TOKYO, Dec. 5, 2021—You can not underestimate China’s People Export sInitiative. They are all over the world, as we all know, as Chinese restauranteurs, massage and acupuncture therapists, boisterous tourists… At the current pace, they might take over the whole world over the next few decades. In Japan, resident Chinese now command the No. 1 population share among all legal foreign residents, the feat that they achieved in less than 5 years and almost doubling in 15 years. Several more decades forward, though, this may have to change.
The Japanese government Nov. 30 released details of its most recent census that showed that the number of resident Chinese in Japan in 2020 was 667,475, nearly double of 353,437 in 2005. And in 2010, Chinese dethroned Koreans as the largest legal resident bloc totaling 460,459, and representing nearly 30 percent of total resident foreigners, compared with 423,273 Koreans (of both South and North origins). Japan’s aggregate population in 2020 was 126.146 million, shrinking 0.7 percent and standing as the 11th largest populous country in the world. Of the total, resident foreigners accounted for 2.747 million, growing 43.6 percent from 2015.
Will this Chinese people exports continue a long time? It may over the coming few decades in line with the Xi Jinping Belt and Road policy, but beyond that the trend starts looking iffy as China’s population aging is likely to progress, if not at Japan’s pace. In May, the Chinese national statistics bureau announced that people over 65 years old accounted for 13.5 percent of the 1.411 billion population while child birth plunged 20 percent from 2019. A Japanese government population research researcher was quoted by Nihon Keizai newspaper May 12, 2021 as predicting that China’s population growth is likely to peak before 2030. Chinese people over 65 years old totaled 190 million, an all-time high and up 60 percent from 2010. In 2016, China revised its one-child-per-family policy to allow couples to have two children, but as proved by Japan’s failure to increase births with many incentives, it has yielded little result.
Aging and population contraction is a reason why Xi accelerates BRI: He wants China to become a intellectual property giant to feed its aging population with royalty income from high speed railways, nuclear plants, and other giant tech projects it is selling to emerging countries.
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