Chinese President Xi Jinping’s recent article in Qiushi, the Communist Party’s flagship journal for outlining core ideology and policy, frames China’s demographic challenges as a strategic opportunity. It offers Xi’s most detailed vision yet for addressing the country’s aging population: shifting from a labor-intensive, population-driven economy to one powered by innovation, education, and productivity. Yet beneath the lofty rhetoric lies a familiar and contentious concept: renkou suzhi, or “population quality.”
The notion of suzhi has long been a cornerstone of Chinese policymaking, shaping debates on everything from education to health care. On the surface, it advocates for cultivating a healthier, better educated, and more skilled population. But its implications run deeper—and are more divisive. Historically, suzhi has been used to draw lines between urban elites and rural or migrant populations, carrying connotations of class bias and, at times, embracing eugenicist thinking. Implicit in calls for a “high-quality population” is the judgment of a “low-quality” counterpart, reinforcing societal divides in a way that is rarely acknowledged outright.
Chinese President Xi Jinping’s recent article in Qiushi, the Communist Party’s flagship journal for outlining core ideology and policy, frames China’s demographic challenges as a strategic opportunity. It offers Xi’s most detailed vision yet for addressing the country’s aging population: shifting from a labor-intensive, population-driven economy to one powered by innovation, education, and productivity. Yet beneath the lofty rhetoric lies a familiar and contentious concept: renkou suzhi, or “population quality.”
The notion of suzhi has long been a cornerstone of Chinese policymaking, shaping debates on everything from education to health care. On the surface, it advocates for cultivating a healthier, better educated, and more skilled population. But its implications run deeper—and are more divisive. Historically, suzhi has been used to draw lines between urban elites and rural or migrant populations, carrying connotations of class bias and, at times, embracing eugenicist thinking. Implicit in calls for a “high-quality population” is the judgment of a “low-quality” counterpart, reinforcing societal divides in a way that is rarely acknowledged outright.
What is striking is the emphatic personal stamp Xi has placed on this familiar rhetoric. He describes “high-quality population development” as a “new concept” first proposed by himself—a policy pivot aimed at addressing demographic shifts by fostering a “high-quality workforce.” Xi’s framing emphasizes a sharper economic focus: moving beyond controlling population size to prioritizing quality, optimizing structures, and enhancing mobility.
Xi’s vision is clear: a population that is educated, innovative, and adaptable, equipped to power China’s ambitions to leapfrog the United States in next-generation advanced manufacturing and technology, while remaining resilient to geopolitical headwinds. Yet the systemic realities of China’s political and economic structures make its realization anything but straightforward. The gap between aspiration and implementation remains vast, with no easy solutions offered by Xi.
It’s true that the challenges of an aging population are not unique to China; much of the developed world, particularly East Asia, is grappling with similar issues. Japan and South Korea, for instance, are contending with the burdens of a rapidly greying society.
But China’s situation stands apart in its complexity. Aging isn’t merely a demographic hurdle—it is amplifying long-standing structural weaknesses. The very obstacles hindering the implementation of Xi’s vision lie in the entrenched flaws of China’s economic and political systems—issues that Xi has either avoided addressing or delayed reforming. Persistent regional disparities continue to leave rural areas under-resourced and underserved, while the rigid hukou system, which ties access to essential public services like health care and education to your residence permit, effectively traps millions in low-opportunity regions, cutting them off from better health care, education, and jobs. Declining birth rates and shifting family norms reflect a younger generation increasingly unwilling—or unable—to embrace traditional expectations, squeezed by skyrocketing costs and evolving societal values. Further complicating matters, the state’s tight grip on private enterprise has stifled the innovation and risk-taking spirit critical to driving genuine progress.
For all its ambition, the path to achieving Xi’s vision is riddled with contradictions, with labor mobility as a glaring example. While factory and service jobs in urban hubs seldom require a local hukou, access to top-tier schools and hospitals does, perpetuating a tiered system where affluent cities like Shanghai and Hangzhou boast cutting-edge eldercare facilities and world-class health care for the wealthy, while rural areas in backwater provinces like Liaoning and Heilongjiang tell a starkly different story. There, aging farmers with no pensions often work well into their 70s, trapped by inadequate infrastructure and meager local resources.
As the population ages, these inequalities become even more pronounced. Older rural residents remain cut off from advanced medical care, while urban areas grapple with labor shortages in critical sectors like health care and elder services. Reforming the hukou system could ease these pressures by allowing for greater mobility and access to urban services, but such a move would disrupt deeply entrenched administrative structures prioritizing control over equitable mobility. Resistance to such reforms, coupled with the slow pace of implementation, leaves these bottlenecks unresolved.
Without meaningful redistribution, rural elderly populations will continue to be excluded from the health care and social support systems concentrated in urban centers. Yet Beijing’s centralized governance—and its reluctance to devolve power to local governments—makes such redistribution exceedingly difficult to achieve. Instead, the gap widens further, a stark reminder of the uneven distribution of China’s modernization.
Urban governance policies add yet another layer of complexity. Major hubs like Beijing and Shanghai actively limit population growth by restricting hukou transfers, channeling labor toward second- and third-tier cities. This approach creates a dynamic where migrants contribute economically to urban centers but remain excluded from the full benefits of urban life, entrenching disparities and undermining efforts to build a truly mobile and adaptable workforce.
China’s shifting social norms add another layer of complexity. Marriage and birth rates have plummeted, with the country’s marriage rate falling to 4.8 per 1,000 people in 2022, down from double that a decade earlier. Meanwhile, the birth rate declined to 6.77 per 1,000 people in 2022, marking the lowest rate since records began in 1949. These declines are driven by skyrocketing housing costs, relentless job competition, and changing attitudes among younger generations, for whom traditional family structures are increasingly unaffordable or unappealing. Financial incentives—subsidies for childcare, housing, or education—might help, but they won’t work without broader reforms that make family life less burdensome. Reducing costs, increasing gender equality, and improving work-life balance would require systemic change, but if history is any guide, the Chinese leadership’s wariness of “welfarism”—the belief that easing life’s burdens risks fostering complacency—leaves little room for the flexibility and empathy such solutions demand. Meanwhile, the deeply ingrained cultural preference for men that continues to dominate workplaces will take time—and concerted effort—to shift.
At the same time, the state pension system is lurching toward insolvency. Long plagued by low-yield investments and drained further by pandemic-related spending, China’s pension funds are projected to run out by 2035. Raising the retirement age—already a politically sensitive issue—won’t be enough to solve the problem. More sustainable reforms, such as diversifying investments and adopting market-driven strategies, would necessitate opening up capital markets and ceding some control over financial systems—a step for which Beijing has shown little appetite.
Even as Xi champions a transition to an innovation-driven economy, his administration’s previous approach to private enterprise has significantly eroded trust within the business and investment communities. The regulatory crackdowns initiated in 2021 wiped out more than $1 trillion from the market value of major companies, severely impacting investor confidence. Breakthroughs in biomedicine, health care innovation, and new models of eldercare delivery require more than state investment; they depend on the freedom of individuals and businesses to take risks, experiment, and occasionally fail. However, the state’s growing control over private enterprise, coupled with inconsistent and at times capricious regulations, has fostered an environment where caution stifles creativity, eroding the foundations of innovation essential for meaningful progress.
Comparisons with other aging societies offer valuable, if limited, insights. Japan illustrates the dangers of inertia, where delayed reforms led to stagnation and hindered adaptability, even as the country developed world-class eldercare systems. South Korea’s generous pronatalist policies have largely fallen short, unable to overcome deep structural barriers such as high housing costs and rigid gender norms. Germany’s relative success in leveraging immigration to mitigate aging pressures provides a compelling example of labor mobility in action, though such an approach remains politically unthinkable in China. These examples underscore a critical point: Tackling demographic challenges requires genuine flexibility, a willingness to innovate, and the resolve to break through deeply rooted systemic barriers. Whether Beijing can adapt these lessons to its own unique context remains an open question.
Xi’s rhetoric about a “high-quality population” acknowledges the need for change but stops short of embracing the systemic reforms necessary to achieve it. Empowering households, redistributing resources to bridge regional divides, and fostering the conditions for innovation would require a profound recalibration of Xi’s governance philosophy. His personal reluctance to loosen the reins of power continues to constrain the state’s capacity to respond effectively to the pressures of an aging society.
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