1999 – The Millennium Approaches

For many years, I taught courses in strategy, leadership and innovation to MBA students and to business executives.  My approach to strategy was somewhat different from most of my colleagues.  I wasn’t particularly interested in complex models, nor did I rely on a textbook.  I considered the key issue to be addressed was strategic thinking, a mindset if you like, trying to work out how to look ahead into an uncertain and clearly unknowable future.  I would spend time exploring areas of likely and possible change, and then engage in the analysis of ‘what ifs’.  This was the world of scenario thinking, not predicting but anticipating what could happen and how to prepare for both foreseeable and less predictable future outcomes.

Part of the way I approached this was to distinguish between those issues where some degree of likelihood could be assessed, together with a range of less likely or even apparently impossible alternatives.  In the first category, looking at what we ‘knew’ about the future, demographics was a key example, especially as population change takes place over decades, and seldom moves quickly in a new direction.  To get a discussion started, I would show students some United Nations Population Division projections, looking at statistics for the present, for ten years ahead, and finally, to stretch their minds (or scare them), the anticipated figures for 2050.  Inevitably, the reactions went from shock, to concern, to fascination, even ending with someone using that well-worn phrase ‘what is to be done?’

Many years later I am not quite certain as to why I still find population projections fascinating, but I do.  I know my initial interest came from visiting China, and for the first time confronting major and dramatic population issues ‘on the ground’.  Two things struck me about the Peoples’ Republic back in the 1980s:  the population was huge, already having exceed 1bn, and, at the same time, China had introduced its ‘one child policy’.  That visit was to initiate my interest in demography, one that has been part of my teaching ever since.

Population growth was a major topic in China, in the 1980s, especially as 11 July 1987 had been officially designated ‘The Day of Five Billion’ by the United Nations Population Fund.  Matej Gašpar from Zagreb, Croatia was chosen as the symbolic 5-billionth person alive on Earth (I should add Croatia was part of Yugoslavia that year).  People picked out for unique events often disappear later.  In his case, Matej Gašpar dropped out of the limelight soon after his nomination.  I discovered he is keen on sport, and the League of Legends, a Multiplayer Online Battle Arena game.  Reports suggest he’s aggrieved at the way he was picked out at birth to be the 5-billionth person, especially as he felt ignored from that moment onwards.  This view is shared with Adnan Mević, the symbolic 6 billionth person. He was born on 12 October 1999 in Sarajevo, although that choice of date was later found to be a mistake!  Too late to change, the UN stuck with their initial selection.  Curiously, it turns out Adnan is another sports supporter – although that might be true of many boys up to the age of 20 years.

Adnan was the last individual to be picked out by the United Nations in this way.  There was no person designated in 2011, when the 7 billionth person was claimed to have been born on 31 October.  Making a choice would have been controversial as, once again, there was a squabble about the correct date (the US census people had chosen March 2012). To make up for the UN’s decision to stop the practice, several groups proposed candidates: Nargis Kumar in Uttar Pradesh, India, chosen by the child rights group Plan International; another was Danica May Camacho in Manila, Philippines, who was visited by UN officials, and the mother presented with a cake; and finally, Wattalage Muthumai of Colombo, Sri Lanka, was apparently chosen because of her birth date, but by no-one notable.  If there was a vote, I’d go for Miss Muthumai – what an ideal name!  As we head to the 8th million person, the projections are even less clear.  For the UN 8 billion will be reached in 2022, while US projections suggest the date will be much later, around 2027.  I guess we can settle on 2025 as a compromise (a later date is looking more likely as birth rates continue to fall in many parts of the world, especially in the light of two years of the COVID-19 pandemic).

If 1999 marked the end of picking a symbolic child to mark a population milestone, over in China, population size has been big news over the centuries.  Back in the Ming Dynasty (in the late 14th Century) the population was estimated to have been around 60 million, and that steadily increased over the next five hundred years, to be around 450 million in the second half of the 19th Century.  [These and all subsequent figures I quote come from the UN, and most are cited in Wikipedia.]  By the time the Peoples’ Republic was established in 1949, the population had increased to 545 million.  On 30 June 1953 China’s First National Population Census took place.  The official summary listed the total population as 582,603,417.  There is something reassuringly precise about that number.

By the time the world was getting excited about Adnan Mević in 1999, China’s population had exploded to 1.28bn. However, that figure masks other extraordinary changes, impacting China’s population as the millennium approached.  Of these, the most important was the one-child policy.  Initially, the Peoples’ Republic had believed a large population was an asset and was happy to see its population continuing to grow. However, within seven years the challenges of dealing with a rapidly growing population became evident.  In August 1956, the Ministry of Public Health introduced a birth control campaign, but with little effect.  After the millions of deaths that resulted from the ‘Great Leap Forward’ (1958-62) there was a short-term and significant increase in the birth rate, the total population reaching 682 m.  China’s leadership interest in birth control returned, only to be set aside during the first few years of the chaotic Cultural Revolution (from 1966-1976).  However, the topic didn’t disappear.  By 1973 a nationwide birth control campaign was established, covering both urban and rural areas.  Part of the approach was the introduction of targets to limit population growth.

By the mid-1970s a maximum  of two children was recommended in cities and three or four in the country.  Despite these attempts at control, the total population continued to grow, reaching 986 m in 1979.  Then the approach changed dramatically. The government put in place a one-child limit for both rural and urban areas, (although it did allow a maximum of two children in special circumstances).  The explicit target for the one-child policy was to keep the total population within 1.20 bn through to 2000 (it was to reach 1.29 bn that year).

The one-child policy was a highly ambitious population control program.  Like the previous programs of the 1960s and 1970s, the one-child policy employed a combination of public education and social pressure, but there was an important change in 1979: it added various forms of coercion.  Under the program, a sophisticated system rewarded those who observed the policy and penalized those who did not.  Couples with only one child were given a ‘one-child certificate’ entitling them to such benefits as cash bonuses, longer maternity leave, better child-care, and preferential housing assignments. In return, they were required to pledge that they would not have any more children.  The one-child policy enjoyed much greater success in urban as opposed to rural areas, especially as the birth rate for urban couples had already dropped by 50% between 1965 and 1975.  For city dwellers, the ‘great rule of demographics’ was evident:  as peoples’ income grows, so they tend to have fewer children, as children cease to be an economic asset as workers and become a cost centre!  For rural China, where a reduced birth rate would have the most impact, children worked: it was there where evidence of significant coercion, even forced abortions and infanticide, emerged.

Reviewed in  1987,  the one-child program had achieved mixed results. In general, it was very successful in most urban areas but far less so in rural China.  Despite its achievements, concerns were evident.  Given the country’s Confucian culture, the elderly expected their children (their sons) would care for them, as they had in the past, was problematic, leaving open the expectation the state would assume the expense.  Based on United Nations and Chinese government statistics, 1987 estimates for the year 2000 indicated the population 60 years and older would be 127 m, (the urban retirement age is 60), or 10% of the total population, rising to 234m by 2025, one-sixth of the total.  Assuming the one-child policy remained in place to 2000, those projections suggested 25% of China’s population would be past retirement by 2040.  Ten years later would be 430m, close to one-third of the total.  Even though China revised its approach in 2016 introducing a two-child policy, this revised strategy looks unlikely to arrest the growing proportion of the aged in the total.  Alongside this, the other major consequence of the one-child policy has been a shrinking and relatively small percentage of people of working-age.  Today, China’s task is to find an appropriate approach to optimize the ‘demographic dividend’, an assessment based on having what is seen as an ideal proportion of the working-aged compared to the rest of the population.

Demography in 1999 was important in another Asian country, India.  India had just pushed past 1.00 bn people, but its trajectory was rather different from that of China.  In 1999, India was approximately 28 million smaller than China, a country with which it had always vied in terms of relative size.  Back in the late 14th Century, its population is estimated to have been around 90 m or more, compared to China’s 60 m.  However, by the middle of the 19th Century, it had only grown to about 200m, compared to China’s 450 m, and by the middle of the 20th Century it had reached 360 m, nearly 220 m less than China.  While China was attempting birth control strategies with increasing levels of compulsion, India’s efforts were less impressive, and its numbers began to boom.  By 1999, it had nearly trebled in size, still below China, but on a much faster growth curve.  By 2020 it had reached 1.38 bn, while China had just reached 1.4 bn.  India will exceed China in 2025 (1.44 bn compared to 1.42 bn), and while its growth may be slowing, it is expected to reach 1.64 bn by 2050, while China will have stopped growing and begun to see its population decrease, to around 1.40 bn.

As the millennium was approaching, both these countries were still growing, but on very different paths.  They also left observers with a challenge.  On the one hand, China was under continuing criticism for its restrictive one-child policy. Those frequent stories reporting infanticide and forced sterilisation, especially in the context of a cultural preference for a boy, served to emphasise that China was ‘not like us’, often a way to offer a thinly veiled racism.  Facts were less important than perceptions.  When I discussed these issues with students, it was hard to get them to set aside prejudices, let alone see the facts in China’s situation :  to be fair, it was difficult to imagine the realities of managing a huge and still developing country.

On the other hand, India was woefully poor, with more than 80% of the population living in rural areas, where children worked, malnutrition claimed to affect half the country, and most youngsters had little or no schooling if they lived outside the major metropolitan areas (and it wasn’t particularly extensive there, either).  If my students found it hard to understand the challenges of China, they were equally at sea in confronting India.  However, a leading management academic, C K Prahalad, (whose books of strategy were used across the West and was named as the world’s most influential business thinker), also wrote about poverty in India.  I would encourage students to read his strategy books, and then The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid.  While this was a compelling account of what entrepreneurial thinkers could do, it was also an excellent source to bring home what it was like to live rural India.  India was praised as a democracy (back in 2004, it was still be claimed to be a democracy), but it was evident its demographic projections portrayed a country running into huge problems, with its poorly financed birth control campaigns doing little to stop this.

Approaching the end of the century, anxiety was in the air.  Major moments in time like these seem to encourage apocalyptic thinking, a sense of endings combined with new and dangerous future developments.  The two largest countries in the world by population were both growing, and, concerned observers suggested they were about to overrun the rest of us.  It was as if we were watching that famous ‘slow motion train wreck’:  the path of increasing numbers seemed inevitable.  Certainly, short term changes in demography rarely happen (only major wars and pandemics have a big impact, but even then, their effects are limited).

Anxiety was evident in popular culture.  This was the year The Matrix was released in cinemas.  Larry and Andy Wachowski (the former names of  Lana and Lilly Wachowski) judged the moment brilliantly.  We could stop worrying about a population apocalypse:  it was already too late.  Instead, they latched on to our fears about future technology.  What was coming as the millennium was drawing to a close?  The Matrix suggested we could be confronting a dystopian world in which humans had been trapped into an enveloping simulation, run by intelligent machines.  Perhaps fortunately, I would guess, most audiences found the action sequences far more memorable than the underlying story:  this was the film in which ‘bullet time’ was used, allowing action to slow down or even stop while the camera simultaneously showed a simultaneous set of real time events – especially in the iconic moments when Neo sees and stops bullets in flight.

While The Matrix was a great action movie, it also proved a perfect starting point for critical analysis by everyone from academics to science fiction buffs.  Seen as a cyberpunk film (combining high tech with social collapse), many saw The Matrix as a natural step on from Japanese anime  Among many such predecessors, the Wachowskis both admired and drew on movies like the 1995 Ghost in the Shell set in 2029 Japan, following a cyborg public-security agent hunting a hacker known as the Puppet Master. Like other amazing anime films, the story is dramatic, dark and embraced philosophical issues concerning self-identity in a technologically advanced world with augmented humans.  Perfect for The Matrix, along with Jean Baudrillard’s book Simulacra and Simulation, which is quoted by one of the characters, Morpheus.  As for me, I like to think that Alice in Wonderland was important, and it does get referenced in the film.  The underlying concept of humans living in a computer-programmed reality appears in many other areas of science fiction, of course, including some of my favourite books by William Gibson and Philip K Dick.  The film, and all these influences, played straight into growing millennium anxiety!

Robert Lacey and Danny Danziger in The Year 1000, provide an engaging account of life in England at the end of the millennium.  Their evidence suggested it was a time of confusion, with prophets of doom jostling alongside new ideas and messianic expectations of an inspired new world.  As they describe it, the first 1000 years ended with social changes accompanied by the emergence new technologies that would make for ‘success and achievement in the next one thousand years’.  It doesn’t seem we were any different in our confusions and expectations as the year 2000 approached.  I wonder what the new technologies are that will make for ‘success and achievement in the next one thousand years’?

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