Factors Shaping the Future of China's Military

Mark Cozad & Jennie W. Wenger

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China’s population is changing rapidly. Although the one-child policy has ended, China’s birth rate continues to drop precipitously. At the same time, China seeks to modernize and professionalize the People’s Liberation Army (PLA). In this work, we place China’s current population dynamics in context to consider how demographic changes will affect the PLA and China’s broader society. First, we discuss China’s current and past fertility rates. We contextualize these rates by comparing trends in China with those in other countries and by considering China’s past population growth. Next, we document China’s age distribution—in the recent past, the present, and the near future—and compare it with that of the United States. We discuss other specific health- and education-related trends that will influence PLA recruiting, present information about China’s past and its likely future economic growth rates, and analyze the implications for the PLA and the country as a whole. Finally, we discuss the PLA’s aims and the ways in which demographic and other trends may influence its capacity to achieve its goals.

Demographics in Detail

Declining Fertility Rates

The size of the population and trends in population growth play a role in China’s capacity to fill its military ranks. China’s birth rate, or total fertility rate (TFR), which is the average number of births per woman, has fallen substantially in the past decade.1 But this past decade is not the period in which China’s fertility rate changed most dramatically. During the 1960s and 1970s, before the one-child policy was enacted, China’s fertility rate began to fall quite sharply; after a period of relative stability during the 1990s and 2000s, China’s fertility rate declined further. The one-child policy was formally ended in late 2015, although rules had been relaxed prior; China’s fertility rate continued to decline during and after these changes (see Figure 1). This suggests that the one-child policy is far from the only driver behind China’s fertility rate patterns.