China’s birth rate just hit its lowest point since 1949—and Trip.com cofounder James Liang thinks that’s a threat to innovation

Trip.com cofounder James Liang has a blunt warning for aging economies: Without more children, their ability to innovate will soon stall. 

“We need more people to innovate. That is why population and having children is important,” he said in an interview with Fortune earlier this year. “If we have a declining population, not only will our ability to innovate diminish, but we will lose our capacity to stay in control of innovation itself.”

It’s part of a broader philosophy he’s dubbed “innovationism,” a tech-forward view of how society should be organized, and one that’s closely related to his longtime academic focus on population and demographic change. 

In Liang’s view, more people means more talent to put towards progress. “At the aggregate level, the amount of human resources put into research and development determines how much output you get in terms of patents and technological know-how,” he said. 

This puts Liang at the intersection of two debates in Asia: Whether the region’s economic dynamism can survive rapid demographic decline and what—if anything—governments can do to reverse it. 

A regional, and global, demographic decline

Liang has long been one of China’s most outspoken, demographers. He was a critic of China’s “One Child Policy” that limited families to just one child. Beijing eventually increased the limit to two children in 2015, then abolished the policy entirely in 2021.

China’s birth rate fell to 5.63 per 1,000 people last year, the lowest level since 1949. At current projections, the country’s population will fall below 1.25 billion by the middle of the century.

Demographic decline isn’t limited to China. Much of East Asia sits well below the replacement rate of 2.1 children per woman, the threshold needed to keep a population stable. Japan, South Korea,........

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