The public doesn't like zero COVID and lockdowns, which I'm sure your boss told you during your troll farm briefing. Why hasn't the public successfully shot down zero COVID?
China demographics thread.
- Thread starter gadgetcool5
- Start date
because there's still substantial support for zero-COVID/lockdowns and since it is already a program that exists, opposition is harder to curry than for policies that are in their planning phase (for example: property taxation which has only been delayed 800 times)
A serious question: were you ever even close to having children of your own?
This forum really suffers from the lack of emojis because a yawn would be particularly apt here. Apparently asking for a serious critique is asking too much.
I don't think this will be the case. Chinese people are more confident than ever, but the total number of births, birth rate and fertility rate have dropped like a rock. Covid obviously accelerated it.
Fertility rate decline may bottom out soon and perhaps even rise somewhat depending on how effective government measures are, but I think birth rate will most likely stay around this level for many years. Reason being the number of people in the child bearing group (ie. 25-35 ish) will continue to decline every year. China's population continued moderate growth despite the one child policy for decades, now the momentum is the other way since the structure of the population has changed.
The "nuclear family" is a Western invention, specifically an American one. Its history is maybe a hundred years. So are mass produced contraceptives, women's education, and both parents being wage slaves. So is excess consumerism and capitalist ownership of the means of production. All post-industrial phenomenon. There is no empirical evidence any of this is sustainable. No more so than democracy was in Athens or the republic in Rome.
The West is heading towards self-destruction. What's important for China is to avoid the fate of the West. This means not buying into self-destructive Western ideologies like "automation will solve all our problems" or "the world needs less people." Robots are not humans. They replace humans. They have no society. They replace society. Western climate activists will have you believe that less humans is a positive future. What they actually mean is less of you.
Where all this finally leads is human extinction, or more precisely, the extinction of nations that follow the Western way. Sooner or later, the world will wake up to the suicidal nature of modern Western culture. But it's going to take a terrible, horrible first example. Like a society literally collapsing from the lack of people. Currently that's looking to be South Korea or Taiwan. Unfortunately East Asia has surpassed the West in the trend; and if China wants to not also be an example that wakes up the rest of the world, then it needs to get its priorities straight right now and stop following the rest of East Asia.
It doesn't need to be anything extreme. The policy required has already been discussed. It comes down to taxing single people to support families, so that you get back to a society in which marriage and family are incentivized, and children are seen as an investment, instead of a cost.
The reason you have to do this is because modern consumerism is actually like a drug - an addiction that perverts people's values to such an extent that they end up acting against their own biological need to survive and reproduce. Just look at all the young people who aren't willing to marry or have children because it'd "decrease their quality of life." By which they mean buy, buy, buy.
Correction won't happen naturally - having the older generation pressure the younger generation to start families isn't enough, in the same way your parents can't convince you out of a heroin addiction. You have to deal with it like you deal with opium. The government must get involved.
The West is heading towards self-destruction. What's important for China is to avoid the fate of the West. This means not buying into self-destructive Western ideologies like "automation will solve all our problems" or "the world needs less people." Robots are not humans. They replace humans. They have no society. They replace society. Western climate activists will have you believe that less humans is a positive future. What they actually mean is less of you.
Where all this finally leads is human extinction, or more precisely, the extinction of nations that follow the Western way. Sooner or later, the world will wake up to the suicidal nature of modern Western culture. But it's going to take a terrible, horrible first example. Like a society literally collapsing from the lack of people. Currently that's looking to be South Korea or Taiwan. Unfortunately East Asia has surpassed the West in the trend; and if China wants to not also be an example that wakes up the rest of the world, then it needs to get its priorities straight right now and stop following the rest of East Asia.
It doesn't need to be anything extreme. The policy required has already been discussed. It comes down to taxing single people to support families, so that you get back to a society in which marriage and family are incentivized, and children are seen as an investment, instead of a cost.
The reason you have to do this is because modern consumerism is actually like a drug - an addiction that perverts people's values to such an extent that they end up acting against their own biological need to survive and reproduce. Just look at all the young people who aren't willing to marry or have children because it'd "decrease their quality of life." By which they mean buy, buy, buy.
Correction won't happen naturally - having the older generation pressure the younger generation to start families isn't enough, in the same way your parents can't convince you out of a heroin addiction. You have to deal with it like you deal with opium. The government must get involved.
Here's a serious critique - and I say this, having once thought of ideas similar to yours:
The problem with breeding and raising children in mass state-run facilities is that it breaks down the fundamental fabrics of society, which is the institution of the family. Not the "nuclear family" that the West promotes, but the extended, clan-based family that humanity has evolved around for hundreds of thousands of years.
The family is the foundation of society. Every social function derives from it. Your first and strongest relationships come from your family. They form the bed rock of bonds from which other relationships grow, the basis of cultural transmission, and the most basic reason for collaboration. This latter aspect is particularly important, because children learn to care about others through their interactions with their family, who provide them with love without condition. You can't get that from hired nurses.
Children without families, who grow up in orphanages, are often "broken"; they suffer from problems like persistent insecurity, anxiety, delinquency, depression, anger, and aggression. Even if this can be solved with better institutional care, there is still no telling what the effects on society at large will be. When these children graduate as adults and begin to interact with natural families, it is likely there will be conflict and resentment. That could cause serious social problems and divides within society, and the consequences are not in any way predictable.
Just as importantly, however, you don't need to go this extreme. Solving the modern fertility problem is just about changing the reward incentive. Fix the addiction to Western consumerism. Reward the family over the individual. Send the signal to single people that they can either start families themselves, or see their extra income go to support those that do.
Most likely, the above would work; and if it doesn't, then we can talk about extreme solutions.
Basically, taxes *for everyone* would then need to start going up. Probably by quite a bit. Enough so they can pay for:
direct costs of raising and schooling a kid until they're either 18 or perhaps even out of college.
indirect costs of larger house, larger car for the extra kid.
Indirect costs for the state, of additional kindergartens, schools, medical facilities etc, all the infrastructure to match the additional kids being born.
And all that for roughly additional 8 or so million kids per year. Costs might amount to some 100 to 150 thousand USD per kid. So lets say 800 billion to 1.2 trillion USD extra for the state budget, per year. Lets say roughly one fifth more than the current state budget for China. Costs per kid are very approximate and I'd appreciate someone else doing a more precise rundown.
Raising state revenues by 20 percent through other means and not taxes in the short term - Not sure that's doable. Short term is key, though. While one might be tempted to distribute the costs over 18 or more years - much better incentive would be if the state paid people out in just several huge instalments. Literally to pay off most of the costs within the first few years. Perhaps make some work like loans - so if the the kid moves out of the country or dies, parents need to repay some of the loan. Or they can choose not to accept the money in the first place.
As for the impact of such taxes on economy - eh, it might be prohibitively high. (some ten years ago taxes made up little under 90% of all state revenue. not sure what's the situation today)
direct costs of raising and schooling a kid until they're either 18 or perhaps even out of college.
indirect costs of larger house, larger car for the extra kid.
Indirect costs for the state, of additional kindergartens, schools, medical facilities etc, all the infrastructure to match the additional kids being born.
And all that for roughly additional 8 or so million kids per year. Costs might amount to some 100 to 150 thousand USD per kid. So lets say 800 billion to 1.2 trillion USD extra for the state budget, per year. Lets say roughly one fifth more than the current state budget for China. Costs per kid are very approximate and I'd appreciate someone else doing a more precise rundown.
Raising state revenues by 20 percent through other means and not taxes in the short term - Not sure that's doable. Short term is key, though. While one might be tempted to distribute the costs over 18 or more years - much better incentive would be if the state paid people out in just several huge instalments. Literally to pay off most of the costs within the first few years. Perhaps make some work like loans - so if the the kid moves out of the country or dies, parents need to repay some of the loan. Or they can choose not to accept the money in the first place.
As for the impact of such taxes on economy - eh, it might be prohibitively high. (some ten years ago taxes made up little under 90% of all state revenue. not sure what's the situation today)
I could not disagree more. I appreciate the seriousness of your response and I don't mean to belittle you at all by saying this, but you have a fundamentally conservative worldview I don't share at all in that you think the answers to social ills lie backward. In my view the answers - if there are any - lie forward, not back. As you ably argued in your prior post, capitalism destroyed the old familial and clan-based attachments communities had. The new relations of production detached people from their land and packed them into factories, and eventually into the skyscraper shoeboxes of the modern city.
I applaud capitalism for having done this. I don't have any sentimental attachments to old traditions and relationships, and despite its pathologies capitalism has managed to raise human productivity and technological advancement to heights antecedent societies couldn't have dreamt. These relationships have become untenable; there are still clan-based societies that demonstrate by their example just what can be expected from them in the modern age: Syria and Libya.
My proposal replaces both the backward petty regionalism and tribalism of the clan-based social fabric and the cultural wasteland of capitalism with a much better fabric. These children would grow up with the idea of China itself as their family and understand their duty to it.
That depends on how you define "family." As I pointed out above, these children would grow up with the idea of the state as their extended family and themselves as their immediate family.
There is a loose historical precedent to this: the janissaries of the Ottoman Empire. These were military units famed for their cohesion and discipline formed by abducting young children from Christian families, converting them to Islam, and raising them in military camps (the legacy of this institution is a large part of the reason there's such hatred between Muslims and Christians in the Balkans today). These children formed very close bonds with one another and eventually became a powerful political force.
Of course, in my idea the children wouldn't be abducted but born to surrogate mothers and they would be raised to be scientists and engineers (primarily, they could of course choose to study whatever they wish once they were old enough to make the decision), not soldiers.
As I stated previously, that's a function of the children being unwanted rather than being raised in orphanages per se. Unwanted children born to conventional families often exhibit the same pathologies.
That's reasonable. I was motivated by a desire to solve this demographic problem in its most extreme, caricatured manifestation because it's the only argument China-haters have with even a semblance of validity, so I accept that my solution has a radical character. I feel better knowing that it's sitting in the desk of some government planning bureau and can be pulled out should the need arise.
