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Rust bucket punctured by population exodus
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DONG Cheng, a Qiqihar resident in his 50s, feels increasingly isolated as most of his friends leave the city in northeast China’s Heilongjiang Province.
Some have moved to bigger cities like Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen in search of better-paying jobs. Others have moved south to care for grandchildren. China’s once flourishing industrial northeast region has become the nation’s rust bucket.
According to the Qiqihar Statistics Bureau, about 85,000 residents moved out of the city in 2014, compared with about 48,000 people moving in. The net outflow was about 25,000 in 2013.
Qiqihar is not the only northeastern city suffering a population contraction. According to the national census of 2010, the northeastern provinces of Heilongjiang, Jilin and Lioaning had a net population outflow of 1.8 million people. That compares with a net inflow of 360,000 in 2000.
The demographic change has a severe impact on local economies.
“There was a time when long queues always formed at popular restaurants in our community,” says Dong. “Nowadays, no more.”
About eight restaurants in the Shunyi Community where Dong lives have closed this year, and prices for existing apartments in the community dropped from 5,500 yuan (US$806.45) to 4,800 yuan within a single year.
Dong works at the Qiqihar No. 1 Machine Tool Factory. It employed 10,000 workers at its peak. Today only about 1,000 remain.
“Many old people have left town, and few young people want to come and live here,” says factory worker Zhao Wu, who’s in charge of the company dormitory.
Those dorms were packed a dozen years ago. Now they house only 100 workers.
The northeast used to be China’s industrial heartland. The No. 1 Machine Tool Factory was once among the so-called “big seven factories” of the region. Today, most of them have been crippled by recession, if they continue to operate at all.
Dong says his salary has been decreasing since 2010. He now earns about 1,000 yuan a month. His son, who graduated last year, is working in Beijing, where he complains about high rents eating into his take-home pay. But Dong encourages him to stay there. Finding a good job in Qiqihar is practically impossible.
To the south in Liaoning Province, maternity nurse Zhao Yanhua sits idle in her nursing station at the Anshan Central Hospital.
“We get only about 50-60 newborns a month now,” she says. “We used to get 200-300 in the 1980s. We needed three nurses on every shift back then; now one suffices.”
The birth rates of Heilongjiang, Jilin and Liaoning provinces are lower than the national average, while the proportion of elderly people is rising.
“An aging population and a dwindling labor force are creating low birth rates,” says Luo Dandan, an academic at the Heilongjiang Academy of Social Science.
His report “Heilongjiang’s Population Problems and Possible Strategies” sheds light on the dire situation in the region.
The proportion of those 60 years or older increased from 7.4 percent to 14.8 percent between 1995 and 2012, the report said. It estimates that the aged population will reach about 7.6 million, or 19 percent of the province’s total, by 2020, and then surpass 33 percent by 2045.
A revision in China’s family planning policy, allowing offspring of one-child families to have a second child, isn’t doing much to change the demographics. Since April 2014, only 6,484 couples have applied and completed procedures to have a second child, only 1.6 percent of the eligible population.
“It seems to be a common view among many northeast residents that it is costly and just not worth it to have even one child,” says Fu Cheng, a researcher at the Jilin Academy of Social Sciences.
He says many older couples aren’t interested in having another child, and many young people are so “selfish” that they want to avoid family obligations altogether.
“Many young people have a child only to please their parents,” he says. “I think the family planning policy needs to be further eased. I doubt there will be a population explosion.”
What the northeast really needs, says Feng Lei, a researcher of China Academy of Social Science, is a whole new way of structuring its economy. It used to be the center for heavy industry and primary products, but the global and national focus has changed. Nowadays, the emphasis has shifted to the Internet age and other advanced technologies. The northeast wasn’t prepared and got left out in the cold.
In a sense, it’s catch-22. The more the economy declines, the more people leave. The more people leave, the more the economy declines.
“Heilongjiang residents are moving to more economically advantaged regions,” Luo says. “The economy is what’s driving population exodus.”
“Many talented academics are moving south,” says Professor Han Junjiang at Northeast Normal University. “And millions of rural workers have migrated from home.”
People are even moving across the border to work or study in neighboring Russia and South Korea, according to Professor Wang Xiaofeng at Jilin University Northeast’s Asia Research Center. He cites a 2011 study of three counties in Heilongjiang that showed a fifth of the local population had crossed the border.
Yi Fujian, who wrote the best-selling book “With an Empty Nest,” says both Japan and Europe faced economic crises at turning points in their population growth — just the kind the northeast needs.
“Northeast China reached a similar turning point in 2013, when its economy started to decline,” he says. “Considering that the 14-and-under population is only about 12 percent of total population in the region, a serious labor shortage is coming.”
Big cities like Beijing and Shanghai also face lower birth rates, but the demographic gaps are being filled by increasing inflows of migrants.
In Shanghai, for example, about 29 percent of registered local residents were 60 years or older at the end of 2014, but about 10 million migrant population have flooded into the city. Shorter-term migrants tend to be young, able-bodied workers.
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