China demographics thread.

[doggydogdo]

Seriously, sometimes I ask myself when the CCP introduced the one child policy didn't the experts who drafted this policy predict the obvious consequences of such a policy and the long term consequences this will have on the country? For a party that's known to think long term wise I'm surprised they didn't foresee this or if they did then they ignored it for some reason.

China already doesn't have much arable land compared with its population, one Child policy is needed for common prosperity

 

[FairAndUnbiased]

I wonder if suburbanization would help bring the fertility rate up. China should build low-density housing in rural areas that are only available to couples with multiple children.

It did not help the US. US is mostly suburbanized yet birth rates are still falling like a rock while maternal and infant mortality is skyrocketing.

Suburbanization brings other negative effects like low efficiency infrastructure, high energy usage, etc. And in fact Chinese rural areas are already more suburban than what people think of as rural in the US.

"Core" countries like China, Japan, Italy, France, India, etc follow the village format where people live in a town and go out to the fields. This is historically so infrastructure like wells, blacksmiths and town walls were efficient. It isn't a 1 family farm in the middle of nowhere. So the "low density but communal housing" model is already being followed in much of China but it is already seen as too expensive and government is moving people out.

"Colonial" countries have homesteads which is 1 family on an isolated plot of land. They can do this because most colonial countries really got rolling after gunpowder and industrialization, so they didn't need town walls (they purged the natives already) or local services (they got supplies made in industrial cities). So there is a level of even lower concentration than what is otherwise suburb.

 

[gadgetcool5]

Seriously, sometimes I ask myself when the CCP introduced the one child policy didn't the experts who drafted this policy predict the obvious consequences of such a policy and the long term consequences this will have on the country? For a party that's known to think long term wise I'm surprised they didn't foresee this or if they did then they ignored it for some reason.
Even more so I can't understand why they stuck with it for so long until recently. It's crazy that it took them so long to discard this genocidal and catastrophic policy which has affected and will continue to affect China for decades to come and the foreseeable future.
The fact that they still have a 3 child policy even today is even more laughable, instead of allowing people to have as much kids as they wish like every other normal country on earth.

I agree that they stuck to the One Child policy way too long, but to be fair, I don't think it is to blame for China's demographic woes. Japan, Taiwan and South Korea never had any restrictive birth policies and are just as bad shape, if not worse.

It's a regional cultural issue due to residual Confucianism over-emphasizing educational competition, which is seen as a zero sum game with only a few winners, and there's this notion that there is only one path to a good life and it's by winning that educational rat race and getting into the best schools.

 

[Xiongmao]

There is a solution to reverse birth decline. Give financial assistance, food assistance, free education and subsided low housing for giving birth.

Those people who dont marry or give birth will not qualify for any assistance and has to pay a little more taxes.

This is the way. Also I would flood the nation's consciousness with propaganda about how the traditional family with more than 2 children is a patriotic way of living.

Also I would level up people's state pensions depending on how many children they raised.

 

[jli88]

I know that 17.52 million is a large number, but in a country as large as China, this problem would be alleviated if the average man married a younger woman. I don't remember the exact number, but someone on here worked out that if the average Chinese man married a woman roughly two years younger than him, the gender imbalance would no longer be a problem. The issue is largely cultural.

A lot of Chinese men are also finding wives outside, from Vietnam, Myanmar, Indonesia etc.

Seriously, sometimes I ask myself when the CCP introduced the one child policy didn't the experts who drafted this policy predict the obvious consequences of such a policy and the long term consequences this will have on the country? For a party that's known to think long term wise I'm surprised they didn't foresee this or if they did then they ignored it for some reason.
Even more so I can't understand why they stuck with it for so long until recently. It's crazy that it took them so long to discard this genocidal and catastrophic policy which has affected and will continue to affect China for decades to come and the foreseeable future.
The fact that they still have a 3 child policy even today is even more laughable, instead of allowing people to have as much kids as they wish like every other normal country on earth.

CCP is not homogenous. And all bureaucracies desire power and want to keep power. The Population Control apparatus made the most weird population and birth projections (already criticized by most experts) to justify their existence. Even until 2015, they were stopping people to have births, and were predicting all kinds of numbers. Their predictions were wildly off the mark. It's a good thing that Xi administration did to disband this apparatus.

China already doesn't have much arable land compared with its population, one Child policy is needed for common prosperity

Malthusian arguments again which led to this disaster in first place.

1. Arable land is not static, with better infra, better seeds, agriculture, more land can be made arable.
2. Even with current land, the yields in China right now are half those of advanced countries in some places, literally production can double just by increasing yields.
3. Despite progress, there are still many inefficiencies and wastages in Chinese agriculture. >10% grain is lost just during harvest.
4. Tech advances can totally change the game. Fusion can make power so cheap that you can boil the water in the bohai sea and send it to Gobi desert to make it arable. Right genetic editing and strains can make a lot of desertified land arable. Hydroponics, Vertical Farming can make high value food items. Many other tech advances apart from these.
5. China has more than enough arable land, and current production to even feed 2 billion people. And here by feed I mean to keep them well nourished and fed, not splurge. If the goal of food security is to have enough food to survive a long war, then by cutting on excesses, you can easily feed your people. E.g. Meat like Beef is heavily water and grain intensive per calorie of nutrition or protein.
6. One-Child Policy has already led to annual births of just 9 million in 2023, if this generation also has one-child, this will lead to 4.5 million. One-Child Policy by definition leads to halving of every successive generation and could never have been sustainable.

I agree that they stuck to the One Child policy way too long, but to be fair, I don't think it is to blame for China's demographic woes. Japan, Taiwan and South Korea never had any restrictive birth policies and are just as bad shape, if not worse.

It's a regional cultural issue due to residual Confucianism over-emphasizing educational competition, which is seen as a zero sum game with only a few winners, and there's this notion that there is only one path to a good life and it's by winning that educational rat race and getting into the best schools.

China is already in a worse shape than Japan. The TFR for the whole of China is lower than that of Japan, despite it being only a fraction in living standards. The TFR of Mainland is also much poorer than Korea/Taiwan compared to when they had similar living standards. So Mainland's TFR is going down at a faster pace than elsewhere.

This is the way. Also I would flood the nation's consciousness with propaganda about how the traditional family with more than 2 children is a patriotic way of living.

Also I would level up people's state pensions depending on how many children they raised.

Some regions need to be targeted more than others. North East for example needs to be heavily targeted. They have very low TFR despite having lower living costs. Government can go further here in terms of encouraging children per dollar spent.

 

[MortyandRick]

despite it being only a fraction in living standards.

That's a bold statement. Any evidence to back up that it's only a fraction of living standards? In interested to see what you use for living standards? Life expectancy? Access to housing? Buying cars? Please clarify.

 

[Eventine]

China already doesn't have much arable land compared with its population, one Child policy is needed for common prosperity

China has enough arable land for 1.4 billion people (probably 1.5+ billion with GMO crops). The goal should have been to maintain population at a stable level, not create an inverse pyramid structure that would almost certainly result in an economic crisis in the coming decades.

Defenders of the one-child policy shouldn't be arguing a straw man. Nobody is saying China shouldn't have tried to address over population. But going down to one-child is mathematically guaranteed to create an inverse population pyramid and crisis.

Policy planners likely knew this but fell for the Western Malthusian lie that other races were over populating the earth and needed to bring down their population levels. When in fact, it's always been a component of the West's genocidal strategy against other races:

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In the 1960s and 1970s, neo‐Malthusian panic about overpopulation overtook eugenics as the primary motivation behind coercive policies aimed at limiting childbearing. Neo‐Malthusian ideas spread among senior technocrats and government leaders in some developing countries, resulting in human rights abuses that Western development professionals encouraged and that Western aid often funded. Those abuses peaked in the form of China’s one‐child policy (1979–2015) and India’s forced sterilizations during its “Emergency” (1975–77), a period in India when civil liberties were suspended and the prime minister ruled by decree.

Funny how the West never implemented these policies in their own crowded countries.

 

[FairAndUnbiased]

China has enough arable land for 1.4 billion people (probably 1.5+ billion with GMO crops). The goal should have been to maintain population at a stable level, not create an inverse pyramid structure that would almost certainly result in an economic crisis in the coming decades.

Defenders of the one-child policy shouldn't be arguing a straw man. Nobody is saying China shouldn't have tried to address over population. But going down to one-child is mathematically guaranteed to create an inverse population pyramid and crisis.

Policy planners likely knew this but fell for the Western Malthusian lie that other races were over populating the earth and needed to bring down their population levels. When in fact, it's always been a component of the West's genocidal strategy against other races:

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Funny how the West never implemented these policies in their own crowded countries.

Honestly now that I think about it, I don't even see the problem with a large poor population in China. Yeah it'll give fuel to the racists, but as it turns out, racism is not rooted in logic and thus you can't counter it with rationality.

If GDP of China stayed the same as today but with 20% greater population and lower GDP per capita, China would still have an ~10k GDP per capita nominal which isn't all that bad. In exchange, the population pyramid would be healthier and most of all, the attitude of the population would be different.

China has an attitude problem right now. The period of youthful innovation with lots of young people forming a large, low cost experimental market is ending. Yes, the market is getting bigger due to economic growth, but due to old age conservatism, is getting less innovative because middle aged and young people consume different things. Middle aged people also spend less as a portion of salary than young people. The old age conservatism is why some utterly idiotic ideas refuse to go away and why you have 30-40 year old professors sneaking out to become taxi drivers in NA.

Lots of the tech that is being rolled out today has its original roots in the early 2010's. DPU chips for instance were published by Tsinghua University in 2014. Right now is executing the innovative ideas of 10 years ago and executing catch up. But coasting off just realizing the old innovations and catching up has limits.

Imagine if China's average age was still 28-30. The market will need to cater to those people, rather than to 38-40 year olds which frankly are a totally different market. Youthful ideas would still be coming out.

 

[montyp165]

This is the way. Also I would flood the nation's consciousness with propaganda about how the traditional family with more than 2 children is a patriotic way of living.

Also I would level up people's state pensions depending on how many children they raised.

For the sake of articulating a maximalist pro-natalist approach, it would require a combination of strong media influence, economic incentives for family cultivation and tax penalties on unpaired/unmarried people without kids, combating anti-natalist ideology, as well as examining other similar/related cultures with higher birth rates for policy consultation and development (in China's case Vietnam and North Korea). Basically one would need to approach things as if it were a Cold War style of prolonged socioeconomic and ideological conflict in a manner of speaking (hypothetically).

 

[doggydogdo]

Malthusian arguments again which led to this disaster in first place.

1. Arable land is not static, with better infra, better seeds, agriculture, more land can be made arable.
2. Even with current land, the yields in China right now are half those of advanced countries in some places, literally production can double just by increasing yields.
3. Despite progress, there are still many inefficiencies and wastages in Chinese agriculture. >10% grain is lost just during harvest.
4. Tech advances can totally change the game. Fusion can make power so cheap that you can boil the water in the bohai sea and send it to Gobi desert to make it arable. Right genetic editing and strains can make a lot of desertified land arable. Hydroponics, Vertical Farming can make high value food items. Many other tech advances apart from these.
5. China has more than enough arable land, and current production to even feed 2 billion people. And here by feed I mean to keep them well nourished and fed, not splurge. If the goal of food security is to have enough food to survive a long war, then by cutting on excesses, you can easily feed your people. E.g. Meat like Beef is heavily water and grain intensive per calorie of nutrition or protein.
6. One-Child Policy has already led to annual births of just 9 million in 2023, if this generation also has one-child, this will lead to 4.5 million. One-Child Policy by definition leads to halving of every successive generation and could never have been sustainable.

It's not about food production is about agriculture absorbing surplus workers. China wouldn't let their people be like the landless people in the rest of the global south, which would mean the already limited arable land would be further divided up making peasants far poorer. It's not Malthusian to say that in a world with limited resources/Job opportunity that infinite population growth is bad.

China is already in a worse shape than Japan. The TFR for the whole of China is lower than that of Japan, despite it being only a fraction in living standards. The TFR of Mainland is also much poorer than Korea/Taiwan compared to when they had similar living standards. So Mainland's TFR is going down at a faster pace than elsewhere.

The living standards in China is only lower because of China's (and the global south's) massive population which the West (Japan, south Korea, Taiwan included) exploits for cheap labour disproportionally benefiting people from the west.



If China really just need more workers, they could just rise the Retirment age, China already has one of the highest life expectancies in the world and one of the lowest retirement ages. China's fertility is an Issue but not as big as some think. China's gaokao literally had record number of takers this year and it's still growing. China focus on quality instead of raw quantity is clearly paying off and some of you are struggling to see it