China demographics thread.

[Michaelsinodef]

I have to also mention that even in the event of population decline, the doom & gloom predictions are vastly overstated in my opinion. As-is, China is still struggling to maintain low unemployment, and with labor-intensive jobs inevitably leaving for cheaper countries, this issue will keep intensifying. The main reason is that high-tech advanced industries usually do not require as many people, the same goes for service jobs. You can see that in India - their focus on services led to the majority of people being simply excluded from the productive workforce. Even jobs in agriculture are shrinking with growing mechanization - I remember there was a report where Chinese agriculture had really low levels of mechanization compared to developed countries which were all sitting at 90%+.

I think the focus of the Chinese government should be not on creating another population boom (I think this goal is frankly unrealistic) but on securing a stable transition and ensuring a higher quality of the new smaller workforce. Growth in productivity and moving to high-value industries can easily offset the population decline, China has plenty of room for both.

I agree, I think it was about 25% of workforce in the 'tertiary sector' which does largely consist of agriculture but also various other jobs.

Still probably too high (think only 10% for the developed west), and I'm sure more mechanization is needed in Agriculture.

Luckily, if one looks in news (forgot which thread), there was a rather recent post about how drones, satelites etc. were helping in agriculture, achieving impressing numbers such as 30% reduction in water usage etc.

Basically, lots of effort is actually put into 'smart' agriculture, and well China is 100% self food sufficient (imports mostly for variety and also food for live stock like pigs etc.).

What's more, we are also seeing electrification on agriculture vehicles as well I believe, so even with a blockade and no oil, China should suffice (would likely need to ration, and cut down on meat).

 

[lube]

I don't know what his motivation is but his claim is ridiculous.

If the current population was indeed 1.28 billion as he claims, that'd be 10% less than the offcial number. Given how population surveys are carried out, the survey data would have to be manipulated completely from the village and street level all the way up. That's simply impossible.

National population surveys take place every 10 years. Each requires tens of thousands surveyors to visit every village and street, in addition to the numerous statisticians crunching data at the different levels of the government. Before and after the local survey data are added together and rolled up, they are randomly checked to ensure confidence in the result. The published result is not just as simple as someone declaring "China has a population of 1.41 billion as of 2021. Period." The result actually consists of data to the county level at least. It covers not only the head counts but also ages, genders, ethnicities, employments, educations, family relationships, family wealth, etc. The workload would have been enormous to fake all these data perfectly.

If his claim was true, there would have been 130 million fake head count added to the survey. That'd be more than the population of the most populous provinces in China, such as like Henan, Shandong and Guangdong. Where could the politburo have hidden this much fake head counts in the survey result? Even if the politburo could spread the forgery all over the place down to the villages and streets, a 10% difference between the published result and the reality would still be very noticeable to the tens of thousands surveyors and the savvy locals.

In between the national surveys, the surveyors and statisticians do not just spend days drinking tea in their offices. There are rotating surveys at smaller scales all the time to keep the data up to date. To cover the manipulation in national surveys, these smaller surveys would have to be faked systematically and thoroughly, too.

Accurate population data is critical for almost all economical and social activities. It is cross-referenced every day by all government branches to derive the statistics that are per capita, such as unemployment rate, crime rate, birth rate, rate of primary school enrollment, migration trends, just to name a few. A 10% off in the population data would make all these derived stats off by 10%, too.

Not only the government cares about population data, institutions, private and public, also need the accurate data to run their business. Can you imagine China Telecom, Alibaba and Ctrip planning their business with population data that's 10% off and not realizing the discrepancy over this many years?

His claims see-saws from being gleeful the coverup is collapsing under the weight of decades of lies, or they're covering up the coverup.
Before the 2020 census, he was claiming only a few people in the right places were needed to hide the true scale of the population collapse in China from the top.

Of course each new iteration brings more people into the conspiracy.

I can buy the population figures could be adjusted down every census because they made some bad projections, but he's a true believer of that 130 million number. The mind is flexible that way.

 

[gadgetcool5]

No one is arguing that China shouldn't try to increase productivity. Every country in the world wants to increase productivity. But countries with high productivity are at the mercy of countries with a larger market, because if you are a producer and you have no one to sell to, you are in trouble as well. As a related note, "jobs" are not a finite resources. Jobs are created by demand. And demand is created by having people to sell too. The fewer the people, the fewer the people who need jobs, but also the fewer the people who need goods and services, which means the fewer jobs as well. Overall it's a vicious negative cycle => fewer people => less demand => less jobs => smaller economy => fewer people can afford to get married => even fewer people, etc. eventually leading to national extinction.

As a related note, it's hard to get high productivity in the long run without a high talent pool. China's big advantage has been its large market and labor pool. And even if your worker is twice as productive as the next country, if you only have half as many workers, your economy will still be the same size.

Overall, a shrinking population will weaken China's economic size and thus global heft. Thus, the government should try to increase the birth rate. Even if a "population boom" is unrealistic, then at least adopt pro-natal policies to reduce the massive shrinking of the population. Frankly, Japan and South Korea need this as well.

 

[xypher]

China already has a large market and will continue having a large market, so that point is kinda moot. Are you under some Western delusion that in a few years half of Chinese will evaporate or something? Lol.

There is no positive correlation between individual productivity and population size. I would even argue that it is the opposite of what you are saying because it is easier to provide good education and job opportunities to fewer people. No country will be having 2x workers than China.

They should but not through banning abortions or protection like that guy has suggested. South Korea and Japan are in a worse position because the room for productivity growth is smaller for them - they are already in high-value industries, highly urbanized, etc. Plus, China is only getting close to shrinking while Japan has been shrinking for years now with a median age of like 47. South Korean population pyramid is also way more fucked than the Chinese one, google it.

 

[Minm]

His claims see-saws from being gleeful the coverup is collapsing under the weight of decades of lies, or they're covering up the coverup.
Before the 2020 census, he was claiming only a few people in the right places were needed to hide the true scale of the population collapse in China from the top.

Of course each new iteration brings more people into the conspiracy.

I can buy the population figures could be adjusted down every census because they made some bad projections, but he's a true believer of that 130 million number. The mind is flexible that way.

The Chinese government has a history of making the numbers look as nice as possible, but they don't really lie outright. Just like GDP numbers are manmade but broadly accurate, population estimates are probably the same.

No one is arguing that China shouldn't try to increase productivity. Every country in the world wants to increase productivity. But countries with high productivity are at the mercy of countries with a larger market, because if you are a producer and you have no one to sell to, you are in trouble as well. As a related note, "jobs" are not a finite resources. Jobs are created by demand. And demand is created by having people to sell too. The fewer the people, the fewer the people who need jobs, but also the fewer the people who need goods and services, which means the fewer jobs as well. Overall it's a vicious negative cycle => fewer people => less demand => less jobs => smaller economy => fewer people can afford to get married => even fewer people, etc. eventually leading to national extinction.

As a related note, it's hard to get high productivity in the long run without a high talent pool. China's big advantage has been its large market and labor pool. And even if your worker is twice as productive as the next country, if you only have half as many workers, your economy will still be the same size.

Overall, a shrinking population will weaken China's economic size and thus global heft. Thus, the government should try to increase the birth rate. Even if a "population boom" is unrealistic, then at least adopt pro-natal policies to reduce the massive shrinking of the population. Frankly, Japan and South Korea need this as well.

There are already not enough high skills jobs for university graduates, so increasing the number of children would create more problems in creating jobs for them. It's better to first try to move all the poor, middle school dropout children into high school and university and increase the population size again after that. As the number of graduates starts to decrease again in the future, there'll be a labour shortage and investment into new children will be very profitable. That's when the government should increase fertility with more drastic measures, right now it should just stop it from collapsing too fast. More importantly, they have to eliminate the factors that are holding Japanese, Singaporean, Taiwanese and Korean fertility down, which is mostly the high cost of education and housing.

Cheap costs of children should be the indicator to watch for now, the number of births will only become relevant later

 

[FriedButter]

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China's population expected to see negative growth before 2025: official​

Birth data for 2021 released by 29 provinces and regions in China so far showed that the number of new births in 2021 was the lowest in decades in several provinces, and only 6 among the top 10 provinces with the highest birth numbers exceed 500,000.

The top 10 provinces with the most births are Guangdong, Henan, Shandong, Sichuan, Hebei, Anhui, Guangxi, Jiangsu, Hunan and Guizhou. Only Guangdong Province has had more than 1 million new births, the Global Times found.

According to the provincial data, the number of births in Central China's Hunan Province fell below 500,000 for the first time in nearly 60 years. Central China's Henan Province, the city with the third highest population in China, had fewer than 800,000 births for the first time since 1978. The number of births in East China's Jiangxi Province fell below 400,000 for the first time since the 1950s.

The growth rate of China's total population has slowed significantly and is expected to enter a negative growth during the 14th Five-Year Plan period (2021-25), Yang Wenzhuang, head of population and family affairs at the National Health Commission, said on the 2022 Annual Conference of China Population Association on Thursday.

Chinese demographers predicted that negative population growth will be the dominant trend in the coming years for a long time and improving the overall quality of the population and changing economic development plans are vital to address the problem.

"This is an inevitable result of a long period of low fertility rate," Huang Wenzheng, a demography expert and senior researcher at the Center for China and Globalization, told the Global Times. "It can be predicted that China's birth rate will continue to shrink for more than a century and the birth rate in first-tier cities will continue to fall. The third-child policy may alleviate some of the problems, but it is unlikely to reverse the trend in the short term."

According to the National Health Commission, the average number of children women of childbearing age intends to have been 1.64 in 2021, down from 1.76 in 2017 and 1.73 in 2019. Of the 10.62 million people born in 2021, 41.4 percent are the second child and 14.5 percent are the third child or above, according to a statistical communiqué on China's health development in 2021 released by the National Health Commission on July 12.

"Low fertility rates mean that there are fewer potential mothers and fathers. The number of people willing to have children is also shrinking fast at the same time. Add these two factors together and we now see the trend of rapid shrinkage in natural population growth rate," Huang said.

Lu Jiehua, a professor of sociology at Peking University, told the Global Times on Sunday that given the current demographic trends, China will inevitably enter a period of negative population growth for a long time, although there might be some fluctuations occurring during this period.

To reduce the cost of childbirth, parenting, and education, many cities and regions have rolled out a set of measures, including reducing childbirth and education costs, to aim for a balanced population growth in the long run.

For example, Panzhihua city in Southwest China's Sichuan Province, with 1.23 million population, announced in July 2021 that it plans to dole out money to couples giving birth to more than one child, the first-ever official incentive of its kind to spur more childbirths as part of broad-based efforts to address China's demographic decline in the longer term.

"The overall arrangement of the social and economic development needs to be adjusted to adapt to the new pattern of population growth," Lu said. "For a long time in the past, China has relied on demographic dividend to drive economic development. In the future, the demographic dividend may gradually decline or go into debt. In this case, we should explore advantages in areas beyond the demographic dividend to fully improve the overall quality of the population and create new conditions for economic development."

Addressing young people's concerns and pressures about having and raising children, stabilizing housing prices and optimizing favorable policies may help alleviate the pressure of negative population growth, experts said.

"It can be predicted that China's birth rate will continue to shrink for more than a century and the birth rate in first-tier cities will continue to fall. The third-child policy may alleviate some of the problems, but it is unlikely to reverse the trend in the short term."

Addressing young people's concerns and pressures about having and raising children, stabilizing housing prices and optimizing favorable policies may help alleviate the pressure of negative population growth, experts said.

To reduce the cost of childbirth, parenting, and education, many cities and regions have rolled out a set of measures, including reducing childbirth and education costs, to aim for a balanced population growth in the long run.

So predictions now is that birth rates will continue declining for maybe more then +100 years and current policies MAY help alleviate pressure with a long term goal of achieving a balanced growth rate. Doesn’t look like to me that the government is all that optimistic on the trend. Could even be pessimistic as well.

For a long time in the past, China has relied on demographic dividend to drive economic development. In the future, the demographic dividend may gradually decline or go into debt. In this case, we should explore advantages in areas beyond the demographic dividend to fully improve the overall quality of the population and create new conditions for economic development."

I think China may start readjusting their economy soon to start accounting for the demographic issues in the coming years. Don’t think they will wait too long and see if the implemented policies will have any desired effects on the trend. Tho I suppose in the very long run then there could be a glut in the housing market, which will probably help reverse the trend to a point.

 

[A potato]

Those ethnic minorities are overwhelmingly of the same race (East Asian) with most of the rest of a similar race (Southeast Asian).

That Indian stinking up every thread with his pseudo-elitism perched on high from a white majority country that has nothing in common with him should be ignored.

Also to the innocently incompetent suggesting that China should start importing even Southeast Asians, catastrophic move. Average IQ there is in the 80s and at best 90s for some in the mainland (Vietnam). Completely different cognitive *and* personality profile.

Of course the Indian suggests that AND Latin Americans. SleepyIndian would do well to realize they score very low at any level of scholastic achievement, wealth creation, participation at any level of science, technology, or engineering, are net takers over a lifetime from the government (take more of tax revenue than they pay in over a lifetime), have far higher crime rates when compared to East Asians, every government and nation they established has been extremely corrupt with low trust between groups, and so on, but according to him since they didn't completely collapse those states where they make up a large population then that's good enough.

What I really don't understand though is why people even bother with this guy, he and his opinions are as irrelevant as a grain of rice or a bag of farts. His real homeland (the one him and his ancestors and his racial relatives have existed in for all history) is emblematic of *every* problem that could possibly exist.

Among the most polluted, poorest, dumbest, corrupt people and country on Earth. His opinions are worse than useless, they are destructive and honestly most people would do best not to expose their innocence to his inherent savagery.

The only minorities who do not look east asian are, Tajiks and Russians and to some extent, Tatars, Uyghurs and Uzbeks.

 

[JewPizza]

Those ethnic minorities are overwhelmingly of the same race (East Asian) with most of the rest of a similar race (Southeast Asian).

That Indian stinking up every thread with his pseudo-elitism perched on high from a white majority country that has nothing in common with him should be ignored.

Also to the innocently incompetent suggesting that China should start importing even Southeast Asians, catastrophic move. Average IQ there is in the 80s and at best 90s for some in the mainland (Vietnam). Completely different cognitive *and* personality profile.

Of course the Indian suggests that AND Latin Americans. SleepyIndian would do well to realize they score very low at any level of scholastic achievement, wealth creation, participation at any level of science, technology, or engineering, are net takers over a lifetime from the government (take more of tax revenue than they pay in over a lifetime), have far higher crime rates when compared to East Asians, every government and nation they established has been extremely corrupt with low trust between groups, and so on, but according to him since they didn't completely collapse those states where they make up a large population then that's good enough.

What I really don't understand though is why people even bother with this guy, he and his opinions are as irrelevant as a grain of rice or a bag of farts. His real homeland (the one him and his ancestors and his racial relatives have existed in for all history) is emblematic of *every* problem that could possibly exist.

Among the most polluted, poorest, dumbest, corrupt people and country on Earth. His opinions are worse than useless, they are destructive and honestly most people would do best not to expose their innocence to his inherent savagery.

Why are you racist?

 

[ember]

When women are pushing back children in order to finish college and start building a career first they are essentially doing things in reverse order of what would be beneficial.

Provide an incentive to have kids early in life. Let women with children attend college for free.

 

[JewPizza]

Provide an incentive to have kids early in life. Let women with children attend college for free.

Letting all women with children get free college unconditional is too expansive. Make it merit based so that smart women get free college while dumb women get like 25% off college tutition.