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.
Both GDP (nominal) and GDP PPP per capita for China is less than half of Japan. I didn't think this would be controversial.
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 urbanizing so people don't need to be provided farm land. Apart from that, the rural population is actively declining and ageing, so in fact rural areas need people now.
It is Malthusian to make those statements and they are plain wrong.
Resources are NOT limited. If we were living with 1900s technology, we would already have starved, but with better technology, better systems etc. we can extract more resources, extract resources that weren't possible until now etc.
Think of energy. Even with current solar tech, placing solar on only 2% of China's empty deserts will provide enough energy to meet all energy needs.
Jobs are not something that are a fixed quantity and a larger population is problematic. Countries with small populations (like Haiti) are also poor, with high rates of unemployment.
Jobs themselves depend on the number of people (hence demand side of economy). Hence, more people creates more demand and more jobs. Unemployment rate is hence about the structure and health of the economy.
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
Gaokao number grows because more people are taking college exams. And this will definitely cease because the number of newborns in 2023 was lower than the number of people who took Gaokao in 2023.
If quality was the only thing that mattered, Switzerland would have been the world's super power.
China's fertility is an issue specially for future. Only 9 million kids were born in 2023. That is enough only for a population of 700 million people (that is assuming that births remain the same). China is already giving birth to kids to support only 700 million people. If fertility rates keep declining, coupled with lower number of child-bearing women, the number of kids born could soon (~ 10 years) decline to 4 million, which is only enough to sustain ~350 million people.
I'm in China, and I don't currently see even a hint of any of these ideas being implemented. I can't even think of a Chinese TV show or movie in recent memory to feature a happy family with two or more children. The last one I can think of is 家有儿女 from nearly 20 years ago. Anti-natalist sentiment is also expressed freely on Chinese social media and I don't see any hint of a crackdown on it. In addition to anti-natalism, all kinds of other "制造焦虑" ideology surrounding marriage, family, and child-rearing are freely expressed in Chinese social media with thousands of upvotes and sympathetic replies, such as the idea that it's deeply cruel to the first child (especially if it's a daughter) to have more than one child or the idea that having two sons means a lifetime of financial woe and misery. In modern China, I feel like the anxieties around having children are rapidly evolving into something that people outside of East China can't even begin to comprehend. People are worried about stuff that wouldn't even enter the minds of Joe Blow from Wisconsin let alone Mohammed Ali from Egypt.
Ultimately what I'm getting at is that slowing down, let alone halting or reversing, decreasing birth rates is hard enough, as many governments around the world can attest to, but doing so in modern China presents uniquely difficult challenges that I don't think can be overcome in the near feature at all.
That's the issue. The one-child policy has been ended, but now one needs a strong push for more children.
How many people in this thread actually have kids?
I suspect most do not.
Once you have a kid, you'll know -- they are lovely but exhausting. Additional children have very rapidly diminishing marginal returns. Having one kid is enough for some couples. Having two kids is enough for most. There's very few practical reasons to have more.
I totally understand from an individual's perspective it makes sense to have lower number of kids. But from a societal perspective it doesn't. So the society and government needs to take steps to shift the incentives such that higher number of kids are desirable for individuals.
But they have never forced anyone to have just 1 child. They only decided they would provide the full range of welfare (free schooling, child benefits) for 1 child per household. During no point since the 1980s to now did China go below 1 child on average. Anyone interested in having more children would just have to pay more, which given services affordability in China, is not that much more.
Also when China decided to increase benefits but limit it to 1 child per household, it took some 20 years of 3-4 children on average until a drop was noticed. So clearly the average person didn't care much, and only later with increased living standards did people start caring, or perhaps they would have cared even without the government recommendation, the way people did in other developed countries?
China pretty much followed the same fertility curve as comparable living standard economies, I.e. somewhere between South and Eastern Europe.
This is gross simplification. The one-child policy was much more than that.
Also, China didn't follow the same fertility curve. China's fertility today is MUCH lower than South or Eastern Europe, and that is despite the fact that per capita GDP has still not caught up with Europe.
China's fertility curve decline was much sharper than most other countries.
I don't think so, China has to adapt to its current reality. If we go back in time and examine what China was, it was always an imperial metropolis that welcomed assimilation from the whole known world. The key being that known world back then was much smaller. Reconstruction of the Chinese state is tied to being the core of the known world, so in the long run China should inevitably welcome many foreign cultures to work under it.
You can't rule over peoples you hide from, hate and fear. Well, at least it doesn't cause a long lasting rule.
Totally agreed. China was the original country of immigrants. As long as you accept the culture and customs, you can be Chinese. Even if the wider world is not welcomed immediately, people from neighboring countries in South East Asia, East Asia should be welcomed with open arms.
