China demographics thread.

[manqiangrexue]

China needs to arrest this development before it gets this bad, and the most important cultural change is this extreme individualism imported from the West. All social media, educational institutions, local party organizations, etc. need to be mobilized against the single life-style that is being sold to young women and men right now.

Yes, I think this is very true. We have all been focused on the quality of life, improving resources and free time so people would have children but I think that is actually a minor consideration compared to cultural aspects. The human will is incredibly strong; if one truly wants something, one can, as the Chinese saying goes, scale bladed mountains and swim through oceans of fire to get what one wants. In other words, no matter how hard life is (and life is incredibly hard in some places of the world where the fertility rate is off the charts high), couples will have kids if they want kids. It was once China's culture to put the most value on having fat babies but now that value is on cars and apartments, luxury goods, expensive vacations... mind-rotting mentality adopted from the West.

So to this effect, I think the most critical action for the CCP would be, first, as the conventional wisdom goes, block out Western influence, and second, use media to instill the image of a happy large family back into the population. Make the masses understand that people are worth more than things, that the value of one's life is not measured by how many expensive things one consumed but in the legacy left behind, and the fertility rate will go back up.

This, however, can have the effect of slowing down Chinese national progress as people become more family-oriented and less career-oriented so the move might have to be timed vis a vis the competition with the US.

 

[RavenClaws]

China is a manufacturing power house. Just manufacture people in lab. They already dit it some years back but the scientist was detained. Now we need he back to scale the tecnology. No more with these nonsense policies.

Even assuming that artificial wombs are solved tomorrow, this does nothing to solve the problem of raising them. A human child is essentially useless for the first 5 years, and a human mind takes almost 25 years to fully mature emotionally and intellectually. The environment which the child is raised determines everything in the early years. Historical cases of children who were abandoned, raised by animals and rediscovered were unable to even learn how to speak past a certain age. It takes a whole village to raise a child, as human civilization takes far more than just the base hardware provided in the genes of a homo sapiens.

You can also heavily restrict abortion like what Romania has done to shoot up birthrates but that will have consequences for the parents who are unable either financially or socially to take care of the children who end up in state burdened orphanages.

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!

There's a simple way for China to buoy birthrates: develop the rural areas and let people who want a slower pace of life have good quality of life in the countryside. Urban lifestyles while economically productive have huge opportunity cost (and actual costs) for having children. It's actually a miracle of life and determination that middle and working class couples doing 996 can have a child at all, it's simply not possible without grand-parents in good health either. We have a situation where almost only the very poor and the very rich can have above replacement rate fertility in cities, and I don't see it changing soon.

Rural areas will have higher birthrates as children are labor and the opportunity costs for having a child is much less.
Once access to education and medical facilities improve in rural areas, there's not much need to migrate to big cities, and honestly the CPC has no need to shoot for 90+% urbanization rates just to pad GDP numbers like the neolib west. The neolib system also cannot function without a constant source cheap migrant labor in their rural economy anyway. China needs to find its own path and balance for modern society. We can't have 1.4B college white collar workers in cities and there has to be a sustainable structure going forward. Maybe a sustainable urban-rural split is closer to 60/40. IMO this kind of policy shift from the mass urbanization of the previous decades is something only the CPC has the capacity to pull off.

It's sad when the most ambitious and capable people go in the cities and end up childless though. Not sure what that will do to the genetic structure of the population long term.

 

[Enestori]

I've said it before, I'll say it again. You need to punish those who don't have children.

Incentives and carrots don't work, as Singapore and Japan have shown over the generations. That leaves the stick.

Every sibling you have gives you +20% on the gaokao.

You need two children to become a civil servant. Extra credit on the exam for three/four children.

You need two children to join the CCP.

With two children, you get a hukou to anywhere.

If you don't have children, you pay a

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!

like in the Soviet Union.

So many ideas, so many ways to use the stick. Let's get creative.

 

[Eventine]

The stick assumes people can’t easily leave; and that they won’t protest / rebel. The Chinese government has been historically most concerned with stability and brain drain; until it changes the general culture, sticks will just create trouble.

 

[manqiangrexue]

I've said it before, I'll say it again. You need to punish those who don't have children.

Incentives and carrots don't work, as Singapore and Japan have shown over the generations. That leaves the stick.

Every sibling you have gives you +20% on the gaokao.

You need two children to become a civil servant. Extra credit on the exam for three/four children.

You need two children to join the CCP.

With two children, you get a hukou to anywhere.

If you don't have children, you pay a

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!

like in the Soviet Union.

So many ideas, so many ways to use the stick. Let's get creative.

If one is not very patriotic, punitive measures on things seen as personal choices usually do not elicit compliance but rather rebellious behavior. If one is very patriotic, then one should heed the government's calls willingly. If your government tried to force a way of life onto you by taxes and punishment, and you had a way of leaving to a country with an easier lifestyle that would not enforce this upon you, would you stay? Most would probably leave and badmouth their own country everywhere they go.

Incentives should be financial and very very generous. I would be careful with incentives via gaokao. 20% is massive; it's the difference between a top 5 school and an idiot school nobody wants to go to. This opens up the danger of flooding China's top training spots with stupid kids with siblings rather than the true geniuses that can push innovation with that training.

 

[tankphobia]

Carrot and stick only works if they can't leave and the option to stay is much better than the alternative, since globalisation this has become impossible. Well not impossible since a large portion will not have the economical means to leave, but expect all the brightest and richest to take the next plane out the moment such dystopian policies are announced.

 

[FriedRiceNSpice]

Carrot and stick only works if they can't leave and the option to stay is much better than the alternative, since globalisation this has become impossible. Well not impossible since a large portion will not have the economical means to leave, but expect all the brightest and richest to take the next plane out the moment such dystopian policies are announced.

For the best and brightest in a high-demand field, say a senior engineer at Huawei making over 1M RMB per year, you think they really will leave just because they will have to pay an extra say 100-200k RMB tax for not having a child? Anywhere they go, they will not be able to enjoy the same quality of life. As long as the penalties are purely financial and will not impact an individual's advancement in the private sector, I don't see how it will drive people to leave.

 

[Xiongmao]

I've said it before, I'll say it again. You need to punish those who don't have children.

Incentives and carrots don't work, as Singapore and Japan have shown over the generations. That leaves the stick.

Every sibling you have gives you +20% on the gaokao.

You need two children to become a civil servant. Extra credit on the exam for three/four children.

You need two children to join the CCP.

With two children, you get a hukou to anywhere.

If you don't have children, you pay a

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!

like in the Soviet Union.

So many ideas, so many ways to use the stick. Let's get creative.

France has medal for raising multiple children with dignity:

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!

"Three classes of medal exist: bronze for those raising four or five children, silver for parents of six or seven children, and gold for those with eight or more children."

 

[Virtup]

If one is not very patriotic, punitive measures on things seen as personal choices usually do not elicit compliance but rather rebellious behavior. If one is very patriotic, then one should heed the government's calls willingly. If your government tried to force a way of life onto you by taxes and punishment, and you had a way of leaving to a country with an easier lifestyle that would not enforce this upon you, would you stay? Most would probably leave and badmouth their own country everywhere they go.

Incentives should be financial and very very generous. I would be careful with incentives via gaokao. 20% is massive; it's the difference between a top 5 school and an idiot school nobody wants to go to. This opens up the danger of flooding China's top training spots with stupid kids with siblings rather than the true geniuses that can push innovation with that training.

At some point it becomes a worthy tradeoff to let some people go so that the rest can procreate at reasonable levels. While many people left China for the west when it was at its worst, most stayed. While they weren't the brightest and most qualified, It is their descendants who built the country to what it is today.
Same goes for the gaokao and university thing, what's the point of achieving so many technological accomplishement today if later on most of the population becomes old and stubborn. Look at Japan, it is now mostly inhabited by elders whose stubborness and conservatism might be the biggest contributor to their country's eventual downfall. In the seventies and eighties, they used to lead the world in many technologies including cars, ships, motorcycles, semiconductors, robots, lean manufacturing and others. But now, they still insist on using fax, have barely started phasing out disquettes (LMAO) and their newest computers (as in for the japanese market) look like they're from the 2000s. They also keep electing the same party over and over again, and are extremely averse to any daring policy that might cause radical changes to their existing system. At some point a war will break out (that's certain if you follow history), and they're at a huge risk of getting wiped out.
It is well known that as people grow older, they become more resistant to change and set on their "old" ways. This is extremely dangerous for a civilization's survival, especially when it gets compounded with the fact that they cause younger people to work longer and harder to support them, preventing them from procreating and leading to a vicious cycle. We're already seeing the consequences in Japan and Europe, which are on their way to getting deleted.
To get back to your point, if deploying somewhat radical measures through a carrot and stick approach leads to some bright people leaving and to some college graduates becoming dumber, so be it. As long as the Chinese civilization stays alive, they'll rise once again (assuming they'll fall from grace in the first place). Otherwise, all the hardwork that's been done in the last 70 years will be wasted.

 

[broadsword]

For the best and brightest in a high-demand field, say a senior engineer at Huawei making over 1M RMB per year, you think they really will leave just because they will have to pay an extra say 100-200k RMB tax for not having a child? Anywhere they go, they will not be able to enjoy the same quality of life. As long as the penalties are purely financial and will not impact an individual's advancement in the private sector, I don't see how it will drive people to leave.

Better still, the government can compensate those it wants to retain. This sort of counter-balancing policy is often practiced in fiscal management.