Agreed. There was a lot of inertia to taking earlier action & the mentality was well, China has such a large population, it won't be a problem. I have also seen many Chinese say if the population drop by several hundreds of millions, life would be more comfortable. Certainly there will be less competition and gdp per capita will go up...a bit of an essay on demographic issues & solutions so here goes:
Chinese are well aware of our own history. Here, I would like to point to ancient Western history. The Roman Emperor Augustus actually created laws that punished childlessness, divorce & adultery among the Roman Nobility as he was worried about population decline. However it seemed the natural population continued to decrease in later periods. The upper class Romans wanted to have less kids to concentrate wealth in their heirs. The Roman's took a lot of slaves from the Germanic tribes to supplement their declining manpower. A lot of soldiers were also from these tribes. Of course, these slaves and soldiers would later revolt as the Huns drove Germanic tribes westward. Declining demographics was a major contributor to the decline of the Roman Empire.
The Ancient Greeks also blamed their conquest by Rome on declining demographics. Apparently, the society had a massive gender imbalance of males vs. Females because of female infanticide, which eventually led to population drop and manpower shortage in war.
Now I ain't no expert in history or it's analysis. But actually, I think the Roman case has a lot of of parallel with modern Western society. They also serve as a cautionary tale for China.
I have seen the solutions posted on this thread. Economic incentives, pro Natalist policies, I think they are part of solving the puzzle and China is on their way with these. Technological advances will certainly mitigate some of the economic effects. Immigration would be at the bottom of my list.
I expand further and ask, why do people even have children? In the modern age, children are a net economic loss to their parents. So what value do they provide? Well, they provide social capital. Parents enjoy life with kids around. Then there are also traditional pressures like aging parents who want their adult children to start families. I think this is rather flimsy though as obviously a good minority of people don't see kids as contributing socially to their lives, and hence we see birth rates stagnate at a low level all across modern societies despite incentives.
Personally, I think the best solution is to appeal to people's sense of identity. China has a patriotic population proud of their history and optimistic about their future. I think if people can see this problem as hindering the perpetuation of China itself, of everything they have worked hard for and the legacy of their ancestors, it would go a long way as motivation. China needs to treat it like going against Covid. Maybe the govt needs to admit publically the 1 child policy went on for too long. Basically, treat it like an existential crisis as early as possible, before it actually becomes one. It's getting late.
