May 6, 2012
By Peter Goodchild

Groups larger than that of the band or the small tribe simply do not do as well in providing for the happiness of their individual members. A social group of a million or a billion may have military advantages but is more likely to operate as a tyranny than as a democracy, and China is the obvious case. A Communist dictatorship is, to put it mildly, an anachronism, and keeping the populace in submission to the central government is a struggle that cannot go on forever. The basic problem is that the country is an ecological disaster, and there is little sign of a solution forthcoming. China may have large amounts of cash, but it is nevertheless short of almost everything needed to maintain human life. It may be wondered where its population is planning to live in the future, when China itself cannot hold those numbers.

The Chinese effort at dealing with excess population growth has not been entirely successful. Since 1953, the year of the first proper Chinese census and approximately the start of concerns with excessive fertility, the population has gone from 583 million to over 1.3 billion. For that matter, since the official starting of the one-child campaign in 1979 the population has grown by over 300 million (Riley, 2004, June); in other words, China’s increase is equal to the entire population of the US. By a curious coincidence, Canada and China are very similar geographically, in terms of size, ranges of climate and terrain, amount of arable land, and so on, yet China’s population is 43 times greater.

Because of the global decline in fossil fuels, and the lack of any viable form of “alternative energy” on the necessary scale, as well as a decline in a great many minerals, large numbers of people throughout the world are likely to die of famine over the next few decades, in one way or another. Many of these will not be deaths by famine directly; famine will result in a lowering of the birth rate (Devereux, 2000; Ó Gráda, 2007, March). This will sometimes happen voluntarily, as people realize they lack the resources to raise children, or it will happen involuntarily when famine and general ill health result in infertility. China is already quite familiar with famine. The number of famine deaths during China’s Great Leap Forward (1958-1961) was perhaps 30 million, and the number of lost births was perhaps 33 million. This was the worst famine in human history.

There is a common misconception that if all else fails, China will still have enormous amounts of coal. That is not the case, any more than it is anywhere else in the world. The US has almost 30 percent of the world’s coal reserves, while China has only the third-largest reserves, totaling 14 percent, but China accounts for 43 percent of the world’s production (Höök, Zittel, Schindler, & Aleklett, 2010, June 8). With its enormous growth in consumption, it is unlikely that China’s coal supply will last until 2030 (Heinberg, 2009; 2010, May).

China is also losing water. As is true of many other countries, China is pumping at rates that cannot be maintained. The shallower aquifers could be replenished if pumping were reduced, but the deeper “fossil” aquifers cannot be rejuvenated when their levels are allowed to fall. Among the latter is the deeper aquifer of the North China Plain (Brown, 2008).

Combined with excessive population, the loss of water in China is leading, in turn, to a loss of food. Agriculture uses more than 70 percent of the world’s fresh water and is mainly responsible for the depletion of aquifers (UN Environment Program, 2007). In China, four-fifths of the grain harvest depends on irrigation. The fossil aquifer of the North China Plain maintains half of China’s wheat production and a third of its corn. As a result of the depletion of water, Chinese annual grain production has been in decline since 1998.