China demographics thread.

[jli88]

It may be that people are nothing more than a commodity for governments and the upper class, but again, what is lost in this debate is how advances in automation and artificial intelligence are going to affect jobs in the future, It understandable that It is difficult for most to see the danger in the long term, that is understandable, is like climate change, difficult for most to understand the danger they really are, but governments have to be careful when it comes to basically forcing people to get married and have many children, forcing an increase in the fertility rate. Because it is one thing to have a group of poor elderly people without jobs sitting around waiting for dead to come and quite another to have millions of desperate poor young people without the possibility of getting a job.​

I think people died really young in the past and all kind of slavery were very common, so a lot people didn't manage to have kids in the past. You can say that the quantity of people today reaching their 70s and 80s is unnatural. You can say that most children today reaching adulthood is unnatural. Most of the explosive population growth that humanity experience was probably due technological advancements and not natural selection. So I don't know what is the "natural condition"

Either way in modern times, global society has done a lot in the last few decades or so to make people to no have children, from chemicals to cultural shifts in the name of progress, it goes way beyond the one the child policy of China. So basically, to reach the "natural condition" the global society will have to REDO a lot of that, force a change in the modern global cultural paradigm and get rid of the chemicals and methods. That means that child positive policymakers will have to walk over the will of many people, reducate many people to accept the new paradigm shift.

Ok, we have reverse the paradigm, now people are having 3 children on average, now, what policies are needed to make sure that in the next few decades those 3 children have a good education with a decent paying job as a reward, in a era were artificial neurons can code much better than any human or build things faster/better than any human ever lived, drive anything safer than any human drivers, serve humans better than human themselves. Become luddites? Reject technological progress to keep people employ? IDK technological backwards countries usually get colonized or bully by technological superior ones no matter how many people they have. So a balance in necessary.

I know it may look like hype now and the current trend is probably is BUT the gap between the artificial and the real is being filled pretty fast, at least when it come to jobs tasks. So policymakers have to take into account that.

You're all ignoring the coming balance between increasing automation and decreasing consumption. Global economy must trend towards decreasing human consumption or at least making effort to improve its sustainability.

China sees this trend outside of itself even if it wishes to maintain the previous model for a decade longer. This is why we see fairly substantial effort from CPC to realign Chinese industry and societal structure. Reducing population isn't a bad thing but it cannot be too dramatic a shift either. Lifting one child policy was done exactly at the right time. We're moving to a world that doesn't need the same level of individual consumption. It also cannot seem to afford it. Inventing trillions of money units out of thin air for excessive consumption is over for the US and the writing was on the wall since the 1970s but never came to manifest until now.

China cannot rely on the same old methods toward increasing prosperity. It recognises that a smaller, more resourced population is better to tackle the new world. Higher standards, higher knowledge and education, higher expectations. All these things will improve Chinese society for its next step of transformation. However impressive China has been over the past few decades, it is still below western nations in overall individual resourcing and wealth. It should not be the case and that cannot be achieved with the mindset of sticking with the same old business as usual models.

Recognising this has been the case for well over a decade for the CPC in my opinion. They've also addressed a few future industries and nurtured them. They could do better but what can you expect from people brought up in 1960s to 1980s China. I'd say a well done to them and as we shift to younger generations coming to roles of influence, this whole demographic issue isn't so much one of population trends but cultural identity. If you want to worry about demographics, worry more about the cultures being encouraged with young people.

I would suggest a rule of thumb (if forced to find a figure) of minimum Chinese population to maintain, out of recognising human nature, the nature of competition in humanity's past and so on, that the number be kept above the total population of Europe and North America. Most of these populations are going to be increasingly migrant derived but lets assume their culture maintain ethno-cultural enmity against China. This means a population roughly above 800M. Over time as Chinese individual become more productive than those counterparts (as it should since Chinese generally have higher intelligence and better work ethic at the moment! and has been ahead of the west for most of human history) then it's acceptable to reduce this ratio to a 1:1.5 or so. The west has used a 1:5 ratio in the past to rule the world. So it is all intelligence and the support of the society's resources as a whole.

I would like to address these comments together:

1. Throughout human history, technology has served/enabled people to be more productive. It has never completely replaced people. Predictions of massive unemployment have been frequent through out the industrial age, but humans adapted and in fact created whole industries using new technology. The whole IT industry, which is so central to modern economy really started in 1970s when the mainframe computers started coming in. So, humans have always shifted to other industries, created new industries etc.
2. Throughout human history until the industrial revolution, population was the largest determinant of a civilization's economic output. The gap created by industrial revolution is now being slowly eroded where developing countries are rising to western standards, some slower than others.
3. Are current technological trends different from that of what happened through out history?
   1. This is an interesting question, I don't think they are. Current AI is a misnomer, GAI an even bigger one, LLMs are nothing more than stochastic parrots. While a mixture of Generative Algorithms, LLMs, compute will lead to much more efficient algorithms and greater capability in doing tasks.
   2. Why would you bet your future economic, technological, and national security on a tech trend that is not necessarily concrete, and goes against all established historical transformations?
      1. Japan has already made this mistake once where it bet its prosperity on automation and robotics (when it started facing demographic issues) but how bad did that turn out?
   3. Even in the extreme case where this supposed trend were true, wouldn't you like to first confirm and than give up on population? Humanity has already shown that its very good at not having kids so population control is no longer a big deal, and can be implemented in a generation.

 

[manqiangrexue]

I would like to address these comments together:

1. Throughout human history, technology has served/enabled people to be more productive. It has never completely replaced people. Predictions of massive unemployment have been frequent through out the industrial age, but humans adapted and in fact created whole industries using new technology. The whole IT industry, which is so central to modern economy really started in 1970s when the mainframe computers started coming in. So, humans have always shifted to other industries, created new industries etc.

Making people more productive and replacing people are the same. Making 5 people as productive as 10 people is the same as replacing 5 people. "Completely replacing people" means a society or industry in which there are no people but only robots; that's not even a relevant discussion.

1. Throughout human history until the industrial revolution, population was the largest determinant of a civilization's economic output. The gap created by industrial revolution is now being slowly eroded where developing countries are rising to western standards, some slower than others.

These are not those times anymore. There are too many examples of countries with bigger populations but weaker national power to even point out. On top of that, China's power is growing and is much stronger than when it was at its peak workforce population. Therefore, the correlation between population and national power is basically already gone.

1. Are current technological trends different from that of what happened through out history?
   1. This is an interesting question, I don't think they are. Current AI is a misnomer, GAI an even bigger one, LLMs are nothing more than stochastic parrots. While a mixture of Generative Algorithms, LLMs, compute will lead to much more efficient algorithms and greater capability in doing tasks.

They don't need to be different from what happened throughout history because there are many examples of historic innovation that reduced the need for human labor.

1. Why would you bet your future economic, technological, and national security on a tech trend that is not necessarily concrete, and goes against all established historical transformations?

Because it goes with all established historical technological development. You have repeatedly failed to establish the opposite so the underlying assumption of your question is incorrect rendering the entire question moot.

1. Japan has already made this mistake once where it bet its prosperity on automation and robotics (when it started facing demographic issues) but how bad did that turn out?

Japan bet its prosperity on following the US and got butchered by its master when it became too strong. It has nothing to do with its automation or lack of.

1. Even in the extreme case where this supposed trend were true, wouldn't you like to first confirm and than give up on population? Humanity has already shown that its very good at not having kids so population control is no longer a big deal, and can be implemented in a generation.

No, it's already confirmed that technology and innovation reduce the need for human labor. Your question is irrelevent again. You couldn't force people to have kids anyway in the current situation. As automation rises and more is produced per person, leading to an increase in per capita resources and quality of life, people feeling thier lives get easier will have (more) kids. You can't put the cart before the horse. China has a huge population and thus time cushion for that to happen.

 

[Quan8410]

Any sugar coating is bad. Big cities like Hangzhou are providing quite generous incentives for couples to have babies so declining birth rate is a problem. If not they will do nothing. They just failed to convince couples to have children. That's all. Don't use US or Europe to excuse our problems. We have diffrent Confucian values, one of them is 四世同堂.

 

[FairAndUnbiased]

You're all ignoring the coming balance between increasing automation and decreasing consumption. Global economy must trend towards decreasing human consumption or at least making effort to improve its sustainability.

China sees this trend outside of itself even if it wishes to maintain the previous model for a decade longer. This is why we see fairly substantial effort from CPC to realign Chinese industry and societal structure. Reducing population isn't a bad thing but it cannot be too dramatic a shift either. Lifting one child policy was done exactly at the right time. We're moving to a world that doesn't need the same level of individual consumption. It also cannot seem to afford it. Inventing trillions of money units out of thin air for excessive consumption is over for the US and the writing was on the wall since the 1970s but never came to manifest until now.

China cannot rely on the same old methods toward increasing prosperity. It recognises that a smaller, more resourced population is better to tackle the new world. Higher standards, higher knowledge and education, higher expectations. All these things will improve Chinese society for its next step of transformation. However impressive China has been over the past few decades, it is still below western nations in overall individual resourcing and wealth. It should not be the case and that cannot be achieved with the mindset of sticking with the same old business as usual models.

Recognising this has been the case for well over a decade for the CPC in my opinion. They've also addressed a few future industries and nurtured them. They could do better but what can you expect from people brought up in 1960s to 1980s China. I'd say a well done to them and as we shift to younger generations coming to roles of influence, this whole demographic issue isn't so much one of population trends but cultural identity. If you want to worry about demographics, worry more about the cultures being encouraged with young people.

I would suggest a rule of thumb (if forced to find a figure) of minimum Chinese population to maintain, out of recognising human nature, the nature of competition in humanity's past and so on, that the number be kept above the total population of Europe and North America. Most of these populations are going to be increasingly migrant derived but lets assume their culture maintain ethno-cultural enmity against China. This means a population roughly above 800M. Over time as Chinese individual become more productive than those counterparts (as it should since Chinese generally have higher intelligence and better work ethic at the moment! and has been ahead of the west for most of human history) then it's acceptable to reduce this ratio to a 1:1.5 or so. The west has used a 1:5 ratio in the past to rule the world. So it is all intelligence and the support of the society's resources as a whole.

Europeans and their descendants (Americas) in 1950 made up 1/3 of all humans, higher than the percentage of China historically.

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Chinese population in 1950 was 550M vs. 454M in the G7 west (148M US, 84M JPN, 71M GER, 50M UK, 46M ITA, 41M FRC, 14M CND). There's still non-G7 west like Denmark, Netherlands, Spain, Portugal, Greece, Turkey, Norway, etc. And then there's nonwestern whites like Soviets.

Chinese population became exceptionally large later on in the 60's and 70's. It did not start exceptionally large. Today China is almost 2x the entire G7 combined (1400M vs. 780M).

 

[gelgoog]

For people to have more families house prices need to come down and housing must be more affordable. It is kind of simple that.

 

[Totoro]

Most people who don't want any kids don't have them because having kids lowers the quality of their life. Kids just take all of their free time for like 5+ years and are an emotional burden and stress for another 10 or more. Those are a huge part of the population. Tens of percent of the new generations, easily.

Some people who have one kid also think like that now that they had experience with one kid and they don't want another.

But there is a small subset of people who have one kid and who would perhaps have another if they had housing for a bigger family, money for education and so on.

 

[tokenanalyst]

Are current technological trends different from that of what happened through out history?

1. This is an interesting question, I don't think they are. Current AI is a misnomer, GAI an even bigger one, LLMs are nothing more than stochastic parrots. While a mixture of Generative Algorithms, LLMs, compute will lead to much more efficient algorithms and greater capability in doing tasks.
2. Why would you bet your future economic, technological, and national security on a tech trend that is not necessarily concrete, and goes against all established historical transformations?

Like a said before the population explosion that happened in the last century was due technology and not natural selection, basically we defeated natural selection and our evolution as a species is at the mercy of sexual selection now. So technology is the driver of the size of human population, in the 60s we created the technology that along with the cultural paradigm shift leaded to a decrease in fertility rates.

Like I said before, since the time of the Neanderthals, the technological inferior population get out competed, conquered or bully. Imagine if the US is the only capable of making nuclear weapons how history would turn out.

Or let look the Israelis, population matter when you want to impose your identity over a territory. But because technology even an numerical smaller military can walk over a territory and do unspeakable horrors to people.

1. 1. Japan has already made this mistake once where it bet its prosperity on automation and robotics (when it started facing demographic issues) but how bad did that turn out?

Converted Japan the third largest manufacturer in the world and technological power house that with 1.5% of the human population output more than 7% of the goods.

• Even in the extreme case where this supposed trend were true, wouldn't you like to first confirm and than give up on population? Humanity has already shown that its very good at not having kids so population control is no longer a big deal, and can be implemented in a generation.

I have never said give up, I said if things get too bad governments will basically had to walk over people rights to reverse the paradigms and control the technologies responsible for the current drop in fertility rates or even using artificial means to force the "production" of more children if thing get too bad, doing things that usually for some reason people don't want to talk about in this debate. Is like climate change the solution if things get too bad is in plain sight but is so radical that people avoid to even talk about it because involve more than completed cutting fossil fuels which is bad enough. Now if governments manage to reverse the fertility rate beyond replacement levels and technological unemployment become much severe now instead of having a lot of angry old folks you will have a lot of angry you people.

A good option would be to give people positive incentives to have more children to keep the population size in check but at the same time monitoring how technology induced unemployment is going.

 

[Eventine]

Europeans and their descendants (Americas) in 1950 made up 1/3 of all humans, higher than the percentage of China historically.

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Chinese population in 1950 was 550M vs. 454M in the G7 west (148M US, 84M JPN, 71M GER, 50M UK, 46M ITA, 41M FRC, 14M CND). There's still non-G7 west like Denmark, Netherlands, Spain, Portugal, Greece, Turkey, Norway, etc. And then there's nonwestern whites like Soviets.

Chinese population became exceptionally large later on in the 60's and 70's. It did not start exceptionally large. Today China is almost 2x the entire G7 combined (1400M vs. 780M).

True, but we should remember the European population made up just 5-10% of humanity historically until they started colonizing other continents during the Age of Colonialism. China’s population was 20-30% of humanity for thousands of years and even during the great European population explosion, it was still >25%.

China has always been a demographic power house; but now the rest of the world will crush it and the rest of East Asia into the ashes of history simply because East Asians refuse to get married & have children. Because they’d rather work themselves to death for a second apartment or go on travel vacations. It’d be comical if it weren’t tragic.

Any way, at current rates, Africans and Indians will inherit the world and in a hundred years, East Asian power will be but a memory.

 

[Randomuser]

True, but we should remember the European population made up just 5-10% of humanity historically until they started colonizing other continents during the Age of Colonialism. China’s population was 20-30% of humanity for thousands of years and even during the great European population explosion, it was still >25%.

China has always been a demographic power house; but now the rest of the world will crush it and the rest of East Asia into the ashes of history simply because East Asians refuse to get married & have children. Because they’d rather work themselves to death for a second apartment or go on travel vacations. It’d be comical if it weren’t tragic.

Any way, at current rates, Africans and Indians will inherit the world and in a hundred years, East Asian power will be but a memory.

Or maybe in 50 years the vast majority of the world is dead because not only has it turned into a nuclear wasteland, climate change has heated up most of the world so its impossible to thrive. I never understood how people are so confident of whats going to happen into a 100 years when they can't even properly see what happens in the next 20 alone. India now has below replacement rates. I wonder how people saw that coming 20 years ago or hell even just 5 years ago.

 

[Eventine]

"At current rates" assumes a boring scenario for the next 100 years. But of course, no one can predict world changing events.

But to guess, there's high chance of another great war launched by Americans and Europeans as their relative power declines. A moderate chance it goes to nuclear and the world is destroyed. If that doesn't happen, a moderate chance of artificial general intelligence and quantum computing. A low chance of climate change making most of the world impossible to inhabit, fusion power, and large-scale space colonization.

Those would be my predictions.