China needs to grow its population to counter big power India and a rising south East Asia.
China is already doing that with numerous government measures and incentives. What China won't do, is irresponsibly grow it's population like India.
India's population is growing fast, because the majority of it's population are poor. But India doesn't care to develop this large poor population into a proper workforce, or uplift them into the middle class. India doesn't care if these people live or die. All it cares is that there will always be lots of poor people around to beg the government and the upper classes for jobs and opportunities. It prefers a large pool of desperate and cheap manpower, not a large pool of skilled and educated workforce. Because those people could potentially rise up to challenge the established middle class and elites.
India wants to keep wages and expenses low, by keeping the poor desperate and destitute. So that the farmer keeps the food prices low, and the slum labourers continue to charge low prices for their services. But when crises arise like Covid, these people are left to die. Because to the Indian elites and middle classes, there are always more of the poor.
It is just so easy for India to grow it's population while it's so difficult for China to do the same. Because China actually cares for it's population, and doesn't want to see a repeat of the famines and desperate poverty. China is already heavily urbanised, and so childbearing rates have dropped because raising children has become a costly commitment. Chinese parents want their child to grow up better then they were. Chinese parents don't have children just so that they can become an additional workforce to beg in railway stations, to be sold for cash, or to be abandoned if they're not useful. That era is over for China, and it cannot return to those dark times. But all that is business-as-usual in India.
So under this context, I foresee that China could regrow it's population to some level of stability in the future. But it won't be able to match the explosive population growth like India. Still, China could maintain its economic development while trying to minimise its wealth gap. India OTOH will eventually reach a point of overpopulation, with a mediocre economy that cannot sustain everyone. And then we shall see what is going to happen in India.
