In June, South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol announced a “national demographic emergency”. With the nation’s population forecast to virtually half to about 26 million until the end of the century, the United Nations’ newest demographic estimate speaks to his concerns.

Though this builds on long-run trends, only now is South Korea creating a specific ministry for population strategy and planning. But lessons gained from population planning initiatives along China’s Yellow Sea reveal that South Korea lacks a complete strategy. The background of South Korea’s demographic crisis is decades of economic prosperity and long-term complacency.

 South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol announced a ‘national demographic emergency’

From the middle of the past century, South Korea saw one of the fastest drops in fertility among humans ever seen. The newest UN World Population Prospects 2024 shows that the average number of live births a woman has across her reproductive years — or the total fertility rate — dropped from over six in 1960 to 0.72 in 2023.

South Korea’s GDP-per-capita is predicted to surpass Japan this year, the country’s economic revolution was amazing; in the 1950s, its GDP-per- capita was around half of Ghana. South Korea appears to have neglected to monitor China’s long-run economic demography policy, meanwhile, while it was focused catching up to Japan.

But unlike either South Korea or Japan, population policies define policymaking in China. Mao Zedong encouraged high birth rates, which produced the worker explosion expected to change the global economy as well as the Chinese one. Deng Xiaoping instituted a one-child policy and put that population to use from the 1980s.

The newest UN World Population Prospects 2024 shows that the total fertility rate dropped from over six in 1960 to 0.72 in 2023.

Less often mentioned, however, was that Deng also kept strengthening China’s educational, scientific, and technological bases. From the 1980s mandatory basic education was legislated; in the 1990s, post-secondary education spaces were enlarged, thereby starting the flow of workers able to be more productive than Mao’s baby boomers.

Simultaneously, China realized its fate would be to become old before it became affluent, based on 1980s Renmin University demographer studies. China, therefore, maximized its low-wage worker surge from the 1980s to the early 2010s by means of investor incentives that would eventually generate a world-changing industrialization process.

Moreover, Chinese policymakers guaranteed the expected comparable future growth in retirees from the 2020s would be less likely to hinder its long-term economic program by limited pension and healthcare pledges.

South Korea appears to have neglected to monitor China’s long-run economic demography policy, while it was focused on catching up to Japan.

China’s population has already started to decline, but its planners—from the 1980s—opted a strategy that would allow demographic fluctuations within a larger long-term economic growth program. Furthermore, on that agenda is China’s foreign policy using the Belt and Road Initiative to seize the development possibilities of “younger” areas like Southeast Asia and Africa.

Far from just observing demographic trends at home, China’s planners have a generally comprehensive and cointegrated population and development strategy at home and overseas. South Korea doesn’t need a population ministry if China’s population planners are any guide. South Korea needs a ministry charged with long-term thinking and a viable long-term economic demographic transition plan.