China will have more elderly people who will be unfit for work by 2020. (Photo : Getty Images)
Analysts fear that the robust labor force will thin out to a few people who are inept for work.
Howard French, a journalist for the New York Times and an author of two books on China, predicted that China will be facing a shortage of skilled workers and the government will be subsidizing for a huge number of senior citizens.
He said, "And, at that moment, extraordinary numbers of Chinese people will exit the workforce, and the Chinese workforce, which has already begun to shrink, will shrink in a vastly accelerated way. And so China's going to face huge retirement costs and Social Security costs, health care costs, related to this immense aging of the population."
The author said that the problem of China's workforce shortage is caused by the one-child policy of the Communist Party. The policy ran from 1978 to 2015.
He said that the policy was "based on a faulty science" that was ambitious to maximize the country's growth per capita.
"Because the Chinese made a straight-line prediction based on what the present fertility rate was in the late 1970s, they made some big errors in their projections. Imposing the one-child policy meant that the fertility rate took additional hits. And the penalties of this decision are just now being born," he explained.
The one child policy had exceptions. If a couple's first child is a girl, then they can have another. This covered about 53 percent of the population in 2007.
Other experts share the same insights as French. Mark Haas, a political scientist at Duquesne University said that the Chinese government will be faced with the problem of rising poverty from an elderly population by 2020.
Haas added that the U.S. will benefit from this problem as China will be consumed with providing services for the elderly to manage its poverty levels.
