Playing Politics With Population in China : *Asia: Beijing manipulates the issue to gain the upper hand with neighboring nations and beyond.

China’s population pressure and its implications for stability have an important international dimension. Last February, the publicly acknowledged total passed 1.2 billion, and officials were informed privately that this figure might be as much as 15% too low. If the current trend continues, the population by official estimate will exceed 1.8 billion in the year 2050.

In August, the government issued a “white paper” in which it warned that continued excessive growth in the population will have severe consequences for China’s natural environment, standards of living and social development. But the government’s population-control measures continue to be hampered by problems of undercounting and stiff popular resistance.

China’s State Council recently re-endorsed its coercive family planning policies, which generally limit a couple to one or two children, for the next five years. During these years, 120 million women will be in the prime childbearing years. In the face of growing resistance, government pressure will only exacerbate an already difficult situation and could eventually lead to social instability.

Population density increases from west to east across China, reaching a peak in the southeastern coastal provinces of Guangdong, Fujian, Zhejiang and Jiangsu. It is these areas that have generated the strongest impetus toward emigration. Refugees, many of them boat people, have poured illegally into parts of Southeast Asia, East Asia, North America and Europe, where governments have so far been virtually powerless to stop them.

One aspect of this picture, which has not been adequately noticed in the West, is how the ruling group in Beijing manipulates the problem for its own political ends. The Tian An Men massacre of 1989, for example, stimulated considerable anti-communist unrest in Hong Kong, where people must anticipate a takeover by Beijing in 1997. As a countermeasure, Deng Xiaoping allowed himself to be quoted in the communist Hong Kong press as saying that, were the Communist Party to lose control on the mainland, 100 million Chinese would immediately flood into Indonesia, Thailand and other Southeast Asian countries, including Hong Kong, which would get half a million virtually overnight.

More recently, Beijing has winked at the incursions that Chinese fishermen make into the coastal waters of neighboring countries, including Taiwan, because the issue provides Beijing with bargaining chips to play in international diplomacy.

We can anticipate that the Chinese government will expand on these tactics in future years, and not only with closely neighboring countries. We may see government-assisted illegal emigration, tacit approval of piracy and even government facilitation of raids by private militias on neighboring countries.

China’s population pressure is not going to disappear, and the Pacific region will feel the consequences. Beijing will use the issue to its own advantage while it can.