If a low birth rate is China's problem, why isn't foreign immigration the solution?

So China's two-child policy is now officially a three-child policy. This development will have come as no surprise to anyone who follows Chinese politics. It's been obvious for years that the Party-State now feels its people are having too few children, not too many. 

One thing this decision makes clear is that the Chinese state simply cannot imagine giving up on its family planning policies altogether and legalising all births, including those outside of marriage. Children have to be born to a heterosexual married couple, and there has to be a limit on the number of children per couple, even when the limit is so high as to be academic in most cases. I suppose that, as well as promoting conventional lifestyles that are good for "social stability", this ensures the countless people who work for the family planning departments across the country will keep their jobs. 

In any case, this new policy is going to mean very little in practice, because the average Chinese family simply isn't interested in having more than two children. In fact, in middle class environments, many couples don't want more than one. When asked why, they will usually claim that having a child is simply "too expensive". This is, in my view, mostly because of the kind of stresses and expectations that the system places on parents and that they place on themselves with regards to their children's education. 

Policymakers are not unaware of this. The Politburo meeting in which the shift was announced also promised supportive measures to address the structural issues that are preventing couples from having more children, including "improving prenatal and postnatal care services, developing a universal childcare service system, reducing family spending on education, strengthening tax and housing support, and safeguarding the lawful rights and interests of working women", as the Xinhua report puts it. 

This all sounds sensible, but most experts agree that it won't be easy to change the basic trends. China's fertility rate stood at just 1.3 children per woman in 2020, which is as low as countries like Japan and Italy. In previous years fertility rates weren't much higher. Few believe they will start growing again. 

A Mao-era poster, saying more or less "if you want the countryside to prosper, have more children who can plant trees". 

 

I happen to think that in the long run lower fertility rates carry real advantages, particularly for an overcrowded country like China, where a lower population will put less pressure on the environment and allow for a better quality of life. But this does not cancel out the fact that an ageing society will lead to real economic and social problems for at least a generation, and doubtlessly cause the leadership to worry about China failing to overtake the US.

European countries with low birth rates have basically addressed the issue through immigration. This has allowed them to replenish their workforce by absorbing newcomers, rather than trying to drive up their own birth rates and contribute to environmentally-deleterious global population growth. Foreign immigrants currently make up 9.4% of the EU's population, and immigrants from outside the EU make up 6.3%. 

Prosperous and ageing East Asian countries are also turning to the same solution, albeit it to a lesser degree. Japan may have a reputation for being monocultural and unwelcoming to outsiders, but it has in fact begun to open its doors to foreign immigration. The number of long-term foreign residents in Japan was 2.23 million, or 1.75% of the population, in 2015. Admittedly some of those are Japanese Brazilians, or Zainichi Koreans, but most are recent immigrants from other Asian countries with no prior links to Japan.

South Korea has gone even further down this path than Japan, with between 2 and 5% of the population made up of foreign immigrants, depending on whose figures you believe. In Taiwan foreign residents make up around 3% of the population, mostly blue-collar workers from South-East Asia. Taiwan even offers immigrants a reasonable path towards naturalisation.

The entrance to Yokohama's Chinese neighbourhood, Japan.

The logical solution for China would be to go down the same path. If it only allowed immigration, China today would not be an unattractive option for young people from countries like Bangladesh, Indonesia and Vietnam, or even places further afield like Nigeria or Egypt. Wages for unskilled labour in China are already significantly higher than in most of Asia and Africa, particularly in China's richest cities and provinces. There are many people around the world who would not be unhappy to work in a factory or a restaurant in places like Shanghai, Tianjin or Fujian province. There are also plenty of young people with degrees who would be happy to learn Chinese and boost their skills with an office job in one of China's big cities.

The reality, however, is that China is showing no signs of moving in this direction. None at all. Foreigners aren't allowed to take up unskilled jobs in China, with extremely rare exceptions. Only professional jobs are open to foreigners, and even those only to a very limited extent. For years the Chinese government was happy to court foreign students with scholarships (even those are now drying up), but the expectation was always that the students would go back home after finishing their degree. The tight rules around work visas for foreigners make it almost inevitable that they end up leaving.

The data from China's last national census, released just last month, show that there were over 845,697 foreign citizens living in China in 2020. This is more than 2010, when the last census was taken, although both Beijing and Shanghai have actually seen a significant decrease in the number of foreigners. Much of the increase probably comes from a trickle of Vietnamese and Burmese citizens moving to South-Western China. There are also bound to be many ethnic Chinese counted among the foreign residents, some of them people who were born in China and later emigrated and changed citizenships.

For a country of China's size and level of development, these figures are nothing. They mean that foreigners account for about 0.05% of the population (and this is without mentioning that numbers are currently in free-fall, as foreigners in China are getting fed up with the Covid-19 border restrictions that make it impossibly hard to leave to see family and then come back). Even India, a country of similar size and much poorer, has around 5 million foreign residents (most of them coming from neighbouring countries like Bangladesh and Pakistan). The reality is that, in terms of openness to foreign immigration, China is an outlier in the modern world.

From a purely economic perspective, it would make sense for China to open up more to foreign immigration, both skilled and unskilled. The obstacles in the way of this are clearly political, not economic. Modern China's sense of identity has been constructed upon a nationalism that is frankly exclusionary. If it is hard for ordinary people in most countries to accept the concept of having to compete with foreign immigrants for jobs and resources, and there isn't a place in the world where it doesn't cause resentment, in China it would be particularly tough for the public to swallow the idea. 

An episode from last year made it starkly clear how opposed the Chinese public is to even the most timid attempts to make it easier for foreigners to live in their country. In early March 2020, China's Ministry of Justice published the draft of a new regulation on the eligibility of foreign citizens to apply for permanent residency (PR). The draft was published in order to gather public feedback, as is customary in Chinese lawmaking (this might well be one of the most democratic features of Chinese governance, although it doesn't apply to all laws). Unfortunately, this move quickly ignited a storm of racist and xenophobic discourse.

The proposed new regulations would only have made it very slightly easier for foreigners to apply for China's permanent residency cards, which are some of the hardest in the world to obtain. It's hardly like they would have "opened up the floodgates" of mass immigration to China. Far from it. In spite of this, the publication of the draft regulation was met with a flood of truly nasty comments on Chinese social media. Most of those commenting were not reacting against the slightly more relaxed new rules, but against the concept itself of giving foreigners permanent residency in China, something that they probably did not even realise was possible.

Sixth Tone translated one egregious Weibo post that received 22,000 likes: "In a hundred years' time, I don't want China to have become like the US, with all kinds of people mixed together. We Chinese people have a strong national sentiment. We have the same ancestors, we're all children of the Yellow Emperor, the same blood courses through our veins." Many said the presence of foreigners would make China less safe and diminish the country's sense of patriotism. There were also lots of outrageously racist comments about black people, condemning them as a pathologically lazy and degenerate race who should be kept out of China at any cost; others ranted against blacks and Muslims in language that seemed to be taken straight from Grayzone, and vowed to protect Chinese women from foreign men. 

Of course social media is known for attracting horrid sentiments, and not just in China. But in this case the large number of upvotes received by the most racist comments, and the almost complete lack of pushback against this avalanche of xenophobic feeling, make it pretty clear where people's hearts lie. Or one can also look at other examples from recent years, for instance the xenophobic comments that flooded social media after a Pakistani student was stabbed to death by a local citizen in Nanjing over a small argument in 2018, or the rap song in Chengdu dialect that came out in the same year entitled "Stupid Laowai", ending with the singer literally inciting violence against foreigners. And all this is in a country that barely even has any foreigners to begin with.

Another common complaint is that foreigners are already too privileged, a trope that is just as widely believed as the one about China's ethnic minorities enjoying special privileges, and equally based on a mix of truths, half-truths and misconceptions. Many of those protesting the new regulations compared the "ease" with which a foreigner can acquire permanent residency (in fact it isn't easy at all) with the difficulty for Chinese citizens to apply for a Beijing or Shanghai hukou, or asked whether foreign residents would also be subjected to restrictions on how many children they can have. 

These complaints are best seen as a case of homegrown Chinese frustrations being shifted onto foreigners, who bear no particular responsibility for them. Such attitudes guarantee that any future easing of the rules on foreign immigration will be perceived by the broader Chinese public as one more unearned "privilege" which places foreigners above locals.

Elon Musk at the meeting with Li Keqiang in which he was offered Chinese permanent residency. He didn't take up the offer.

Public opinion may be firmly opposed, but it is not like Chinese policymakers themselves are giving any signs of being interested in encouraging immigration. The continued difficulty of applying for ten-year permanent residency cards, the one thing that allows foreigners to settle stably in China for a reasonable amount of time, is a symbol of this. The current conditions for applying for permanent residency are skewed towards those with extremely high skills in certain sectors, mostly high-tech industries, and CEOs and other people with very high incomes. Such policies cater only to people who probably have no wish to settle in China anyway, while ignoring most of the foreigners who live there, speak the language and could make a real contribution. 

Over the last few years it has been made slightly easier to apply for the PR permits, but it is still very difficult by international standards. The number of foreigners that has obtained one probably numbers in the thousands, and many who have lived in the country for years are still ineligible. The government did however offer permanent residency to Elon Musk, who must be the sort of immigrant they are looking for. Strangely, he chose not to trade his $37 million Bay Area estate for a fancy flat in Sanlitun or Pudong. The permits are also granted more readily to foreign citizens of Chinese ethnicity, both officially and in practice, reflecting the fact that overseas Chinese are still seen as somewhat more deserving of the right to live in China. 

What is certain is that half-hearted efforts to attract top-end scientists, engineers and venture capitalists are not going to solve the country's demographic problems, even in the unlikely event that all the Nobel prize winners and Elon Musks of the world suddenly decide to pack their bags and move to China. 

Of course, if one day the official attitude towards immigration becomes more positive, then public opposition does not have to be an insurmountable obstacle. The government/party has a way of doing what it feels is necessary, and getting the public to go along with it. It is possible to imagine that schemes might be implemented along the lines of those in the Gulf countries, with people brought in from poorer countries to work in factories or construction projects, placed in dormitories, and expected to leave once their contract is over. This might be better accepted by the public, although it could still cause resentment. 

Another possibility is that the development of automation and robotics will make the importation of cheap labour less necessary in future. But even then falling birth rates will still be a reality, and the people who run China clearly feel this to be a problem, with or without automation.