Chinese Economics Thread

K

KYli

Brigadier
mossen said:
A much bigger reason for low births is insane housing costs. The price-to-income ratio in cities like Shanghai or Beijing make even London look cheap by comparison. Who is going to have kids if you can't afford big apartments and/or houses relatively easily?

Another issue is lack of religiosity. Religion drives fertility. For an atheist nation there are hard limits. Maybe China can get to Japan's 1.4 TFR from today's 1.1. The key issue should be to avoid rock-bottom TFR like South Korea's 0.8 TFR.
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China doesn't have any problem for having big families even during the height of cultural revolution and when atheist is on top and that all types of religion are under attacked. In addition, Chinese worship ancestors from ancient time and never very religious. Somehow it has become the world most populated country. So your assessment of religion drives fertility is false.

Religion and atheist have nothing to do with fertility. The only reason why some religion drives up fertility is due to brainwashing and propaganda. Even Muslim countries, India, and many Latin American nations are having lower fertility over the years. Urbanization and women empowerment and education, and low child mortality are what drives low fertility.

President Xi understands the importance of work life balance. That's why he has tried to crack down on property prices, tutoring and tycoons. Common prosperity is strike to find a road for high and middle and lower income Chinese so they wouldn't be enslaved by the corporate like the Japan, Hong Kong, and South Korean tycoons, conglomerates and zaibatsu did to their people.
 
K

KYli

Brigadier
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Why China Keeps on Targeting Its Technology Giants​

China’s hands-off approach to the technology sector minted billionaires and giant companies at a breathtaking pace. Now President Xi Jinping’s government is reining in the country’s most powerful corporations, including
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,
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and
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, along with their ultra-rich founders. The scrutiny is one of the largest concerted actions against private enterprise in decades, wiping out $1.5 trillion in market value last year -- and
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keep coming
.
Maintaining social stability is a signature goal of Xi and the ruling Chinese Communist Party, so any company or person it perceives as threatening can find themselves in the cross-hairs. Such a sweeping definition could include just about any large business. Alibaba has been
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by antitrust authorities for alleged monopolistic conduct in e-commerce, while
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is being scrutinized for food delivery. Didi’s position as the biggest ride-hailer in China, and the massive amounts of data that generates, caught the attention of the Cyberspace Administration,
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while the Ministry of Education went after
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that profit from the intense competition to get into the country’s top universities. The speed of change has been dizzying: Rules issued in 2021 to curb monopolistic practices were drafted and
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in just three months.
 
S

SanWenYu

Captain
Registered Member
mossen said:
A much bigger reason for low births is insane housing costs. The price-to-income ratio in cities like Shanghai or Beijing make even London look cheap by comparison. Who is going to have kids if you can't afford big apartments and/or houses relatively easily?

Another issue is lack of religiosity. Religion drives fertility. For an atheist nation there are hard limits. Maybe China can get to Japan's 1.4 TFR from today's 1.1. The key issue should be to avoid rock-bottom TFR like South Korea's 0.8 TFR.
Click to expand...
Buying properties in Shanghai is expensive but renting is actually not that bad unless you have to live on the Bund.

IMO, Shanghai and Beijing deserve high property prices after factoring in their current population, the potential growth, and the cities' status in the country. Urbanization in China has probably another 20 years to rise still. The pressure on housing in the top tier cities won't recede until then. It is thus unfair to compare housing prices of China's top tier cities to places like London and New York. The housing issue in China's big cities is a byproduct of the nation's unique, fast rise of the last 40 years.

No doubt there is speculation that pushes the property prices up. But if there were not enough demand, speculators alone wouldn't be able to keep the prices high for this long.

The low birth, like the housing issue, is also a byproduct of China's rise which centers around industrialization. In an industrialized society, many things can change birth rate negatively in addition to housing - more time on socializing and entertainment, low mortality thus less urgency in reproduction, more adults pressed to maintain/change their social status, etc. Housing is not considered the biggest contributor to the low birth rate.

Lack of religiosity is not a cause. Religion is not a solution either. Russians have become more religeous after Soviet Union dissolved. Yet Russian women have been making less and less new babies. And in countries like India, Egypt, Turkey, Indonesia, Philipines and Thailand where there is abundant religiosity, they all have seen birth rate dropping, too.
 
mossen

mossen

Junior Member
Registered Member
KYli said:
Religion and atheist have nothing to do with fertility.
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Of course it does. But I am not talking about the type of religion but the intensity of religiosity. China had very high fertility during the 1940s-1970s because it was extremely poor and poor people tend to have lots of kids. The only way to have lots of kids while being rich is being religious, as Israel proves (the bulk of Israel's fertility comes from the highly religious sectors like the ultra-Orthodox or modern-Orthodox).

I don't think China can conjure up religiosity, so that train has passed. Israel is in many ways a special case, an outlier. But if it wants to push up TFR from 1.1 to 1.4-1.5 then it needs to fix its gigantic housing bubble. That has been one of the biggest failures of the CCP. It allowed housing prices to get completely out of control. If the CCP doesn't do that, then you should expect fertility to collapse to Korean levels (0.8 TFR).
 
K

KYli

Brigadier
mossen said:
Of course it does. But I am not talking about the type of religion but the intensity of religiosity. China had very high fertility during the 1940s-1970s because it was extremely poor and poor people tend to have lots of kids. The only way to have lots of kids while being rich is being religious, as Israel proves (the bulk of Israel's fertility comes from the highly religious sectors like the ultra-Orthodox or modern-Orthodox).

I don't think China can conjure up religiosity, so that train has passed. Israel is in many ways a special case, an outlier. But if it wants to push up TFR from 1.1 to 1.4-1.5 then it needs to fix its gigantic housing bubble. That has been one of the biggest failures of the CCP. It allowed housing prices to get completely out of control.
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That's not totally accurate. Ultra-Orthodox Jews are living with handouts. Israel government can't sustain such generous welfare anymore. That's why it is pushing Ultra-Orthodox Jewish men to work.

Rural region of China in Chengdu, many not religious minority have a ton of children. The Chinese government used to support them with handouts. But these people just keep getting poorer with more and more children. In the end, the Chinese government decided to move them from mountainous area to urban area and educate them about family planning.

You see the Chinese government doesn't want people being in poverty and relying upon handouts forever. If the Chinese government just needed to boost the fertility rate. It does not need religion. It just needs to give handouts to some poor rural people and ask them to have as many children as they want. But that would create many social problem and dependency on handout.

So it is generous welfare and handouts that increase fertility not religion.
 
M

Minm

Junior Member
Registered Member
mossen said:
Of course it does. But I am not talking about the type of religion but the intensity of religiosity. China had very high fertility during the 1940s-1970s because it was extremely poor and poor people tend to have lots of kids. The only way to have lots of kids while being rich is being religious, as Israel proves (the bulk of Israel's fertility comes from the highly religious sectors like the ultra-Orthodox or modern-Orthodox).

I don't think China can conjure up religiosity, so that train has passed. Israel is in many ways a special case, an outlier. But if it wants to push up TFR from 1.1 to 1.4-1.5 then it needs to fix its gigantic housing bubble. That has been one of the biggest failures of the CCP. It allowed housing prices to get completely out of control. If the CCP doesn't do that, then you should expect fertility to collapse to Korean levels (0.8 TFR).
Click to expand...
China's TFR was 1.7 in 2019. It will pick up again once the pandemic related restrictions are lifted and people can meet potential partners again. Japan and Korea are both highly urbanised. China still has hundreds of millions of rural residents, who will have more children. The communist party is also at least as good as a religious organisation at starting an ideological pro birth campaign
 
T

Tyler

Captain
Registered Member
mossen said:
Of course it does. But I am not talking about the type of religion but the intensity of religiosity. China had very high fertility during the 1940s-1970s because it was extremely poor and poor people tend to have lots of kids. The only way to have lots of kids while being rich is being religious, as Israel proves (the bulk of Israel's fertility comes from the highly religious sectors like the ultra-Orthodox or modern-Orthodox).

I don't think China can conjure up religiosity, so that train has passed. Israel is in many ways a special case, an outlier. But if it wants to push up TFR from 1.1 to 1.4-1.5 then it needs to fix its gigantic housing bubble. That has been one of the biggest failures of the CCP. It allowed housing prices to get completely out of control. If the CCP doesn't do that, then you should expect fertility to collapse to Korean levels (0.8 TFR).
Click to expand...
There is no bubble in housing. You have totally misunderstood the situation. It is the US that has a housing bubble.
 
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