Population Peak of 1.46bn Will Put Strain on China

China's population, already the largest in the world, will peak at 1.46 billion in 30 years, straining the country's healthcare system, putting pressure on jobs, and gobbling up a greater share of the world's food and energy resources.

The demographic forecast was made by the nation's family planning chief, who said the country's one-child policy would not lead to a reduction in overall numbers until the mid-2030s.

Zhang Weiqing, director of the state population and family planning commission, told a symposium in Shanghai over the weekend that the number of people living in China would continue to rise by 10 million a year. "This will pose a serious challenge to our social security system," he said.

The biggest short-term threat is of destabilising unemployment as millions are added to the workforce every year until 2020, when the working age population will peak at 940 million.

Despite an annual growth rate of more than 9% for the past 20 years, China is struggling to provide jobs for the surge of new graduates, migrant labourers, and former employees of defunct state-run factories. The government and labour activists report a rising number of protests by laid-off workers.

When this problem starts to ebb, a new one will arise in the form on a sharp increase in the elderly population.

Citing demographic peaks as the "toughest challenge for China's sustainable development," Mr Zhang said the population suffered from low quality as well as high quantity. He was referring to poverty, low education, Aids, and a growing gender imbalance.

The government estimates that 144 million migrant work ers have already flocked from the country to the city. Another 300 million peasants are expected to move into urban areas by 2020. Fearing a lack of people to care for the growing elderly population, Shanghai relaxed its regulations this year to allow certain couples to have two children.

But Mr Zhang said there would be no changes at a national level to the strict family planning policy. The government credits the one-child policy with trimming overall population growth by about 300 million births over the past 10 years, creating space for economic expansion.

If current trends continue, the United Nations Population Fund predicts the number of people in China will rise and then fall to 1.39 billion by 2050, by which time it will have been overtaken as the world's most populous nation by India, forecast to have 1.6 billion people by mid-century.