The calibre of a workforce prevails over its size

Published: April 24,2023

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 tighter job market, which
lowers labour cost and attracts foreign companies (but strictly in labourintense 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 selfreliant 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 highcalibre 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)