China demographics thread.

[tokenanalyst]

If every nation was dying at the same rate, you could make the argument that it’s humanity’s problem to fix. But that is clearly not what’s happening. East Asian birth rates are dramatically lower than those of Europe & America. Chinese birth rate is half that of India’s. Almost a third of many countries in the Middle East and Africa.

There will come a time when 95+% of the world’s people will not be East Asian or have anything to do with East Asians. With such demographic change will come cultural, economic, and geopolitical change. The problem may fix itself, sure, but not in the way you’d like. Even if East Asian nations resist the temptation of immigration, it will become harder and harder to defend East Asia's place in the world when you become such a small minority.

Wow, how do you come with these numbers man? How you disappear 1700 billions humans from this planet, even at a lower birthrates people are going to still have children, what ? every single East Asian is going to become gay or lesbian or something? In the worst case scenario unless a massive nuclear war happens East Asian population will fall from 20% to 15% of the global population and that is the worst in the reality is probably not near as bad, probably will fall just 2-3% due that birthrates are also falling in Africa and the middle east. Even the White Europeans populations will be still around, the reason why white European are becoming minorities in their host countries in due mass migration not because they are having zero babies.

 

[FairAndUnbiased]

The core issue I have with replacing natural births via artificial means is that it is taking more and more agency from humans as a whole. They had initially advertised that robots will reduce manual labour and allow humans to focus on creative work, yet generative AI have made that train of thought dead in the water.

Having children and raising them in your image is already one of the few things that cannot be currently replaced via artificial means.

What is the purpose of living, if all work is simply completed by robots and there is no productive work done by the living? I can already see a future where even engineers and scientists with decades of experience are outshined by the newest generation of generative AI.

That is why nation states are extremely cautious when it comes to Stem cell research which would make artificial birth possible, it makes humanity optional.

Anyhow, with current legislative and technological barriers, China and l the rest of the world will run into demographical crisis/resolve birthrate issues long before artificial birth will affect the outcome. Either way this ends artificial births will not be a significant factor.

Agreed. Based on current rates of progress assuming no big upsets we'll get to the proposed cyborg AI enhanced state long before we get to artificial birth. Genetics is way more tricky and controversial than robotics.

And I do think cyborg implants (outside the brain) are much more ethical. Chinese even hate GMO food, the probability that the population and leaders (from the population) accept genetic manipulation at a basic survival level is 0.

 

[Wrought]

If every nation was dying at the same rate, you could make the argument that it’s humanity’s problem to fix. But that is clearly not what’s happening. East Asian birth rates are dramatically lower than those of Europe & America. Chinese birth rate is half that of India’s. Almost a third of many countries in the Middle East and Africa.

There will come a time when 95+% of the world’s people will not be East Asian or have anything to do with East Asians. With such demographic change will come cultural, economic, and geopolitical change. The problem may fix itself, sure, but not in the way you’d like. Even if East Asian nations resist the temptation of immigration, it will become harder and harder to defend East Asia's place in the world when you become such a small minority.

To quote a certain writer, “it’s not the end of the world; it’s just the end of you.” I give it twenty years before East Asian countries recognize the full scale of the problem and begin to panic.

Why are you painting immigration as such a bad thing? Cultural assimilation can be difficult, of course, but there's nothing inherently flawed about it. It's the normal course of history, if anything. There was a time when Hua and Xia were separate tribes.

 

[asiandemographer]

South Korea and Japan will go gently into that good night due to their neoliberal political systems that do the bidding of a master that wouldn't shed a single tear if all of us Mongoloids disappeared overnight. It remains to be seen what China will do but here on the ground in China as we await the birth of second child which will give my wife a lifetime fertility rate almost THREE TIMES the local average (0.7 in Nanjing), I can't help but feel like we're heading to an almost Children of Men-like situation in the future except that in Children of Men, people desperately want children but can't have them, whereas in E. Asia, children are going extinct by choice.

Currently Chinese fertility rates are lower than those of South Korea and Japan (when they were at similar levels of development). As you yourself mentioned major Chinese cities have a TFR which is 1/3rd of replacement TFRs.

I think living is the point of living. What a strange thing you mentioned, as if our lives only have purpose if we grind and work through them. It's everyone's dream to hang out and have fun all day while robots complete all the work and people benefit. It's like having slaves but it's not unethical. Of course the two main caveats are that 1. we need to avoid a Matrix-like outcome where artificial intelligence becomes too intelligent in areas where it's not supposed to and 2. we need to avoid a situation when the uber rich own all the robots, use that wealth to buy more robots, and the majority of the population is too poor to afford anything and can't even get a job. The first issue is technical and I cannot tell you how to develop AI so that it is confined but the latter, I've seen handled in expert fashion. For example, oil exports drive the Qatari economy. Given this, it would be easy to imagine that the richest Royal Qataris take the lion's share leaving the rest to squabble over scraps but instead, they have a government system where the profits of the oil exports are split amongst its citizens like getting constant massive welfare checks from the government and I don't know if it's an exaggeration but I hear it's so generously split, that average Qatari citizens own mansions and have nice houses behind the mansions for the servants to live in. If we allow confined AI and robotics to generate massive wealth for the society and we can split that wealth like the Qataris, I'd say China can be headed to a Utopian society. Betcha people will be dropping kids like spiders laying eggs if they have artificial wombs to carry them and 10 robot servants to care for them while all the parents have to do is hang out carefree all day and play with them.

This is an extremely interesting comment, some of my thoughts, and I have studied this topic as a personal hobby for quite a while:

1. The whole of human history has been the use of technology to make humans more productive. However, humans have always just went on to do other stuff. This will continue to be true in my estimation. Example, before the industrial revolution, >90% of human population was engaged in agriculture. Today, we enjoy unimaginable levels of agricultural production with very small % of the population for most developed countries.
2. Human population (no. of humans) is among the most important human resource possessed by a country. It is clearly not the only thing, but among the most important.
3. Technology doesn't progress in predictable or desirable ways. I have been hearing of stuff like regrowing/transplanting whole limbs for decades, but they have never come to fruition. Human biology is extremely complicated, and we struggle with even simple things. To then predict that we will have artificial wombs, which replicates perhaps the most complicated process (basically a miracle) in whole human biology is taking it too far.
4. I think people derive meaning from their work, it obviously has to be a healthy balance, and something that they at least mildly enjoy doing, but work can be very valuable in providing human life direction.

Wow, how do you come with these numbers man? How you disappear 1700 billions humans from this planet, even at a lower birthrates people are going to still have children, what ? every single East Asian is going to become gay or lesbian or something? In the worst case scenario unless a massive nuclear war happens East Asian population will fall from 20% to 15% of the global population and that is the worst in the reality is probably not near as bad, probably will fall just 2-3% due that birthrates are also falling in Africa and the middle east. Even the White Europeans populations will be still around, the reason why white European are becoming minorities in their host countries in due mass migration not because they are having zero babies.

By current East Asian fertility trends, after every generation the population halves. This is the definition of an exponential growth (or degrowth in this case). This is one thing that makes stuff hard for people to understand, because humans are not very good at exponential thinking.

To give an example, if 100 children are born today, and a generation is broadly 25 years, within 100 years, 6.25 children will be born if fertility rate is 1.05 and stays the same.

If the fertility rate is 0.7, then from 100 children today, within 100 years, you will have 1.23 children born. (That's almost 99% children population collapse).

The worst part is that the TFR's are declining, and they continue to decline at rates that beat forecasts. Major East Asian cities have TFRs of less than 0.7, and the TFR still continues to decline. I couldn't have believed 5 year before that a whole nation of 50 million people can have a TFR of 0.72 (like South Korea), but the TFR has been declining so rapidly that it keeps creating "new normal" of situations which people didn't even think were possible before. Even South Korean statistical office now says that it will decline to 0.65 within 2 years, and these people have always underestimated the decline (though probably not this time).

 

[tokenanalyst]

Currently Chinese fertility rates are lower than those of South Korea and Japan (when they were at similar levels of development). As you yourself mentioned major Chinese cities have a TFR which is 1/3rd of replacement TFRs.

1.24 compared to 0.8 in South Korea.

 

[tokenanalyst]

If the fertility rate is 0.7, then from 100 children today, within 100 years, you will have 1.23 children born. (That's almost 99% children population collapse).

I am not a demographer but 0.7 is number of children that from average women are having, from 2 women only one is having 1 or two children. Either China is not like these Western countries when they take relax attitude to problems, if this REALLY represent a problem for the survival of the country and cannot be solved with AI and automation,i am going to be real, you now that women are going to take the brunt of this problem even if they have to take women out the workforce into motherhood which is the main cause of the declining birth rates.
But I do think AI and automation are inevitable and that will decimate the job market in the coming decades and the worst part is a self-sustained trend, the less people there are for jobs the more jobs will be automated. Sadly in this case women jobs are the highest risk, which could force them into motherhood creating babies for jobs that will probably not be available in the future, a global recipe for disaster.​

 

[tokenanalyst]

That's almost 99% children population collapse).

I thought you said 99% population collapse.

 

[manqiangrexue]

This is an extremely interesting comment, some of my thoughts, and I have studied this topic as a personal hobby for quite a while:

1. The whole of human history has been the use of technology to make humans more productive. However, humans have always just went on to do other stuff. This will continue to be true in my estimation. Example, before the industrial revolution, >90% of human population was engaged in agriculture. Today, we enjoy unimaginable levels of agricultural production with very small % of the population for most developed countries.

Yes, people will likely go on to do something else at the current point in development but my post was answering the question of what would happen if ultimately, machines got to a point where everything was done.

1. Human population (no. of humans) is among the most important human resource possessed by a country. It is clearly not the only thing, but among the most important.

It's "among" the most important because the actual most important is the population of educated and contributing citizens, so technically, it is education level x total population. As long as the educated and contributing population is growing or the same, the overall population doesn't matter because it's just a question of how much fat you're trimming, if any.

1. Technology doesn't progress in predictable or desirable ways. I have been hearing of stuff like regrowing/transplanting whole limbs for decades, but they have never come to fruition. Human biology is extremely complicated, and we struggle with even simple things. To then predict that we will have artificial wombs, which replicates perhaps the most complicated process (basically a miracle) in whole human biology is taking it too far.

It's not taking it too far at all. Technology can be unpredictable but it can also be predictable. Cloning, flying machines, heart/organ transplants were also imaginations of the past. As a matter of fact, nearly all technology was dreamed about before it was made.

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FYI, Nature is the most prestigious journal in biological sciences.

1. I think people derive meaning from their work, it obviously has to be a healthy balance, and something that they at least mildly enjoy doing, but work can be very valuable in providing human life direction.

You'd be arguing that people with a lot of inherited wealthy partying their days away feel empty and meaningless, which would mostly sound like poor person cope if ever brought up. Qataris seem quite happy getting massive government checks to pay for mansions, supercars and servants while unemployed. Being unemployed and wealthy means you can explore anything that interests you or gives you meaning as a hobby with no pressure to perform. Do as much or as little of it as you want. Not having to work for sustanence doesn't mean you don't have the freedom to work for fun or fulfillment.

 

[azn_cyniq]

There will come a time when 95+% of the world’s people will not be East Asian or have anything to do with East Asians.

I don't think this day will ever come. If the population falls drastically, so will the cost of living, which will in turn lead to a higher birth rate. The truth is that most of East Asia is overpopulated and its population was bound to fall at some point. The goal of these countries should be to manage the decline so that the drop in population is not too drastic, but to say that East Asia will become irrelevant within a foreseeable timeframe is silly, in my opinion.

 

[gadgetcool5]

I don't think this day will ever come. If the population falls drastically, so will the cost of living, which will in turn lead to a higher birth rate. The truth is that most of East Asia is overpopulated and its population was bound to fall at some point. The goal of these countries should be to manage the decline so that the drop in population is not too drastic, but to say that East Asia will become irrelevant within a foreseeable timeframe is silly, in my opinion.

Except the actual reason for the ultra low birth rate in East Asia is due to culture and psychology, not cost of living. Those things are not going to change without a deliberate push for that to happen. And where would that push come from?

Besides, developed East Asia ex-China, e.g. South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Japan have such a low amount of arable land that if the population fell in line to be proportional to how much flat/arable land they have, it would indeed be miniscule compared to the global population.