Source: Vladimir Wrangel/Shutterstock.

      Chapter Menu

      A Booming China or a Busting One?

      The Problem of Exponential Growth

      Population, Development, and Environment Impact

      The Other Side of the Coin: Population and Innovation

      Limits to Population: An Effect Rather than a Cause?

      Thinking with Population

A Booming China or a Busting One?

      The People’s Republic of China has long been a place in the world singled out for environmental concern. With a population of almost 1.4 billion people, or about 18% of the people on Earth, and a growing industrial economy, this would seem to make sense. While China is far lower in per capita greenhouse gas emissions (roughly 9 metric tons of CO₂ equivalent for each person compared to around 20 metric tons in the United States), the Chinese economy produces a whopping 27% of total global greenhouse gases). Numbers have power.

      Those who approach environmental questions through these kinds of numbers also see a growth trend and a pattern of accompanying industrialization that causes them worry. China had only a half billion people in 1950, while today there are triple that number. With each new person comes more demand for limited available water, the production of mounds of garbage, and the disturbance of large areas for new home construction. The 340 million motor vehicles in China, including 250 million cars, each emit roughly their own weight in greenhouse gases per year, contributing seriously to both local air pollution and global climate change. The dramatic rate of population growth poses obvious questions about the limits of the land, water, and air to support the nation.

      Still, there is more than just the number of people to concern us here. Water consumption in China is around 800 gallons per person every day (where the US consumes more than 2200 gallons per capita daily), a number far surpassing that of most places on Earth; for most sub-Saharan African countries the average is closer to half gallon. With an increasingly affluent and large population, China – like the United States – definitely has a major environmental impact.

      But these raw numbers and their apparent demographic drivers can be enormously deceptive. First, a significant proportion of water use and greenhouse gas emissions, among other areas of heavy environmental impact, are driven by the export of resources, industrial materials, and consumer good consumed elsewhere. Where less than 10% of water use, for example, is domestically consumed there, roughly 30% goes to industrial production. With exports to places like the European Union, North America, and elsewhere in the world, the population of China seems to be a far less major source of environmental woes than the circulation of the global economy itself.

So too, the population growth rate of China is at an all-time low. While in 2020 China’s population will continue to experience a net gain, and some seven million more people will live in the country by then end of that year than the beginning, the growth rate is actually only about 0.5%. That compares to growth in 1969, which peaked at a staggering 2.8%. China has essentially stopped growing, and is headed for contraction (see Box 2.1 ). The country is likely to begin shrinking in this century. With fewer young people entering the economy to support the aging population, all kinds of new issues attend the “population bust.” Yet fears of runaway over-population impacting the environment need some careful reconsideration (Robbins and Smith 2017).

      Box 2.1 1Environmental Solution? The One-Child Policy

      The People’s Republic of China’s “One Child Policy” came to an end in 2015. Viewed originally as a solution to “overpopulation,” the suite of penalty and incentive policies created by the Chinese state in 1979 appears flawed in retrospect. Indeed, China’s more recent concern is underpopulation.

      This radical family planning policy upended reproductive decision-making across the country and changed the demographic face of the country. The change in family size was accomplished through a set of fines leveled against families having more than one child, coupled with incentives for single-child families to obtain education and other elite privileges. Though rural families and some ethnic minority groups were exempted, a significant proportion of the Chinese population lived under the constraints of this law, which strongly incentivized small families. In 1979, the fertility rate in the country was a relatively high 2.9, and in rural areas it was perhaps double this figure. According to the World Bank, the current fertility rate of the country is a remarkable 1.7. This wholesale transformation of family size has been greeted by many as a model and by others as unnecessary and regressive.

      The advantages of a slowing growth rate are several. They include a potential lessening of demand for natural resources, though as a growing proportion of China’s one billion citizens enter the middle class, the overall resource demands of the economy have expanded on the whole. The potential effect on the country’s environmental impact from the generation of waste, air pollution, and greenhouse gases is also celebrated by observers, though here again the rapid industrialization of the country has meant an overall increase in all three problems.

      The disadvantages of the policy are more indirect, but nonetheless widespread. First, a cultural preference for boys has caused widespread sex-selective abortion of females, resulting in a wildly skewed ratio of young men to young women in the current generation. Estimates put the ratio at roughly 120 males to 100 females in the population under 15 years. This trend is exaggerated over time, and the National Population and Family Planning Commission estimates that Chinese men will outnumber women by 30 million in 2020, with implications for social stability. Second, the traditional family structure, in which children collectively cared for aging parents, has been put under enormous stress.

      Perhaps the most understated feature of the one-child policy is that the reduction in family size may only be partly attributable to the law. Falling birth rates have accompanied industrialization throughout Asia, as changing economic conditions have created their own incentives for smaller families. In countries like Japan and South Korea birth rates have plummeted in the past 40 years, without any state-sponsored population policies, and with fewer attendant social problems and shocks. Given that the Chinese resource and environmental impact footprints are still growing dramatically, critics suggest the policy was largely misconceived.

      Most remarkably, by 2020, China was searching for new policies to increase family size. With a skyrocketing dependency rate (ratio of old to young people), a decline in care for the elderly, a disappearing labor force, and general stagnation have become national concerns.

To what degree does the historically meteoric growth of population in China (or the United States or anywhere else in the world) represent an environmental crisis? How have affluence and lifestyle influenced this impact? Is there enough water to allow 10 billion people to survive on the planet? Many explorations of the relationships between environment and society typically start right here, asking a basic question: Are there simply too many people? Can the world support us all? If not, can human numbers ever be expected to stop growing? How and when?

      The Problem of Exponential Growth

      These questions are by no means new either to the field of ecology or to the examination of society or policy. The concept of overpopulation is indeed ancient, though its most prominent modern adherent lived in the decades spanning the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries: Reverend Dr. Thomas Robert Malthus. His assertion, in its clearest form, was that the capacity of population to grow is greater than the power of the Earth to provide resources. Given the procreative capacity of humanity and the inherently finite availability of the Earth’s resources, in this way of thinking, human population is the single greatest influence on the status of the