As trouble has spread across the Middle East, China’s leaders have rubbished any parallels between the world’s most populous country and those authoritarian states. Wednesday’s population census, the first for 10 years, shows both the soundness and the flaws in their reasoning.
Thanks in large part to its one-child policy, China certainly has a less restive population. The median Chinese, at 34 years old, is 10 years older than the median resident of the Middle East; if Beijing faced a jasmine moment, it was 10 years ago, when the median age was 25, in line with Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Libya now. Jobs are more plentiful, too: unemployment has averaged just over 4 per cent over the past decade, one-third the rate of Syria.
Meanwhile, a generation of males has grown up aspiring to own property – often as a means to secure that precious commodity, a wife (all those aborted female foetuses have caused an unusual gender mix within China, with 34m more men than women). The country, in short, has a dwindling supply of the demographic stock most likely to stir unrest: young, unemployed and unmarried men, still living at home with their families.