China’s Revolution in Family Structure: A Huge Demographic Blind Spot with Surprises Ahead

By Nicholas Eberstadt | Ashton Verdery @ American Enterprise Institute February 27, 2023

Key Points

• This report maps out recent and prospective trends in China’s family structure and kinship network patterns and assesses the social, economic, and political implications of these changes. We believe this is the first such study ever undertaken for a major national population.
• The report maps out changing family patterns through demographic modeling techniques, which simulate trends in family formation based on existing demographic data.
• Because statistics on family networks are not collected in China (or almost anywhere else), this area represents a blind spot for policymakers—a potentially fateful one, as shown in this report.

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Executive Summary

Researchers and decision makers in Beijing and the West pay close attention to many major Chinese population trends, including its pronounced sub-replacement fertility, its shrinking manpower totals, and its rapid population aging. Yet one momentous demographic trend in China has as yet attracted almost no interest: the transformation of the country’s family structure.

The reason for this oversight is obvious. Beijing, like other modern governments, simply does not collect information on family structure or kinship networks—so the regime does not think about the issue and its implications.

In this report, we model simulations of China’s past and prospective patterns and trends in kinship networks. We then use the results from these simulations to analyze, assess, and speculate about their implications for China’s social, economic, and political future. We believe this is the first study to think through the far-reaching implications of the results of demographic and kinship network modeling for a national population of a major economy and great power.

Our simulations show that the Chinese family is about to undergo a radical and historically unprecedented transition, as extended kinship networks atrophy across the nation and close blood relatives disappear altogether for many. This fraying of the extended family and atomization of the nuclear family come at an almost exquisitely inopportune moment in China: Social needs are soaring alongside the rising tally of elderly dependents and the shrinking ranks of those on whom the elderly can rely—two social indicators poised for inescapable collision in the years immediately ahead. Indeed, the withering of the Chinese family as we now know it will make for new and unfamiliar challenges at every stage in the life cycle, for both Chinese people and the Chinese state.

Our simulations revealed several key findings.

• An unexpected finding: In terms of sheer quantity, Chinese networks of blood kin were never before nearly as thick as at the start of the 21st century. Due to dramatic improvements in survival, men and women in their 30s today (2020) have on average five times as many living cousins as in 1960. China’s “kin explosion” may be an important, heretofore unobserved, factor helping explain the Chinese economy’s remarkable performance since Mao Zedong’s death.
• But that kin explosion has reached its zenith, and China is now on the cusp of a severe, unavoidable, and unrelenting “kin crash,” driven by its prolonged and increasingly steep sub-replacement fertility patterns. The implosion of consanguineous family networks, in our models, means that China’s rising generations will likely have fewer living relatives than ever before in Chinese history: A “kin famine” looms.
• Population simulations also project a radical inversion within the nuclear family, with living parents and in-laws outnumbering children for middle-aged Chinese men and women. Further, due to the surfeit of baby boys under the notorious One-Child Policy (1980–2015) and declining cohort sizes, growing numbers of men in the decades ahead will enter old age without spouses or children—the traditional sources of support for the elderly.
• China’s coming revolution in family structure stands to overturn fundamental social arrangements taken for granted today. The focus of the family in China will necessarily be redirected from the rearing of the young to the care of the old. The reliability and durability of familial bonds of duty will be an increasingly crucial question—perhaps even a matter of life and death for many, including frail and impecunious elders in the Chinese hinterlands.
• Notwithstanding the looming macroeconomic implications of old-age dependency burdens, the most consequential economic impact of China’s coming revolution in family may actually concern the micro-foundations of the national economy. Since earliest recorded history, China’s guanxi networks have helped get business done by reducing uncertainty and transaction costs. Just as proliferation of blood relatives likely proved a powerful stimulant for growth during the era of China’s phenomenal upswing, the drastic coming plunge in living biological kin in China between now and 2050 may prove an economic depressant.
• The coming revolution in Chinese family structure promises to have political reverberations as well. If the waning of the family requires China to build a huge social welfare state over the coming generation, as we surmise it will, then Beijing would have that much less wherewithal at its disposal for influencing events abroad through economic diplomacy and defense policy.
• Further, our simulations indicate that by 2050, close to half of China’s overall pool of male military-age manpower will be made up of only children. Any encounter by China’s security forces involving significant loss of life will almost unavoidably presage lineage extinction for many Chinese families. Autocracies are typically tolerant of casualties—but this may not at all be the case in the only-child China of today and the coming decades.

Analysts and decision makers in China (and elsewhere) have barely begun to think about the many ramifications of this great disruption for China’s future. Inattention to Chinese family structure is a blind spot—quite possibly a fateful one.

Introduction

Dramatic demographic changes are underway in China, and they bear directly on the country’s economic, social, and geopolitical outlook for the decades ahead.¹ Beijing’s official announcement in January 2023 that deaths slightly exceeded births in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 2022² and that total population for the country fell for the first time since the Great Famine of 1959–61 that followed Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward are only the latest reminders that population trends are constantly recasting the trajectory of “China’s rise.”

Researchers and decision makers in Beijing and the West pay close attention to many major Chinese population trends and their implications—among these, pronounced and continuing sub-replacement fertility, shrinking working-age manpower, rapid population aging, and emerging surfeits of marriageable men, partly due to sex-selective abortions. Yet those convey only some of the demographic headwinds facing the world’s largest economy and most populous society. One momentous demographic trend in China has as yet attracted almost no interest: the transformation of the country’s family structure.

Inattention to Chinese family structure is a blind spot—quite possibly a fateful one. The Chinese family is already set to undergo a radical and historically unprecedented transition, as extended kinship networks atrophy across the nation and close blood relatives disappear altogether for many. This fraying of the extended family and atomization of the nuclear family come at an almost exquisitely inopportune moment in China: Social needs are soaring with the rising tally of elderly dependents and shrinking ranks of those on whom elderly can rely—two social indicators poised for collision and rapidly. Indeed, the withering of the Chinese family as we now know it will make for new and unfamiliar challenges at every stage in the life cycle, for people and for the Chinese state. We have barely begun to think about the many ramifications of this great disruption for China’s future.

The impending upheaval in Chinese family structure is by now essentially unstoppable; a new family order is all but inescapable for China’s rising young generations. Because their parents had fewer children and they had fewer siblings, their children will necessarily have few aunts, uncles, and cousins. This upheaval promises to be massive in magnitude, replete with far-reaching reverberations—and is coming surprisingly soon.

Why has such an enormous, and potentially revolutionary, demographic change gone overlooked by China’s formidable cadre of academics, researchers, and advisers—and their overseas counterparts? The answer unfortunately is obvious. Beijing simply does not collect information on family structure or kinship networks—so the regime does not think about the issue and its implications. They plan for fewer people, not fewer nieces.

Such oversight is hardly new, nor is it peculiar to China. Standing governments have never regarded data on family as relevant to statecraft or security. Empires and states have been conducting censuses for thousands of years—the earliest of them in the Mediterranean and China. But in antiquity, these population counts were designed for taxation and military mobilization—thus, the focus on households and head counts.

That ancient design still informs modern statistical authorities everywhere. Although their techniques for surveying populations may be vastly more sophisticated nowadays, and although the sheer volume of demographic data at their disposal may likewise be exponentially greater, modern governments the world over still fail to ask for information about kinship from their citizens and subjects—and thus do not obtain it. Outside those working with the closely guarded population register data in some Scandinavian countries, who must apply clever approaches to enumerate kin, the kinship systems linking whole societies remain unseen.

In this report, we attempt to illuminate this major demographic blind spot in China’s population profile through modeling simulations of China’s past and prospective patterns and trends in kinship networks. We then use the results from these simulations to analyze, assess, and speculate about their implications for the Chinese future, in the social, economic, and even political realms. We believe this is the first study to think through the far-reaching implications of the results of demographic and kinship network modeling for a national population of a major economy and great power. We hope to demonstrate the utility of such explorations and encourage similar studies for the populations of other contemporary societies.

As we will show, the story of China’s revolution in family structure is more complicated than typically thought. Scholars, pundits, and members of the public certainly appreciate that the country’s family experience is changing. China’s notorious fertility-control policies in effect from the 1970s to 2015 are well-known, for instance, and it is not a leap to reason that such policies—and the other demographic reversals discussed above—presage considerable change in family structure. But how such policies and trends fit in the context of China’s shifting family landscape, how much has changed in the past 80 years, and just how much is likely to change again in the next 80 is a largely untold story.

Read the full report.