Ouch...that's isn't good. They're getting their bare bottom spanked hard.
In China’s Rapidly Aging Cities, Young People Flee and Few Babies Are Born
Fushun, where roughly a third of the population is 60 or above, offers a snapshot of nation’s future
By Yoko Kubota and Liyan Qi, WSJ
Dec. 9, 2024 9:00 pm ET
FUSHUN, China—This rust-belt hub helped fuel China’s economic rise. Now, it offers a view of China’s future—in which eroding growth collides with a ballooning elderly population and a shortfall in babies.
Once vibrating with energy, Fushun is a city slowly going to sleep. Most of its coal mines and refineries have closed. Half its young people have left. Its pension coffers are heavily in the red, with roughly a third of its population 60 or above.
Last year, only 5,541 babies were born in the city of 1.7 million. By comparison, Michigan’s Wayne County, which includes Detroit and has a similar-size population, logged more than 20,000 births.
Signs of aging are everywhere. Bus stops carry cemetery ads. Taxis advertise dental implants—$200 a tooth or $1,680 for “half a mouth.”
On a city bus one recent weekend, dozens of elderly chatted about retirement and doted on the handful of small children on board, making sure the little ones got seats. The bus passed empty apartment buildings that once bustled with mine workers’ families and stopped near a former elementary school that has been turned into a nursing home.
In another decade, all of China will look more like this.
China’s population started shrinking in 2022 and births have been nosediving for several years. By 2035, China will mirror Fushun’s present, with 30% of Chinese 60 or older, based on U.N. population estimates.
Fushun’s rise was built around a Communist Party growth playbook for state-led investment and a lid on births. Fushun was a star performer in both. Now, it epitomizes the economic and demographic strain all of China will confront.
This Lunar year, the year of the dragon, is seen as an auspicious one for marriage and births in Chinese culture. Nonetheless, 2024 births are expected to drop below 8 million, less than half the number in 2015, the last year of China’s one-child policy.
China’s fertility rate is hovering just above one birth per woman, well below the 2.1 needed to maintain a stable population. China is now trying to promote a “birth-friendly culture.”
Fushun, whose fertility rate has long been below 1, has lost more than a fifth of its population since 2000. More than half its residents will be 60 or older in another decade, according to calculations by Yi Fuxian, a researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, based on census data and Fushun’s current fertility rate of 0.7.
‘Double miracle’
For a while, Fushun was in the top 10 of Chinese heavy-industry cities, attracting workers from all over the country.
Japanese occupiers built the backbone for extracting Fushun’s oil and coal resources in the early 20th century. When China’s growth took off, Fushun became known as the country’s “fuel supplier,” at one point accounting for 50% of China’s oil production and one-tenth of its coal.
Fushun’s economy in the mid-1980s was bigger than several provincial capitals. Many of China’s leaders, starting with Mao Zedong, visited its West Open Pit mine, at one point the biggest of its kind in Asia, stretching more than 4 miles from end to end and a quarter of a mile into the ground.
Industrial smokestacks in Fushun.
West Open Pit mine, with the city of Fushun in the background. Fushun’s economy in the mid-1980s was bigger than several provincial capitals.
In Fushun, like elsewhere in China, the one-child policy was a part of the growth formula during those years. Beijing reasoned that with fewer children to care for, young people could be more productive.
The approach helped supercharge China’s economic surge, but it is now paying the price. Limiting births then has meant there are now fewer young people to take care of the elderly and fewer women to give birth.
Liaoning province, where Fushun is located, embraced the one-child policy with particular zeal, boasting of a “double miracle” of effective population control and higher economic growth. Officials have estimated there would have been 22 million more births in the province between 1980 and 2010 if the policy hadn’t been in place.
The double miracle started becoming a double drag around 2000, when China’s shift away from coal led to layoffs and mine closures. More jobs were cut as state oil refiners started losing money after years of runaway expansion. As young workers left, Fushun grew increasingly gray and poor.
In Fushun, the demographic crunch is hitting the younger generation the hardest.
On a fall day near the Laohutai mine, one of Fushun’s last standing coal mines, 38-year-old Wu Guolei waited for customers at his small canteen.
Some days, he said, he was making as little as $15 from the handful of customers. Tutoring costs for his 10-year-old daughter were rising. He has no siblings to split the burden of providing for his parents.
“It’s not that I’m not trying,” said Wu. “It’s that this society is just like this.”
As mines and refineries closed, Fushun became a symbol of China’s depressed north, a contrast from the vibrancy of southern tech hubs like Shenzhen. Its economy has shrunk by roughly a quarter over the past decade. The neighborhoods around Fushun’s closed mines are crumbling and hollowing out.
The abandoned site of a mine in Fushun.
As mines and refineries closed, Fushun became a symbol of China’s depressed north.
In 2015, Fushun started to sound alarms about its finances, citing a pension shortfall of around $1.5 billion, according to a Xinhua News Agency article at the time.
Pension obligations have since snowballed and are now projected to exceed the city’s total gross domestic product of $13.1 billion.
Fushun officials haven’t responded to requests for comment.
The only way Fushun can still pay retirees is with subsidies from the central government. But China’s recent economic challenges mean growth is slowing even in better-off parts of the country. Shenzhen’s fiscal revenue, long rising at a double-digit pace each year, only grew 2.5% in 2023. Some state employees say they have had several pay cuts over the past year.
The city of Fushun had a population of 1.75 million last year. There were only 5,541 newborns.
Wayne County in Michigan, which includes the city of Detroit, had roughly the same-size population. Its number of newborns was 20,065, over three times as many as Fushun.
Beijing has grappled with national remedies to China’s aging problem. It has tackled unusually generous retirement policies for state workers that let women retire as early as 50 and men at 60. Leaders have painted a “silver-haired” economy as not all bad, with market opportunities for businesses as healthcare needs rise.
The mood among Fushun’s retirees wasn’t one of gloom during recent visits.
In the city’s Laodong Park on a warm day, groups of “dancing grannies” blasted folksy dance music. Some elderly played foot badminton, a game similar to hacky sack that is popular in China. A few older women practiced hula hoop, while near them a slow-moving group did tai chi.
In November, at Fushun’s “Elderly People University”—which offers seniors courses from smartphone video editing to harmonica, Latin dance and African drums—a choir could be heard singing scales. A poster displayed a 2016 quote from Chinese leader Xi Jinping encouraging the elderly to “play their role,” exhibit positive energy and make new contributions.
Many of Fushun’s elderly retired from state-owned resources companies and despite the city’s financial bind are receiving pensions of several hundred dollars a month, enough for a relatively comfortable life.
Under China’s two-tiered systems, urban retirees get higher pensions than rural residents, such as the father of canteen owner Wu, who as a farmer receives only $16 a month.
Wu said his parents are likely to continue to do farm work until they die to supplement their pensions. If they get sick and require extensive medical treatment, he said, “That’s it for me.”
The fertility rate in Liaoning province has long been one of the lowest in the country. When Beijing first started worrying about overpopulation in the early 1970s, the province’s leaders quickly started restricting births, well ahead of the nationwide rollout of the one-child policy in 1980.
In one village within Fushun’s municipality, authorities brought in dozens of women with two or more children to be sterilized in 1974, according to Chinese village records kept at the East Asian Library at the University of Pittsburgh. The village asked all local officials to explain to residents that fewer births lead to better lives.
Fushun has lost more than a fifth of its population since 2000.
Fushun residents say that at the state-owned coal and mine companies, enforcement of the one-child policy was particularly strong. State-backed labor unions were tasked with forcing women to get an abortion if a pregnancy didn’t have authorities’ approval. Those who didn’t comply could lose their jobs, residents said.
Today, Liaoning still pays millions in compensation and allowances to those who abided by the one-child rules, including over 120,000 retirees whose only child died or became unable to work due to disability or women who suffered injuries in connection with abortions or other birth-control methods.
‘Ring of Life’
Since Xi took power in China in 2012, he has looked to the state to provide solutions to sagging growth, often via big infrastructure projects, ending an era of more market-oriented economic growth championed by Deng Xiaoping.
Fushun, too, is using a state-led blueprint to try to bring people back. In fact, between the city and Shenyang, Liaoning’s provincial capital, officials have built an entirely new city, Shenfu.
Rising over Shenfu is the “Ring of Life,” a monument about 50 stories tall calling to mind St. Louis’s Gateway Arch. Officials hoped it would be an iconic symbol of the new city to attract tech companies and other businesses. Local media has put the structure’s cost at more than $15 million.
On a recent weekday, the new Shenfu city mostly resembled a ghost town, with many buildings unfinished, while others appeared abandoned or barely populated. Office buildings were sparsely lit. Several two-story buildings were in a zone labeled “Health Station” and “Containment area”—terms describing a Covid-19 quarantine zone.
The ‘Ring of Life’ in the new city of Shenfu.
It will be near-impossible to attract investment or people to the region, said Yichun Xie, a professor of geography and geology at Eastern Michigan University in Ypsilanti, Mich. “It seems like a losing battle to turn things around,” he said.
Shenfu government officials didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Fushun’s government has long been aware that the city’s dire demographic situation is a drag on growth. In 2019, it laid out a plan for boosting births with measures such as free pregnancy tests.
But like Beijing, it mostly banked on the scrapping of the one-child policy leading to a baby boom. By 2019, it was clear births were instead falling more steeply every year, but Fushun officials still projected the city’s population would rise above 2 million by 2030 and the fertility rate would reach 1.6.
“As long as we cope with [the demographic situation] properly, our city’s economy and population will interact in a more positive way in the future,” city officials said about its plan in 2019.
Lost glory
Li Yong, 49, a teacher and photographer, has been taking photos and videos of Fushun’s abandoned industrial sites, trying to capture sparks of life such as fumes rising from an old mine-waste landfill to shelters that keep evolving near desolate industrial sites and the shining amber he found buried amid the coal.
He said he wants to offer a different perspective. “I see tenacious vitality captured in my creations.”
Li has fond memories of growing up in Fushun’s No. 2 Plant Petroleum Plant community, which housed thousands of oil workers and their families in socialist apartment buildings.
He loved playing at the neighborhood Ethylene Park. The state-owned No. 2 plant provided everything from schools to affordable beer. It had its own cable TV station and newspaper. Once, Li recalled, Wang Zhizhi, the first Chinese player to play in the National Basketball Association, came to play with the plant workers. Other times, workers watched Russian ballet performances or movies in the factory club.
Ethylene Park today is quiet and overgrown. The only visitors on a September weekday morning were small groups of retired oil workers sitting around chatting.
In November, Wu, the canteen owner, said he was planning to leave Fushun-—maybe for Harbin, a larger city further north, where he hopes for a better chance to make a living. He said he wants to open a new canteen, or study how to run a restaurant. He is still trying to figure it all out.
—Xiao Xiao contributed to this article.
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