Transition and Challenge: China's Population at the Beginning of the 21st Century

摘要

Problems caused by China's large population have fascinated journalists and scholars for decades. For journalists especially, the massive swells of socialist China's baby boom obliterated ideology and replaced it with the simple and terrifying metric of size. The "one-child policy" made China's population an even more beguiling subject of inquiry as the cool logic and relentless machinery of the state reduced the birth rate to below replacement rates by the 1990s. The population of China is indeed a dramatic subject of interest to the general academic and policy-making audience, and one that lends itself particularly well to interdisciplinary approaches: how will China's population affect the ecosystem? How will the shortage of brides affect Chinese and international society? How will Chinese consumers affect the global economy?