China demographics thread.

[ZeEa5KPul]

Demographic projections 20 years out are probably subject to less uncertainty than economic projections 5 years out, yet nobody seems to think that medium-term economic planning is ludicrous.

Completely false.

The demographic characteristics of the next generation are more or less baked in according to the characteristics of the current population, and those are known.

If that were true then the UN wouldn't keep updating its "predications" every year. The proposition is false even as a matter of principle because the demographic makeup of a population is subject to intervention.

Who is to say that ten years from now China will not have devolved into a dozen warring states with little to no influence on world affairs?

Who is to say that ten years from now America will not have devolved into a dozen warring states with little to no influence on world affairs? America's political future - given its vastly higher polarization and teetering political system - is far more open to question than China's.

Will the sun rise in the sky tomorrow?

Your facetious question is a good introduction to a concept I hope you'll grasp: levels of uncertainty.

The reason we know the sun will rise tomorrow is because we have well-tested physics theories about gravitation and the problem is deterministic (at least the two-body simplification). The reason the UN updates its "predictions" every year and its ranges are so ridiculously vast is that the problem it's trying to solve has far too many variables and is not deterministic from known quantities.

I think that explains the ridiculousness of comparing generation-long demographic "projections" with the state of the solar system in 24 hours, even as a joke.

 

[Lethe]

Completely false.

Completely true. Economic projections even for next year can be thrown off significantly by e.g. CCP choosing to lock down the country or not, whereas there are almost no conceivable interventions that the CCP (or anyone else) can make to generate effects of similiar magnitude re: demographics, and even if there were their effects would take decades to show up and only significantly affect projections beyond the medium-term period. Any such interventions would thus be captured and modelled well in advance, by the updated projections you so decry.

If that were true then the UN wouldn't keep updating its "predications" every year. The proposition is false even as a matter of principle because the demographic makeup of a population is subject to intervention.

They are not predictions, they are projections made according to different variables plugged into the models, which are of course subject to any number of influences. The UN WPP itself offers many projection series. Here are the confidence intervals for TDR for China alone:



Uncertainty increases over time, but within a generation or two the range is quite manageable.

 

[Abominable]

Just something I thought some folk here might be interested in. The tale is a little more nuanced than the fertility collapse/ageing population narrative we are all familiar with.

View attachment 103239

Projection data comes from 2022 UN World Population Prospects, median projection series.

Complete speculation to extrapolate as far as 2060. There's no way a country can survive with 10-15% working age population.

What will happen is as the working age population drops the social services for elderly and children will drop as well.

We already saw this happen in eastern Europe and Russia and are now seeing the consequences of it in America and western Europe in the form of shrinking life expectancy and increasing infant mortality rates.

It's a death spiral for a civilisation IMO. Once you're burdened with 60% dependency rate taxes and support for working age people become worse, you're less likely to have children. That in turn exacerbates the problem for the next generation.

 

[BoraTas]

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.

I don't know what's wrong with centralizing and industrializing child carriage and upbringing. For the majority of history, children were educated by their families and village/clan elders. Starting with the 1600s mass education became a thing. People started to send their children to schools every day to get educated by dedicated teaching facilities and practitioners. It was a massive departure from normal human practice.

The same could be done for carriage and upbringing too. I bet having dedicated facilities and professionals that carry and grow the child would make having a child less intimidating. Most people are deterred by pregnancy and the first 3-5 years. After that, the child's education starts anyway. I don't see anything extreme with "mass" carriage and upbringing. Think about it. You request a child and you have it 3 years and 9 months later as a 3-year-old kid. If people don't want to find a partner, there should be options for single people too. Marriage is originally a religious practice anyway. It is quite obvious it isn't working for most people in modern urban society (look at divorce rates). I'd use artificial wombs instead of surrogate mothers though.

 

[ficker22]

I don't know what's wrong with centralizing and industrializing child carriage and upbringing. For the majority of history, children were educated by their families and village/clan elders. Starting with the 1600s mass education became a thing. People started to send their children to schools every day to get educated by dedicated teaching facilities and practitioners. It was a massive departure from normal human practice.

The same could be done for carriage and upbringing too. I bet having dedicated facilities and professionals that carry and grow the child would make having a child less intimidating. Most people are deterred by pregnancy and the first 3-5 years. After that, the child's education starts anyway. I don't see anything extreme with "mass" carriage and upbringing. Think about it. You request a child and you have it 3 years and 9 months later as a 3-year-old kid. If people don't want to find a partner, there should be options for single people too. Marriage is originally a religious practice anyway. It is quite obvious it isn't working for most people in modern urban society (look at divorce rates). I'd use artificial wombs instead of surrogate mothers though.

It really is a sharp edge, the concept of family is pretty mushy when implementing child raising by externals too much, and given how local governments handled Covid, the odd few will overexaggerate with this concept, leaving children in a pretty bad spot.

Having not sufficient bonding time with either of the parents will leave social problems later on, kinda like how migrant workers have to leave their children but now not the granparents, but the state takes care of basic upbringing.
The centralized caretakers are essentially doing a wage job, for them salary is mostly the main incentives, for the 3 year old the caretakers is half of their world.

It really depends how much time is -not- spent with the parents and on what ratio the child per caretaker will look like.
Workday daycare 8 to 5 propably no problem, anything longer than that, critical. Requesting a 3 year old child because the baby phase is to annoying and time consuming is basically adopting at that point. And those couples who then dont want to adopt children proper from orphanages, because it is not "their" blood are propably better off without children anyways.

Fundamentally tax incentives, close distance commute and integrated communities, longer payed parental leave (15 month minimum) & guranteed job perspectives afterwards are the easier solution in many cases. Also guaranteeing near relatives few days of paid leave, so that they can help take care. And in the long term the idea of extended family should be more emphesized again, why not let your aunt daycare for the child every third day, the other day father in law, next day great-cousin, etc. I get that not all times they live in the same city, but where it is possible relatives should be incentivised help and be compensated.

 

[ficker22]

Think about it. You request a child and you have it 3 years and 9 months later as a 3-year-old kid. If people don't want to find a partner, there should be options for single people too. Marriage is originally a religious practice anyway.

Coming from a single parent house hold I can tell that it is not a nice experience, one would always ask where the other parent was, etc. Some would develope inferiority complex, "being not good enough", whatever.

It is good that we dont have marriages out of tradition anymore, but I firmly believe that voluntary single parents are severly handicapped and in extense the children too.

Wage, time, availability, that is basically halved when being raised with one parent.

This isn't like a cat, which you can leave at home with water and food.


External caregivers give certainly relieve in such situations and China needs much, much more, but wanting to voluntarily get into this situation in the first place seems illogical to me.

All those chinese fem women demanding emancipation, single mother rights, whatever, are full of western bullshit anyway, those city scum never suffered once in their life and are demanding some hokus pokus without delivering anything in return.

Those women are basically Valley Girls.

 

[PeregrineFalcon]

All those chinese fem women demanding emancipation, single mother rights, whatever, are full of western bullshit anyway, those city scum never suffered once in their life and are demanding some hokus pokus without delivering anything in return.

Those women are basically Valley Girls.

I certainly hope this trend doesn't spread and mutate or else it will be like in the US where everything is about "my women's rights" and "toxic masculinity" , "down with the patriachy" bla bla bla. There has to be a counter narrative created to reverse this trend. Sadly western thoughts are insidious and spreads like malignant tumours especially with the ease of communication and the internet, I don't see the trend reversing.

 

[supercat]

Hangzhou will start to subsidize IVF.

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!

 

[Biscuits]

Birthrate going up and down between generations is natural and should not be fought.

Capitalism teaches that growth must be endless, including growth of population. But land is not endless. It is far more desirable to have a smaller population with good life than an overcrowded country where people's needs aren't met.

China is as of today the no1 economy. And if things continue as they do, they will remain so by 2050. It is fine to let India or someone else have no1 population. We compete in tech, in logistics and industry, not in having women that don't do anything but stay at home and have children.

Productivity will not be much impacted due to the high level of mechanization within Chinese industry, so what we actually fear is a drop in demand and not production. During this time, China's domestic demand will be vulnerable, but that is why the rest of the world exist, especially the global south, the countries of RCEP and so on.

Taking immigrants is also an option, but it is just delaying the inevitable. Frankly China needs to take immigrants to make it more international, more approachable by its partners. But not to fight the battle against nature.

A slow down in the economy is inevitable. What China can do now is to sprint ahead as much as possible, put its enemies into recession as much as possible. Then just sit out the inevitable slowdown.

 

[Staedler]

Technological progress is dependent on many factors, but the core foundation is population. Without it, the other factors are meaningless. If we viewed a competition between two groups - one with only 1 person, and the other with 10 people - ceteris paribus, I would expect the next innovation to come from the group with more people in it. We can of course modify it by varying things like investment capital, education level, and so on but the base these things are built on is population.

China is in a unique scenario where it's population is going to shrink in the future, but it's population is also getting significantly more educated with more investment capital, more productivity, etc. So a shrinking demographic doesn't cause the same doom as if it happened to Japan or other developed economies. As long as net productivity and innovativeness increases, China will make it out okay.

But sometimes I see people go too far the other way and try to argue that population shrinkage is fundamentally a good thing. Population shrinkage isn't a good thing, it's just a manageable thing because of China's status as developing country. China should always be looking to increase it's population - just on a timescale and plan that works for it. It absolutely should not be looking at shrinking it's population in the long-term.