China demographics thread.

[Index]

Where do you propose these foreign brides come from? SEA, south Asian, and some African women may be willing to come but only rural Chinese men are interested in them. If you open the open the floodgates of immigration, I guarantee you Chinese cities will be swamped with foreign men instead.

China to some extent also needs foreign workers to fill out workforce gaps. Even if a migrant man doesn't directly contribute to fertility for obvious reasons, they indirectly help by freeing up labor.

The root cause of declining birthrate is households working 2 jobs. People always want more, and when your society offers them a lot of expensive luxuries and choices, theyre not satisfied with just 1 income anymore. The only way to directly fight it is by narrowing peoples' minds, reducing their hopes and letting them be satisfied with less.

That's not an option for China, so instead they just have to free up conditions to let people more easily have children. More work from home opportunities, use foreign labor, bring in foreign families/women, normalize hiring maids etc.

 

[Michael90]

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.

Of course other ultra developed countries like Japan/South Korea, Scandinavian countries etc faced the same issue of low births but that wad after the whole country had fully developed and reached high living standards that birth rates started plummeting. So it was a natural issue bit China's own has been precipitated by its own leaders who deliberately brought about such a drastic measures and they enforced it strictly killing off/forcefully aborting millions of unborn babies now the same people want to try and increase birth rates invane.
In short, China is already facing birth issues while still being a developing country and this is due to the one child policy which stimied birth rates. China was supposed to start facing this issue decades from now when she will alresdy be a fully developed country as a whole not right now . So the leaders should take their responsibilities for this silly act, since birth rates would have keep falling naturally as stabdards of living improved they didnt need to adopt that drastic policy which was unheard in history.

 

[tygyg1111]

Of course other ultra developed countries like Japan/South Korea, Scandinavian countries etc faced the same issue of low births but that wad after the whole country had fully developed and reached high living standards that birth rates started plummeting. So it was a natural issue bit China's own has been precipitated by its own leaders who deliberately brought about such a drastic measures and they enforced it strictly killing off/forcefully aborting millions of unborn babies now the same people want to try and increase birth rates invane.
In short, China is already facing birth issues while still being a developing country and this is due to the one child policy which stimied birth rates. China was supposed to start facing this issue decades from now when she will alresdy be a fully developed country as a whole not right now . So the leaders should take their responsibilities for this silly act, since birth rates would have keep falling naturally as stabdards of living improved they didnt need to adopt that drastic policy which was unheard in history.

I think the issue is that 1.4B is still too high a population re: resource and job availability; nothing is going to fix that and more births as a still developing country doesn't provide any tangible benefit at a macro level. The same argument for the one child policy can still be made today which is a fixed resource amount to be divided amongst fewer people.
So I think the focus on the one child policy is a moot point and unnecessary - it served its purpose (to prevent China turning out like India with a huge number of non-productive mouths with feet to feed when food availability was not even sufficient for the then population), and it was terminated when those conditions no longer existed.
I believe that a natural population reduction to 800M - 1B would be beneficial for China as it would eliminate a lot of unproductive competition. This is in line with studies done in the 70s/80s which projected the ideal population for China to be in the 700M - 800M range.
In short, I think all this worry about fertility rates at 1.4B pop is premature... and to put some perspective on things, the most I have heard about China's fertility rate is from US media.

 

[Index]

Of course other ultra developed countries like Japan/South Korea, Scandinavian countries etc faced the same issue of low births but that wad after the whole country had fully developed and reached high living standards that birth rates started plummeting. So it was a natural issue bit China's own has been precipitated by its own leaders who deliberately brought about such a drastic measures and they enforced it strictly killing off/forcefully aborting millions of unborn babies now the same people want to try and increase birth rates invane.
In short, China is already facing birth issues while still being a developing country and this is due to the one child policy which stimied birth rates. China was supposed to start facing this issue decades from now when she will alresdy be a fully developed country as a whole not right now . So the leaders should take their responsibilities for this silly act, since birth rates would have keep falling naturally as stabdards of living improved they didnt need to adopt that drastic policy which was unheard in history.

Oh god are you seriously one of those pro"life" people? I don't think I'll engage in an argument about that more than saying that forced birth policies tanks the whole country's maternity health and life quality alike.

Countries like Italy or Ukraine are hardly "ultra developed" yet suffer from the same issues. If the standard of "ultra developed" means having 10-50 million people living at ~40 000 $ gdp per capita, then China already achieves that several times over.

Having 1.4 billion people means that China realistically is never (at least in the short term) going to have top 10 gdp per capita. All of Europe combined that has over 1 billion people does not have a high gdp per capita either. China today is a developed country facing developed country issues. It also has an underdeveloped hinterland that can be used to fuel future growth, much like what the baltics and east Europe would have been for the EU, if not for their failed policies. Despite the presence of such an hinterland, I would still characterize EU as "developed".

 

[Eventine]

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

It does not improve the quality of the population to make it proportionally more elderly. Old people are a DEPENDENT population much like children, and the same argument about the economic costs of having more children than the country can sustain applies to old people, except it is much easier to limit the amount of children than to boost it.

A bunch of 70 year olds is not going to be that productive regardless of if you raise the retirement age.

 

[MortyandRick]

Of course other ultra developed countries like Japan/South Korea, Scandinavian countries etc faced the same issue of low births but that wad after the whole country had fully developed and reached high living standards that birth rates started plummeting. So it was a natural issue bit China's own has been precipitated by its own leaders who deliberately brought about such a drastic measures and they enforced it strictly killing off/forcefully aborting millions of unborn babies now the same people want to try and increase birth rates invane.
In short, China is already facing birth issues while still being a developing country and this is due to the one child policy which stimied birth rates. China was supposed to start facing this issue decades from now when she will alresdy be a fully developed country as a whole not right now . So the leaders should take their responsibilities for this silly act, since birth rates would have keep falling naturally as stabdards of living improved they didnt need to adopt that drastic policy which was unheard in history.

Are you Chinese or have you lived in China?
Very few Chinese people in china have such negative views about the one child policy. Most people are quite pro one child policy. There were too many people and too little resources back then. Too much competition . Hell a substantial proportion of people now still feel that way. It was hard to raise multiple quality children.
Also authorities didn't "kill off / or forcibly abort" any fetuses, the parents did that because they could not afford the fine for an extra kid. Just like how people in the west abort because they can't afford to raise a child. So don't try to make the authorities sound like evil being. That's just being disingenuous.

 

[Eventine]

I think the issue is that 1.4B is still too high a population re: resource and job availability; nothing is going to fix that and more births as a still developing country doesn't provide any tangible benefit at a macro level. The same argument for the one child policy can still be made today which is a fixed resource amount to be divided amongst fewer people.
So I think the focus on the one child policy is a moot point and unnecessary - it served its purpose (to prevent China turning out like India with a huge number of non-productive mouths with feet to feed when food availability was not even sufficient for the then population), and it was terminated when those conditions no longer existed.
I believe that a natural population reduction to 800M - 1B would be beneficial for China as it would eliminate a lot of unproductive competition. This is in line with studies done in the 70s/80s which projected the ideal population for China to be in the 700M - 800M range.
In short, I think all this worry about fertility rates at 1.4B pop is premature... and to put some perspective on things, the most I have heard about China's fertility rate is from US media.

Beyond sufficient housing and food, I don't see how a country's natural resources have anything to do with it. Assembly line work isn't the great employer it was in the past, so the bulk of employment for people is actually in services, academics, engineering, etc. All of these fields scale proportionally with population. The whole green energy / sustainable development initiative has revolutionized the availability of energy, so it's not like you're going to run out of electricity because there are more people.

The global situation has changed drastically since the 70s / 80s, and demographics policy has been slow to adapt. I don't understand why that is so hard for people to accept. The faith Chinese people have in Western Neo-Malthusian ideology is honestly disappointing to see considering it was a component of the West's race war against the Global South. If you studied any history you'd know that Europeans and Americans were terrified of the fertility of the Global South and the threat it posed to their "master race."

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Post-war neo-Malthusianism was also situated within ongoing debates about the security of the white race in the face of global population growth,50 much of which was instigated by Lothrop Stoddard’s famous book The Rising tide of color in 1920, and Madison Grant’s The passing of the great race in 1916.51 East also spends a significant portion of his Mankind at the crossroads dealing with differential population growth rates at the global scale, often citing pseudo-scientific studies of the time to argue that ‘white blood’ biologically creates higher IQs and fewer cases of retardation. Finally, he employs neo-Malthusianism to allay American fears that population declines (alleged at the time) in countries with predominately white populations would lead to infiltration and domination by booming non-white populations. East argues that the white race would inevitably maintain balance with its resources and retain power, while the ‘population saturation’ of other races would render them powerless. The blatant racism of East’s argument helps show why race cannot be meaningfully separated from any account of Malthusian revivalism.

These concerns about differential birth rates based on race and class were integral to the development of demography by the 1930s. Demographer Warren Thompson left open the possibility of population induced war in Danger spots in world population (1929). While Thompson does not claim global overpopulation, he does argue that certain areas – specifically Central Europe, the Western Pacific and the Indian Ocean areas – have populations in excess of their resources. These he labels ‘danger spots,’ and, for Thompson, much of (then) modern warfare resulted from the diffusion of population from these areas to areas of resource ‘surplus.’ Thompson argued at the time that people of ‘backwards’ nations were increasing and starting to feel entitled to the resources of other territories, contributing to the kinds of fears that East disputed.52 As a leading figure in the field of demography, Thompson’s analysis contributed to a basic categorization of world population into areas of burgeoning masses ‘out there’ threatening peaceful populations ‘in here.’ As Bashford notes, population debates were a key component to the construction of geopolitical imaginaries in this time period.

Neo-Malthusian ideology was heavily associated with Western efforts at population control for the Global South.

 

[Chevalier]

It does not improve the quality of the population to make it proportionally more elderly. Old people are a DEPENDENT population much like children, and the same argument about the economic costs of having more children than the country can sustain applies to old people, except it is much easier to limit the amount of children than to boost it.

A bunch of 70 year olds is not going to be that productive regardless of if you raise the retirement age.

How did old China deal with the aging and the old? I don’t see the elderly as complete dependants, grandparents often filled the function of an extra pair of hands to help with childbearing when large families all lived together. The current model of nuclear families is a western import, sensationalised by American tv shows like “friends”.

Even the American families, particularly the millennial generation are facing the dual burden of caring for children as well as their aging parents.

 

[coolgod]

Those foreign brides have done nothing to slow down S Korea and Japan's birth rate implosion despite making up a far far greater percentage of the population than foreign brides in China.

How do you know, do you have a controlled study?

It matters because China is still rapidly urbanizing. A shrinking rural population means more Chinese men who won't accept brides from very poor countries.

How does that relate to anything, if we magically move all rural population to city, does it magically fix the imbalanced sex ratio? Do the foreign brides now have to come from upper-middle income countries now?

Sex selective immigration would be a diplomatic nightmare and tarnish China's image in the world.

Says you. Immigration in many countries already select by race, sex, occupation, language, religion, wealth, social status etc. I reject the whole sex trafficking label.

 

[tygyg1111]

Are you Chinese or have you lived in China?
Very few Chinese people in china have such negative views about the one child policy. Most people are quite pro one child policy. There were too many people and too little resources back then. Too much competition . Hell a substantial proportion of people now still feel that way. It was hard to raise multiple quality children.
Also authorities didn't "kill off / or forcibly abort" any fetuses, the parents did that because they could not afford the fine for an extra kid. Just like how people in the west abort because they can't afford to raise a child. So don't try to make the authorities sound like evil being. That's just being disingenuous.

FYI - He is french living in the UK I believe