Ideas@TheCentre
If population is power, then what are we worried about?
Thinking big is currently out of fashion in Australia. That is, if you’re thinking about a 'Big Australia.' But what if, in all our worries about being too large, we're failing to appreciate the true 'big picture'?
This week, visiting Foreign Policy heavyweight Professor John Mearsheimer addressed the CIS on what the rise of China might mean for the Asia-Pacific.
Being an arch-realist of world renown, Mearsheimer unsurprisingly sketched a fairly grim picture of the future. If the past behaviour of big and powerful states is anything to go by, we can expect a pretty nasty strategic competition to develop between the United States and an economically and militarily growing China.
But Mearsheimer differed from another luminary who recently addressed the CIS, Niall Ferguson, in his assessment of what role America will play in this world. While Ferguson believes that the United States is an empire in decline, Mearsheimer instead points to demographics to argue the case for America’s continuing might.
Helped along by its ‘one child’ policy, China’s fertility rate has now dropped to just over 1.7 births per woman. This, combined with rising life expectancy, means that by 2050, more than a quarter of all Chinese will be over 60 years old. China will be the first developing country to get old before it gets rich.
And, Mearsheimer noted, China’s population is projected to peak in 2025, before it begins to decline.
By contrast, America’s fertility rate is the highest in the developed world. With a birth rate just shy of the ‘replacement rate’ of 2.1, American women give birth to just enough babies to keep the population stable. On top of this, America has strong inward migration.
If current migration patterns continue, there will be nearly 100 million more Americans by 2050.
Of course, China’s population will still be much larger than America’s. But for Mearsheimer, the picture of a growing America versus a shrinking China means we can’t easily write off the old superpower.
In other words, population is power.
Perhaps there is a good reason that the world of big power politics doesn’t always enter Australians’ minds when we think about population. Even at the current high levels of growth, we will never match the might of these two giants.
But, in the context of this very big picture, our current population debate looks rather, well, small.
Jessica Brown is a Policy Analyst at the Centre for Independent Studies.
