China's Population Crisis

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Delbert

Junior Member
pla101prc said:
no actually you have to worry about overpopulation. the problem that comes with a super large population is not simply an amplified version of the problems a less populated society would face. there is a book written by scowcroft and brzezinsky, in it brzezinsky said that he went to China and had dinner with Jiang Zemin, and he asked him what is the biggest problem that China faces...out of all the possible choices you'd have like corruption, pollution, and wealth gap, Jiang said "too many people", and brzezinsky agreed (remember this guy is a geostrategist). marxist theory says that quantitative change up to a certain level induces qualitative change, this is the same thing, you cannot simply say "well this country have a similar pop. density so China should be just fine".
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So when do you wish the government should act? untill the time when 30% of China's population were already over age 60??

Even if the government looses up its birth control by that time.. It would be hard to have your population increase immediately. Why? The more your country gets developed, the more life will be complicated, busier, stressful, or even harding to earn money to attain a certain standards of living.

It had already been proven in many developed nations, they tend to have lesser kids. Even in my country (Philippines) which is also a third world, rich people tend to have few kids only 1 or 2, while it was those poor people (belonging to the poverty line) who had as many as 12 kids at the age of 40.

When the time comes and China became a developed country, i don't think couples will still prefer to have many kids..

Are you getting my point? Example was our family, I belong to an upper class society, and I only had a sister. That's all.. were just 2. Get it?
 
M

maniacalich

Just Hatched
Registered Member
Delbert said:
So when do you wish the government should act? untill the time when 30% of China's population were already over age 60??

Even if the government looses up its birth control by that time.. It would be hard to have your population increase immediately. Why? The more your country gets developed, the more life will be complicated, busier, stressful, or even harding to earn money to attain a certain standards of living.

It had already been proven in many developed nations, they tend to have lesser kids. Even in my country (Philippines) which is also a third world, rich people tend to have few kids only 1 or 2, while it was those poor people (belonging to the poverty line) who had as many as 12 kids at the age of 40.

When the time comes and China became a developed country, i don't think couples will still prefer to have many kids..

Are you getting my point? Example was our family, I belong to an upper class society, and I only had a sister. That's all.. were just 2. Get it?
Click to expand...

it looks like Chinese government has already loosen its birthcontrol policy.
One billion would be a appropriate number around 2050 I guess
a more serious problem should be China's bubble economy and its gap of wealth
 
P

pla101prc

Senior Member
Delbert said:
So when do you wish the government should act? untill the time when 30% of China's population were already over age 60??

Even if the government looses up its birth control by that time.. It would be hard to have your population increase immediately. Why? The more your country gets developed, the more life will be complicated, busier, stressful, or even harding to earn money to attain a certain standards of living.

It had already been proven in many developed nations, they tend to have lesser kids. Even in my country (Philippines) which is also a third world, rich people tend to have few kids only 1 or 2, while it was those poor people (belonging to the poverty line) who had as many as 12 kids at the age of 40.

When the time comes and China became a developed country, i don't think couples will still prefer to have many kids..

Are you getting my point? Example was our family, I belong to an upper class society, and I only had a sister. That's all.. were just 2. Get it?
Click to expand...

you cant just expect it to be a smooth ride. there will be difficult times where a large portion of the population is over the age of 60 therefore they have to work past that age. China made mistakes and they cant expect to not pay for it, in fact they are paying for some of it now. but again its all about timings, that generation will eventually pass away in great numbers possibly a shortage of labour. so the timing of when to losen the policy is important. i've already talked about this before.

and voluntarily low birth rate is not gonna be a problem for China for a long time to come. i've already talked about it before.

with all due respect i also wouldnt use philipines as a model for how a country should be governed.
 
solarz

solarz

Brigadier
maniacalich said:
it looks like Chinese government has already loosen its birthcontrol policy.
One billion would be a appropriate number around 2050 I guess
a more serious problem should be China's bubble economy and its gap of wealth
Click to expand...

People have been claiming that China's economy was a bubble for 20 years now.

The wealth gap is an issue, but it's inevitable when you try to lift 1 billion people out of poverty. Some are going to get richer faster than others.
 
J

Judgement Day

New Member
An excellent thread and actually relevant, indirectly, as it relates to China's military.

The United States and China are roughly similar in size, with China having a slight edge by a couple hundred thousand square kilometers, but the livable area is similar. China's population currently exceeds the U.S. by about a billion.

It has been determined that 80% of the rivers and streams in the U.S. are polluted with heavy metals and other contaminants. When I was in China back in 1987, when they had 200 million fewer people, I considered that it was very polluted. I can only imagine the issues they are having today.

The Chinese military will have to plan for a potential domestic population catastrophe of some type in the not too distant future. As has been discussed on this thread, it is not just the gross number of people, but it is the resources and jobs necessary to service the population. (As an example, I live in a rural part of the U.S. and have a 3000 cow dairy operation under construction about 4 miles to my north and another 3000 cow dairy operation under construction about 4 miles to my south. Three thousand cows produce the equivalent waste of about 30,000 humans. The cows are milked for about 300 days and are replaced with new stock, so the waste generation is constant.) Now add other animal operations such as hog and chicken farming and you have a tremendous amount of damage to the environment necessary to support a human population. Again, China has one billion more people than the U.S.

I understand that China can barely provide enough potable water to meet it's citizens daily needs. Imagine the consequences of an accidental release of a military biological weapon. (We have had accidental releases in the U.S., but in generally remote areas.) Then there is the possibility of a regular flu outbreak that could eliminate a large chunk of the Chinese population if it was a really nasty strain.

At any rate, the Chinese will soon have to resort to some possibly drastic ways to reduce their population.....even allowing for the normal attrition you get with older folks. The U.S. needs to cut China some slack in this area and stop peeing and moaning about Chinese human rights violations all the time. If we were in the same boat as they were with regard to population we would be using some tough means to control our population too.
 
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pla101prc

Senior Member
no the key is not to reduce the population in any "drastic way", its to be able to ride out the storm of 1.overpopulaton 2.aging population and then 3. shortage of labour.

it'll be a difficult situation, but not impossible, its sorta like riding the financial tsunami, if you have the right policies, with the economic capacity that China possess today it should be able to make it through in one piece.
 
solarz

solarz

Brigadier
China's population *is* under control, thanks to the one-child population.

The aging population issue is not as drastic as people make it out to be. Remember that 900 million people still live under the poverty line. The life expectancy of those people are going to be much lower than those living in major cities, so the burden of aging parents is mostly going to be felt by those with a decent income (and access to good health care). This means that any "shortage of labour" caused by an aging population will be quickly filled by the huge demand for work in from the rural population.
 
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