Description:
The book features articles by more than twenty renowned Chinese scholars, among them Nobel laureates in economics, Chinese Academy of Engineering academicians, and foreign members of the British Royal Society, the science academies of a number of developing countries and the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. Drawing on the newest available data, including those from the 2010 census, and using accessible language, the contributors present their argument for why timely adjustments to China’s current population policies will do much toward helping the country achieve balanced growth in both population and economy, and realize the Chinese Dream. Otherwise, they argue, the country faces workforce depletion, population aging, gender imbalance, precipitous rise in the number of lifelong bachelors, weakened national defense due to the large percentage of single children serving in the military, and the growing number of high-risk one-child families and elderly people who have survived their only child. These eventualities would condemn the Chinese Dream to empty talk.