Chinese Demographic Data: Population Collapse

4 min readJun 29, 2023

Today will be looking at some new data from Peter Zeihan on Geopolitics, where he has broken down the latest demographic data from the Chinese space.

This new information that has just been released is even worse than the prediction of the current Chinese population levels, which are expected to be around 800 million and not the official statistics of approximately 1.4 billion.

China has drastically miscounted the number of 5 to 10-year-olds born in the past decades.

Without a new population to replace the ageing population, there can be no retirement, new factory workers or other industries.

The world will experience this to various degrees apart from USA, Argentina and France due to having healthier democracies.

Modern capitalism doesn’t work without there being enough workers to work, enough people that have high enough wages to invest money in the economy and the stock market.

Finally, the elderly need to be smaller to provide for themselves adequately.

The world’s population, particularly in China, looks like an inverted pyramid that will collapse and, with it, the global economy.

With this new information being released, it will allow us to make some much-needed updates to an already bleak assessment…and spoiler alert, it’s going to get a lot worse.

The first graph shows us the demographic picture before this new data was released.

You’ll notice China already has an incredibly fast-ageing population.

The number of people entering the workforce can’t keep up with retirees, so even when using the old data, labour costs increased faster than in any country in history.

By 2035, an estimated 400 million people in China will be age 60 and over, representing 30% of the population, according to the government’s projections.

And the ratio of old to young is expected to snowball more unbalanced after deaths outnumbered births last year for the first time since 1961.

Those numbers may very well be very much higher than the current data.

The second graph shows us what the new data are saying.

The number of children under age five has collapsed, leaving China with nearly half the amount of five-year-olds as fifteen-year-olds.

This happened well before COVID drove down birth rates and increased death rates. Even though this is the ‘official’ Chinese data, it’s likely overly optimistic.

So that brings us to our internal extrapolation of the data as seen in graph three.

Again, this is our interpretation, but it gives you a better look at the Chinese predicament.

Leaks out of China suggest the yellow bars don’t even exist; this means China isn’t a country in demographic decay…it’s country in the advanced stages of demographic collapse.

China is entering its final decade of operating as a modern industrialised nation. For any foreign business still in China, those sunk costs on factories can only keep you there for so long…and it will only worsen from here on out.

The collapsing populations in China, South Korea and Japan are so fascinating and horrific.

These nations don’t have a future; at least in this century, we will see in East Asia in the far east what will be happening to the West in around 20 to 30 years.

We are getting a front-row seat to what happens when the young vastly outnumber the old, and keep in mind that women, on average, only have babies up until age 35. After 35, there is geriatric pregnancy.