China demographics thread.

[Eventine]

To be honest, what's the alarm about this population decline in China. China is already over 1.4 billion people. So a decrease in population isn't such a bad thing. There's a reason the CCP strictly implemented the one child policy which lasted for over 40 years. If they thought increase in youthful population was that necessary then they wouldnt have adopted such a radical policy in the first place.. So I think they know what they are doing better than us. So it's not the end of the world if there's a population decline in China as some seem to think. In fact, a population of less than a billion people should be ideal for China given the country's resources and landmass. Let Indians keep breeding like rabbits. Lol. They never had a 1 child policy, plus at the rate they are going, they might reach 2billion soon this coming decades. Lool This will put even more pressure on government spending and employment etc.

The CCP was tricked by Western Malthusians into adopting this policy (source).

In a Helsinki pub in 1978, a Dutch professor, Geert Jan Olsder, and a Chinese mathematician, Song Jian, sat down together for a beer. Olsder mentioned the Club of Rome’s Limits to Growth report and ignited a “messianic fervor” for population control in Jian that would shape China’s future.

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“His eyes lit up,” recalled Olsder, who maintained that “all things equal, [the world] should do the same [as China] and have a one-child policy.”

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“During a visit to Europe in 1978, I happened to learn about the application of systems analysis by European scientists to the study of population problems with a great success,” Jian wrote of the encounter, “I was extremely excited … and determined to try the method.”

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He did not stop at Limits to Growth. He also read Malthus: “When I was thinking about this, I took Malthus’s book to research the study of population.”

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Limits to Growth not only promoted Malthus’s idea that a large population creates resource scarcity, but it also promoted the notion that planners could use “systems analysis,” meaning mathematical procedures, to compute a country’s sustainable population size. In 1978, Jian calculated that China’s “ideal” population was between 650 million and 700 million people—or 280 million to 330 million fewer than its population at the time.

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Jian translated the Club of Rome’s central arguments, but none of the circulating critiques of the Club of Rome’s methodology, into Mandarin. He also published his own findings inspired by the Club of Rome’s approach. Jian was highly respected for previous work on ballistic missiles, and he soon persuaded China’s elite of an urgent population crisis necessitating forceful population control. Harvard University anthropologist Susan Greenhalgh’s book Just One Child: Science and Policy in Deng’s China, chronicles Jian’s successful campaign to spread neo-Malthusian fears among China’s elite despite opposition from rival government factions.

Population control became an integral part of the country’s “socialist modernization” efforts, culminating in the one-child policy. Thus, the neo-Malthusian “crisis mentality and the top-down, engineering-type solutions to the crisis made their way to China,” Greenhalgh wrote.

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They reversed it in 2016 but did not get the results they wanted. I don't think it's useful to believe that the Chinese government has a grand plan - I think they're just as much reactive about it as any other government and this can be seen in how Song Jiang was deceived, intentionally or not, by the Club of Rome.

This is not even to mention the amount of support Western organizations and institutions then poured into reducing the fertility of China, India, and other countries that weren't white:

Not only was the intellectual impetus for China’s coercive population control policies decidedly neo-Malthusian, but organizations such as the UNFPA and IPPF provided support for the one-child policy. The UNFPA opened an office in Beijing in 1979 and pledged $50 million for population policy in China over the next four years. It stipulated that the money was in part to fund training for 70,000 family planning workers and an extensive campaign promoting smaller family sizes.

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The Chinese state-run association responsible for implementing the one-child policy became an IPPF member in 1983.

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International support for the one-child policy consisted of both intellectual and moral encouragement as well as financial support that, even when not ostensibly funding coercion, freed resources to support the one-child policy. For example, every dollar in aid money spent on training family planning workers or on educational campaigns freed Chinese funds that could go toward nonconsensual procedures. UNFPA grants went to training and equipping the people who would go on to carry out coerced procedures. The UNFPA also paid for many of the computers used to calculate birth quotas.

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Chinese funds that would otherwise have gone to buying computers or teaching family planning workers how to perform abortions and sterilizations were thus made available to fund the one-child policy’s enforcement, including the collection of fines and performing coerced abortions and forced sterilizations.

When the minister in charge of the State Family Planning Commission of the People’s Republic of China became one of the inaugural recipients of the UNFPA Population Award in 1983, he said in his acceptance speech that it was “a symbol of the support and encouragement given by the United Nations to China’s family planning program.”

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[gpt]

The CCP was tricked by Western Malthusians into adopting this policy (source).

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[In4ser]

To be honest, what's the alarm about this population decline in China. China is already over 1.4 billion people. So a decrease in population isn't such a bad thing. There's a reason the CCP strictly implemented the one child policy which lasted for over 40 years. If they thought increase in youthful population was that necessary then they wouldnt have adopted such a radical policy in the first place.. So I think they know what they are doing better than us. So it's not the end of the world if there's a population decline in China as some seem to think. In fact, a population of less than a billion people should be ideal for China given the country's resources and landmass. Let Indians keep breeding like rabbits. Lol. They never had a 1 child policy, plus at the rate they are going, they might reach 2billion soon this coming decades. Lool This will put even more pressure on government spending and employment etc.

Indian fertility is already below replacement rate with their population expected to peak in 25-35 years. If has roughly that amount of time to develop or be stuck forever in a middle…er lower middle income trap.

 

[Nevermore]

To be honest, what's the alarm about this population decline in China. China is already over 1.4 billion people. So a decrease in population isn't such a bad thing. There's a reason the CCP strictly implemented the one child policy which lasted for over 40 years. If they thought increase in youthful population was that necessary then they wouldnt have adopted such a radical policy in the first place.. So I think they know what they are doing better than us. So it's not the end of the world if there's a population decline in China as some seem to think. In fact, a population of less than a billion people should be ideal for China given the country's resources and landmass. Let Indians keep breeding like rabbits. Lol. They never had a 1 child policy, plus at the rate they are going, they might reach 2billion soon this coming decades. Lool This will put even more pressure on government spending and employment etc.

The rate of decline in China's young population is extremely alarming, with a decrease of over 50% per generation. This will seriously weaken China's investment and consumption, stop updating urban infrastructure, and in decades, China will no longer be able to maintain a complete industrial chain advantage. At the same time, the elderly will control more resources, leading to social rigidity and innovation stopping. More and more elderly people who cannot work will need to rely on a very small number of young people to support them, which is catastrophic.
On the other hand, assuming that by 2100, China has a population of 1 billion and a healthy population structure, it will dominate the world. If China has a population of only about 400 million and a poor population structure by 2100, it is highly likely that China will degenerate into a regional power, and India will move towards the top of the world at this time.

 

[Eventine]

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More ammo for the fire.

IMO, some people here (and many more people in Asia) continue to be oblivious to the genocidal intentions of the West. If you've ever actually read through a lot of the philosophical, political, and ideological works that came out of the West during the 19th and 20th centuries, you'll realize that Western elites practiced unlimited racial warfare against the rest of the world on the basis that racial outcomes were a zero sum game - ie that the West must do what it can to reduce the population of other races before they become a threat to white supremacy and numbers.

It's extremely unfortunate that people stopped believing in this just because of a few decades of American "engagement" post-Nixon. But fortunate that "mask off" Trump is bringing it back.

 

[Eventine]

The rate of decline in China's young population is extremely alarming, with a decrease of over 50% per generation. This will seriously weaken China's investment and consumption, stop updating urban infrastructure, and in decades, China will no longer be able to maintain a complete industrial chain advantage. At the same time, the elderly will control more resources, leading to social rigidity and innovation stopping. More and more elderly people who cannot work will need to rely on a very small number of young people to support them, which is catastrophic.
On the other hand, assuming that by 2100, China has a population of 1 billion and a healthy population structure, it will dominate the world. If China has a population of only about 400 million and a poor population structure by 2100, it is highly likely that China will degenerate into a regional power, and India will move towards the top of the world at this time.

The biggest issue is population structure. A group of Harvard economists led by David E. Bloom, who were among the people who coined the term "demographic dividend" and who successfully predicted the "opportunity window" of developing countries based on this idea, has also done analyses of what happens when that dividend runs out (e.g. in cases like Japan, and aging European countries).

The key finding is that while total population number is not an obstacle to per capita growth, population structure is an obstacle to per capita growth. In other words, it's fine to have a population of 500 million people. But it's not fine to have a population of 350 million 65+ year old people that have to be supported by 100 million working age people. The latter is a recipe for national disaster.

China is wisely investing in robotics and AI as a mitigation against the coming demographic crisis, but there is no guarantee that either robotics or AI will be able to stave off all the social and economic negatives associated with an aging population. As @FairAndUnbiased argued above, aging populations don't just have a problem with labor deficiency, but more importantly, they adopt socio-cultural attitudes that are risk-averse, regressive, and reactive, because that's what old people naturally do.

If your country is dominated by geriatrics, you're going to have a bad time competing vs. countries dominated by working age adults. It's not just a labor problem, it's a top-to-bottom problem. As we see with companies like Deep Seek, Mihoyo, Game Science, DJI, and Byte Dance, young minds are essential to innovation and disruption. Young people are naturally bold, risk taking, ambitious, fast paced, and energetic, whether in governments, research laboratories, or the work force.

China cannot thrive with a population that's 60-70% elderly people, not unless AI becomes so powerful that it basically takes over human society, in which case none of this matters to begin with.