Social unrest or an aged population are big dangers unless China plans its future correctly, writes Tony Kinsella
MANY PEOPLE across China must be basking in a deserved glow of pleasure from the opening of the Beijing Olympic Games. Pride of place has to go to the many tens of thousands who have worked incredibly hard over these past seven years to deliver the stadiums, hotel rooms, metro lines and myriad other physical and organisational achievements that made the Games possible.
The Chinese government must also be well satisfied, but many in the leadership will experience their moment of real satisfaction only after the Games have finished.
Millions of Chinese citizens are enjoying an understandable and deserved feeling of national pride. In many senses the Olympic Games represent a coming of age for the People's Republic, or perhaps more accurately for the world's oldest continuous polity, a mature rejuvenation. The very success of Beijing 2008 could be the high-water mark in China's recent development. Sporting metaphors are tricky to apply to a country that contains almost 20 per cent of the planet's population. A marathon sprint would perhaps best describe China's transformation over the past three decades, but as any runner will tell you, a marathon sprint is a physical impossibility.
Rising costs, particularly labour costs, increasing controls, energy and environmental constraints, are all beginning to act as brakes on China's headlong growth. Businesses, including Chinese ones, have begun to relocate to Vietnam and elsewhere in pursuit of lower labour costs. Others are relocating parts of their production closer to their final markets. The political impacts of all these changes on Chinese society and government remain to be seen, but reform of Chinese family planning policies could be a key issue.
In the 1970s China's population was more than 900 million, and it topped the one billion mark in 1985. Mao's heirs introduced the policy whereby each couple could only have one child in 1979.
Although this policy was modulated in that it never applied to China's 55 recognised ethnic minorities (more than 110 million people), and was more flexibly implemented in rural than in urban areas, the number of children born to the average Chinese woman has dropped from 5.8 in the 1970s to something around two today.
Defining this "something around" has become a key statistical and economic argument in China. At a reproduction rate of 2.1 children per woman, its population would more or less stabilise at 1.3 billion. Some studies place the fertility rate below the replacement rate at 1.8, against a background of an increase in average life expectancy from 35 in 1949 to more than 73 today.
China may face a more acute version of the structural population problem facing all developed societies if it gets its family planning policies wrong - an ageing population dependant on fewer and fewer citizens of working age, and this in a country with limited social and pension provisions.
China, in the words of the former Beijing bureau chief of the Washington Post John Pomfret, may be "on track to become the first nation in the world to get old before it gets rich".
Wealthier Chinese can easily absorb the social maintenance fee charged to families with additional children. If this policy is continued, family sizes will become an obvious, and inevitably an acrimonious, issue of social justice in tomorrow's China.
Irish experience shows how family planning controversies can alter the make up of an entire society.
Forty years ago Pope Paul VI (Giovanni Montini), a 73-year-old Italian, the son of a minor aristocratic family, pronounced against what he viewed to be "artificial" methods of birth control. In doing so he overruled professional advisers, drawing in part on his life experience.
Giovanni Montini was born in 1897, and began training to be a priest when he was 19. Following his ordination in 1920, he spent his entire professional life in and around the Vatican and the Italian Catholic Church, apart from a brief sojourn at the papal nunciature to the newly-independent Poland of the early 1920s.
His 1968 Humanae Vitae encyclical effectively issued instructions to the world's Roman Catholics not to use contraceptives. This overrode the 66-6 recommendations of the papal commission on birth control which had suggested a more flexible approach.
It is reasonable to assume that, with his Italian pragmatism, Paul VI imagined that more educated and better off Catholic couples would quietly continue to practise family planning.
In his ill-starred attempt to preserve what he perceived to be traditional Catholic values, Paul VI would not only lose the argument about contraception as millions of Catholics ignored the edict of their church, he would also, possibly fatally, undermine the foundations of papal authority and the Catholic Church's pervasive political influence in certain countries.
Couples and individuals around the world either ignored the papal teaching, or having reflected about it, decided to disagree. Many, probably most, ordinary Catholics in developed societies opted not to live according to papal instructions.
In countries such as our own where Catholic teaching had pervaded much of the State, this inevitably led to a political conflict. Catholics came to demand a more secular state within which they would be free to live their lives as they saw fit.
The Irish Catholic hierarchy found themselves fighting a rearguard action, a role for which tradition had done nothing to prepare them. Worse, they found many of their flock lining up behind the opposition.
Ordinary people individually asserting their right to manage their own fertility quietly engineered a profound social change. Unquestioned authoritarian power was among the first victims. The full political consequences of that change have yet to work through our small country of four million. In a country of 1.3 billion it could be a fascinating phenomenon.