The Human Tide

by Paul Morland

  Increasingly old and disproportionately male though it may be, China’s population continues to grow, albeit at a markedly slower rate than was the case for much of the twentieth century. It also continues to be the world’s largest–but not for long. In the early 1970s China’s population was almost half as large again as India’s; in 2015 it was less than 7% larger. India too has been subject to draconian population policies from above, but these have been applied less systematically and for a shorter period than in China. Furthermore, India has been behind China in terms of industrialisation and urbanisation, with around one-third of Indians now living in cities as opposed to one-half of Chinese. The recent relaxation of the One Child Policy appears to have had little impact on birth rates.86 This is not surprising: there is no reason why Chinese attitudes and practices should significantly diverge from other east Asian countries that are more or less uniformly experiencing sub-replacement fertility.

  The result has been that, although India’s fertility rate has fallen, the average Indian woman now has almost a whole child more than the average Chinese woman.87 According to the median fertility projection of the United Nations, the population of India is set to exceed that of China sometime in the mid 2020s. The UN expects that by 2030 China’s population will peak and start declining, some way short of the 1.5 billion mark. Demography is hardly an international competitive sport–although it can get competitive in situations of ethnic conflict88–nevertheless, whatever the future has in store for China, it is likely in considerable degree to be shaped by the peculiarities of the shape, size and characteristics of its population. China will lose its position as having the world’s largest population while it is already a fast-ageing and at best a middle-income country.

  The Human Tide Across Asia

  While Japan and China have each acted as protagonists on the modern world stage and pioneered demographic developments, their changing demographic advances have proven surpassable. Since the mid 1960s it has been Indonesia, not Japan, which has had east and south-east Asia’s second highest population, now exceeding a quarter of a billion. Five other countries (which, together with Indonesia, will be referred to as the Asian Six) in east and south-east Asia have populations of 50 million or more: the Republic of Korea (South Korea), Vietnam, Myanmar, the Philippines and Thailand. Collectively they have a population of nearly 800 million, well over twice that of the United States.

  Looking simply at the population size of the Asian Six in the twentieth century, two things are very striking. The first is that their populations have grown astonishingly since the middle of the twentieth century: in 1950 they constituted collectively fewer than 200 million people, but by 2015 their numbers had more or less quadrupled, a collective average rise of more than 2% a year for sixty-five years. Population growth in the Asian Six peaked in the early 1960s at nearly 3% per annum but is now down to less than half of that and falling. The second thing to note is how that growth has slowed. First, mortality rates plunged, particularly infant mortality. Life expectancy, for example, in South Korea extended from under fifty to around seventy in the three decades following the end of the Korean War. Since 1950 Korean babies not making it to their first birthday have fallen from 138 per thousand to three. Over the same period, the average Korean woman has gone from having six children to less than one and a quarter.89 This is giving rise to the same sort of demographic problems for Korea that Japan is experiencing: the number of children in Korean schools has almost halved since 1980.90

  The other countries in the group, although less prosperous than Korea, have followed a similar population pattern. Thais, for example, now live for only four fewer years than Americans and have fewer children. (In the early 1950s, their lifespan was nearly twenty years less than Americans and they had nearly twice as many offspring.) Childlessness in Thailand is becoming common, particularly in urban areas, and seems to be driven by the same spirit of female emancipation as found elsewhere in Asia. The Bangkok Post reports a conversation in a coffee shop between fifty-four-year-old Varaporn and her twenty-nine-year-old niece, May. The aunt declares: ‘I have a house, a car and a high academic status. What else do I need? My life is complete.’ The niece, with a partner but no children, takes a similar line: ‘Having a kid is just too expensive… If I can’t offer my kids the best care, I’d rather not have any.’91

  Already the median age in Korea has doubled from twenty to forty since 1950 and the UN expects it to reach fifty by 2040. Thailand, a much poorer country, is not far behind. Despite economic progress in recent decades, its demographic progress has been faster, so that it is one of a host of countries which threaten to become old before they become rich.

  After running at full flow across Asia during most of the twentieth century, the human tide has ebbed dramatically in this region in recent decades. Just as neither the Anglo-Saxons nor Europeans more generally had a monopoly on the early, expansive stages of demographic transition, so they have had no monopoly on the later stages, with smaller family sizes leading to older and eventually shrinking societies across many other parts of the world.

  At least for now, east Asia enjoys the benefits of peace and in most countries a high degree of social harmony associated with diminishing populations. It is a dubious trade-off–of current stability for future prospects–and one which nations less advanced in the demographic process, in the Middle East and North Africa for example, are yet to experience.

  9

  The Middle East and North Africa

  The Demography of Instability

  On 17 December 2010 Mohamed Bouazizi, a twenty-six-year-old Tunisian street fruit vendor, set himself on fire in protest at the corrupt and bureaucratic system he encountered while trying to earn a living. His anger and frustration reverberated around a region in which millions of others faced the same frustrations, setting off what came to be known as the Arab Spring, a chain of hopeful revolts against hopeless regimes. While this action succeeded in toppling the governments of Tunisia, Libya, Egypt and Yemen, and seriously challenging the Syrian and Bahraini regimes, it was followed not by the hoped-for democratisation or liberalisation of these countries but rather by a messy mixture of reaction, chaos and civil war.

  The Arab Spring may be over, yet the instability to which it gave rise continues to ricochet around the region. It is clear, however, that the developments triggered by Bouazizi’s protest marked a sharp discontinuity: namely, that the Middle East and North Africa had been paralysed by ageing and unchanging rulers, with men like Muammar Gaddafi in Libya and Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, never mind royal houses from Morocco to Qatar, having ruled their respective nations for multiple decades with no democracy or accountability. Demography surely played an important role in events. For while regimes from the Atlantic to the Gulf were sitting static atop their subjects, run year in, year out by the same ageing monarchs or presidents, the societies beneath were changing fast and a key characteristic of that social change was demographic.

  No country in the region illustrates this point more vividly than Yemen. When Ali Abdullah Saleh came to power in 1978, the total population of this country (including south Yemen, over which, at that point, he did not preside) was 7.5 million. In 2012, at the time he was ousted, it was 25.5 million. In some years during the 1990s, the population of Yemen was growing at a mind-boggling 5% per annum, a rate at which a population will grow more than one hundredfold in the space of a century. (If Germany were to grow at this rate for a century, for example, then there would be more Germans than there are people in the world today.) This was being achieved purely through natural causes, through an excess of births over deaths. Yemen had not become a destination of migration. (Far from it. It was and remains so economically and socially underdeveloped that it has not even been capable until recently of generating significant emigration, so poor and immobile have been its people; cross-border and particularly intercontinental migration begins significantly only when a certain level of prosperity and modernity occurs as we h
ave seen in the case of people from southern and eastern Europe flocking to the US in the late nineteenth century.) Yemen’s level of population growth puts Britain’s mere near quadrupling of its population during the nineteenth century in the shade. In 1990, the median Yemeni was aged just fourteen.

  Although Yemen has been an extreme example of this hyper-charged demographic trend, it was nevertheless representative of what was going on in the region as a whole. In 1950 Egypt’s population was less than a third of Germany’s; today it has surpassed it. Most of the countries in the region have populations with a median age below thirty and in some, such as Sudan and Iraq, it is below twenty, although in most cases the median age is rising fast.1 Precisely how such striking demographic change worked its way into the region’s political scene is complex; that it did seems beyond question, for it is hard to envisage such youth and dynamism at the level of the population not somehow making its mark on the course of events. A country cannot experience a multiplication of its population and remain the same; it cannot have a young population without this somehow influencing just around everything around it. At least in the modern world, an autocracy cannot sit immobile and stagnant forever atop a young and dynamic population that is growing apace.

  Population Shock

  As everywhere else, wars and famines in the Middle East had set populations back and good times allowed them to grow. However, it was only as a process of modernisation began that here, as elsewhere, demography started to follow a recognisable journey rather than a more or less random path. Although much of the Middle East continued to be ruled by the Ottoman Turks up to the end of the First World War, European empires were making their inroads, with the British, French and Italians occupying Egypt and North Africa and the Germans increasingly influencing the Ottoman Empire itself; with European occupation and influence often came the start of demographic transition.

  In this region as elsewhere the data may be imperfect, but it is notable that Ottoman censuses began in 1831, not so long after those of the UK and the USA. Many of the Ottoman records have their limitations. Often this is because the objective of gathering the data was to estimate the forces which could be raised for the army and so focused on male Muslims, who alone would be recruited. The data was often compiled with little clear instruction from the centre, giving rise to issues of consistency. Nevertheless, early Ottoman censuses provide at the very least a useful foundation on which to base estimates of population.2

  Understanding the demography of the Ottoman Empire in the nineteenth century is made more difficult by the fact that its borders were changing and, for the most part, contracting. The Turks were under attack from the emerging Balkan Christian nations, such as Serbs and Bulgarians, who were wishing to liberate themselves from Muslim rule; from an ever-pressing Russia in the Caucasus; from the British and French expanding their empires, and eventually from Italians wishing to found theirs. Yet taking data based on the censuses of 1884 and 1906, more or less for consistent territory, it can be seen that the overall population grew between these dates from 17 to 21 million, an annual average growth rate of only slightly less than 1%.3

  In contrast to Britain, which attained this rate throughout the nineteenth century despite a significant population outflow to the US and the Dominions, the Ottoman Empire achieved its population growth with the assistance of what appears to have been significant immigration, particularly from the Caucasus and Balkans from which as many as 5 million Muslims had fled by the early part of the twentieth century.4 These refugee populations were escaping the territorial advance of Christian powers including Russia and the emerging Balkan nations, who were adopting what today would be called policies or at least practices of ethnic or religious cleansing, and retreating with the Ottoman armies back into the Muslim Empire’s shrinking territory, and thus helping the population of the Ottoman Empire to grow. The extraordinary brutality with which both Russians and Serbs cleansed their Muslim populations as they advanced into Islamic areas is today mostly forgotten. It is estimated that 90% of the Muslim population of the Caucasus was massacred or exiled as Russia extended its rule to the area.5 Populations known as Circassians continue to exist across the Middle East and beyond, the descendants of those who fled.

  On the other hand Turkey’s treatment of its own Christian population was often little better, and in some cases worse. The Armenian genocide of the First World War involved the extermination of more than a million Christian Armenians in eastern Anatolia and was but the largest and most brutal of the massacres inflicted on this unfortunate people by their Muslim overlords.6 Much of the dirty work was undertaken by local Kurds, albeit under the auspices and guiding hand of the rulers in Istanbul.7 The killing was often accompanied by rape and the enslavement of women. It was followed by a process of forced assimilation and conversion for those who remained.8 A similar process of massacre, expulsion and forced assimilation was soon afterwards applied by the newly emergent Turkish state to the Greeks of western Anatolia, a response to a disastrous Greek invasion in the wake of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire.9

  While Muslims were pouring into the Ottoman Empire from the Balkans and the Caucasus, immigration of a different kind was experienced in North Africa, namely the arrival of Europeans, first in Algeria in the wake of the French conquest (starting in 1830) and later in Tunisia, again following its incorporation into the French Empire. By 1900 there were over half a million Europeans in Algeria, 40% of them not French but drawn from other south European countries, and by 1911 over 200,000 Europeans in Tunisia, predominantly of Italian extraction.10 As in the United States and parts of the British Empire, it might have seemed at the time that such overspilling of expanding European populations would make for an inevitable and irreversible transformation of the ethno-demography of the region. However, as in South Africa, this was not to be; demographically, the European arrival was numerically too feeble and too late, encountering the first stirrings of the demographic whirlwind among the indigenous populations and thus their own numeric expansion. In 1941 there were a million Europeans in Algeria, a number similar to the total indigenous population at the time of the French invasion just over a century earlier. Yet by this time the Muslims had expanded in number to 6.5 million.11

  The impact of imperialism on the region is today still widely resented, and with justification, just as is the far longer-lasting impact of the Ottoman Empire on the Balkans. But the demographic effect of European colonialism was to stimulate a population explosion among the local people which was ultimately to prove the grave-digger of colonialism, creating demographic circumstances that made continuing European domination impossible. In the twenty-first century there are barely any Europeans left in Algeria while France has a significant North African population. This is not the demographic outcome which would have been expected at the time of France’s occupation, when Europeans still seemed all-conquering. Naturally, many factors were at work in freeing Algeria from French rule, but it is hard to imagine a settler population in Algeria continuing to rule in the face of burgeoning population growth from the indigenous population; and this fact is as true for Algeria as it is for South Africa or Zimbabwe. General de Gaulle considered the nine to one ratio of indigenous Algerians to Europeans as decisive in necessitating French withdrawal.12

  It is difficult to prove a direct link between Europe’s loss of imperial will, the growth of confidence on the part of colonial populations and the shift in population, but the circumstantial evidence is strong. The fact that European powers were awarded not colonies but League of Nations ‘mandates’ in the Middle East and elsewhere after the First World War has perhaps more to do with Woodrow Wilson’s ideology than it does with demographic factors, yet a close reading of Europe after the war suggests a change of mood regarding empire. At this stage the societies of the Middle East and North Africa were only starting their transitions. Both fertility and mortality rates remained high–albeit that a fall in the latter was fuelling population growth�
�and population advances could still be checked by the traditional Malthusian horsemen. Three hundred thousand died in the famine of 1866–8 in North Africa and periodic outbreaks of disease in the interwar years could raise the annual mortality rate in Algeria from less than twenty per thousand to over thirty-five.13 Albert Camus’ novel La Peste (The Plague) was set in Algeria soon after the war, although it probably relates to a much earlier cholera outbreak. Still, plague should not be thought of as entirely a thing of the past; as recently as 2003, at least ten cases of bubonic plague occurred in Oran, Algeria, the very town where Camus’ novel was set.14

  Egypt, the most populous country in the region after the fall of the Ottoman Empire, provides a good illustration of how the demographic dynamics in the region at this time were still pre-modern. Egypt’s population in 1800 was probably no higher than it had been in 1300 or even at the start of the Common Era, at about 3–4 million.15 During the nineteenth century, however, it more than doubled. People married early, with nearly a third of sixteen- to nineteen-year-old women married in the 1930s (over five times the rate in Western Europe in that decade), and there was a birth rate persistently over forty per thousand.16 Mortality fluctuated and could still be periodically impacted by outbreaks of cholera, but the effect of these events was diminishing. The standard of health remained low with the population experiencing poor diet, housing and sanitary facilities. Yet even the limited and rudimentary impact of modernisation had been sufficient to trigger significant population growth. The population of Egypt, experiencing neither material immigration nor emigration, doubled in the first half of the twentieth century, representing an annual population growth of 1% per annum, similar to that experienced by Britain in the first half of the nineteenth century.17