Editor’s note for January 17, 2023
A note for Access newsletter readers from Jeremy Goldkorn.
My thoughts today:
China’s population fell in 2022 for the first time since 1961: The National Bureau of Statistics announced that China’s population decreased by 850,000 people last year, to 1.4118 billion.
In 1961, the population shrank because many people died in a mass famine caused by the policies of Máo Zédōng 毛泽东. Last year’s decline is mainly because young people no longer want to have lots of babies, or even any at all.
China’s economic growth also shrank in 2022, a year in which gross domestic product (GDP) fell to 3%, its lowest level since 1976. It was a year of economic malaise in which Mao died, and which is usually counted as the final year of the disastrous Cultural Revolution.
These numbers are going to inspire many jeremiads about the end of China’s good years, and some of that negativity is not wrong. The optimism and hyper-speed growth of the last four decades is gone.
The boom boom boom of the era of Dèng Xiǎopíng 邓小平, Jiāng Zémín 江泽民, and Hú Jǐntāo 胡锦涛 is no more and has been replaced by the dullness — and less spectacular numbers — of the age of Xí Jìnpíng 习近平.
But don’t count China out just yet. As Bloomberg put it today, “China’s reopening is prompting bullish forecasts from strategists and money managers the world over.”
