Baby bust: what happens when China's population shrinks?

<div>China’s population is ageing. It’s estimated that a quarter of Chinese people will be elderly within three decades. The relaxing of its one child policy – first to two children in 2016 and then to three last year – hasn’t stimulated fertility rate, which is still stagnant at 1.7 births per woman. In November last year, nappy producers supposedly pivoted their marketing towards elderly clients over parents of babies.</div> <br> <div>Demographers and economists warn about the problems that an ageing – and eventually shrinking – population will cause, in China and elsewhere. Also in China – an added political dimension as birth rates had been tightly and artificially controlled for so many decades. </div> <br> <div>With me to discuss just how serious the problem is, the memory of the one child policy and what the Chinese government should do now, is the demographer Wang Feng, Professor of Sociology at University of California, Irvine.</div>