the highest is Nigeria’s at 4.73. The U.S. is 2.06.)
China’s TFR has long been something of a mystery. Different departments of the Chinese state apparatus tend to put out different numbers; and the significance of the numbers is anyway skewed by the fact of China not having normal sex ratios. The figure most often quoted in recent years has been 1.7, though China’s Family Planning Commission has stuck doggedly with 1.8.
The just-released 2010 census numbers don’t seem to include a TFR estimate, but number-crunchers have been at work trying to extract one. It looks like 1.3 or 1.4. Yi Fuxien of the Economic Observer (China-based, but business-oriented and as independent as it gets in China) has an English-language analysis here.