Chinese Economics Thread
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Geographer
Junior Member
Did you miss my response to your assertion that a large, poor, uneducated population brings no benefit to a nation? I specifically said that size alone benefits a country in two ways: it represents enormous potential which attracts foreign investment, and enables the government to strike favorable deals with foreign companies in technology transfer because those companies are desperate for a toehold in a huge future market. One specific example is how the West treated China after the 1989 Tienanmen Square massacre. If that event had happened in any other country with a much smaller population, the West would have sanctioned the hell out of them. But since it happened in China and enormous business interests were at stake, the trade routes remained open.
You're right that children are the social safety net, not just for the parents but also the extended family. This is the primary reason for having large families. When a government like China's prevents couples from having more children, they are condemning the parents to a risky and possibly impoverished retirement.
It seems like the rest of jackliu's argument can be summarized as "it's better to be dead than poor". If life is so bad for slum-dwellers, why don't they all commit suicide? Why don't you try telling a poor person that they should not exist? Every life is precious and has meaning--to their family, friends, neighbors, and employers. Moreover, even the poorest slum-dwellers add to a nation's GDP. Slum-dwellers and farmers are NOT burdens on society. The work hard and provide essential goods and services to the middle and upper classes. We all benefit from more people, whatever socio-economic class they are born into.
The reason India has not experienced the same economic boom as China in the last 30 years is because of a closed economy, stifling bureaucracy, and decrepit infrastructure compared to China. Their huge young population is an advantage over China that will be most apparent in 20-30 years.
This is straight out of Thomas Malthus and Paul Ehrlich's doomsday books about overpopulation. Those books have been discredited for decades. Population growth does not condemn the vast majority of your population to a life of misery and abject poverty. A simple proof of that fact is the simultaneous population growth and rise in living standards that accompanied the UK, United States, Germany, and Japan in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Between 1901 and 1968, the United States' , an annual average rate of about 1.5%. During that time GDP per capita increased from about $5000 (2005 dollars) to $20,000, or 400%.
One and half percent annual population growth is high by modern standards. China has a 0.48% population growth rate according to the UN, most of Europe is between 0.1-0.6%, Brazil is 1.26%, and India is 1.48%. The United States achieved a phenomenal increase in its standard of living while simultaneously growing its population 3x faster than modern China.
Even in undeveloped countries like India or Indonesia, you cannot tell a slum-dweller that their life is miserable and worthless without being either cold and heartless or dishonest. A slum-dweller's life still has value for themselves and others, and still contributes to the overall economy.
Recall the inherent benefits of population density and population growth. Higher population creates more opportunities for specialization and trade. If the population of Earth was 2, then those two people would have to do everything themselves: plow the field, hunt animals, fish, build their house, sew their clothes, etc. There would be no time for technological progress and intellectual pursuits.
Now imagine there are 1000 people in a village on Earth. That village can now have some specialization of labor. Specialization of labor increases productivity because a worker practices and improves themselves doing the same thing. A surplus of food allows for new jobs: surveyors, researchers, astronomers to track the seasons and tell the farmers when to plant, etc.
Now imagine there are 1 million people a country. Most people are still farmers or fishermen but there is a large class of administrators, engineers, and writers building up civilization and improving standards of living. Population growth leads to technological and intellectual progress.
Finally, the charge of me holding "Western bias" will inevitably leveled against me. But I should point out that it was Western academics and development "experts" who pushed population control in the first place. The CCP is in lockstep with Western population control advocates like Malthus and Ehrlich. The one thing I agree with Karl Marx and Mao Zedong on is their belief in the benefits of greater population.
If you want to argue that yeah, even the poorest person on earth have value and human right, but those right does not transfer to economic productivity, if you want to argue about the intrinsic right of the existence of every human being, then open up another discussion, just like your last attempt trying to derail the topic of the human right issue of China's one child policy, do it else where, because we are talking about the economic influence of overpopulation, not philosophy.
And it is funny that you think I want them to commit suicide lol. I bet you have never really see poverty did you? Have you ever tried to live somewhere, where there is no power, no computer, no government, no law, no police, where you live or die no better than animals. Are you to argue those people are contributing to society in a productive way?
It is funny you still don't get it, why dose people in European US have fewer children without any population control? Are you to argue that they choose to have no children, thus no safety net so they chose to have no one to take care of them when they get old? Of course not, because the government itself is the safety net, the social program will take care of them when they are old, so when they bring children in this world, they will not seek to exploit those children into child labor and poverty to work for them, which is actually what the poor nation are doing. Last time I check, China already have a social security system that is trying to follow the Western model. I consider this to be much better safety net than exploiting your own children.
It is interesting you actually have the ability to correctly diagnosis India's real problem, but yet still insist that population is the key, India and China had identical GDP in late 1970, and yes, very similar population break down as well, there is no evidence that China population in late 1970 is substantially younger or older than India. Like you said it is because China opened it is economy, lessen bureaucracy, and started to build infrastructure and educated it is population, if you notice.. all of them are GOVERNMENT POLICIES!!!! Which India fails to do. And it is those government policy that makes all the difference. In fact I can use your argument to support my thesis that a large population with a incapable government will bring no benefit to the nation.
There is no evidence that the India's young population factor alone will bring them advantage in the future, all indication shows that India's demographic breakdown is not going to change much in the future, they had the similar amount of young/old people in the 1970s as they will have in the 2030s. If India were to not change the government policy, there is going to be fat chance they will have any advantage. And even if they do, the will still be behind developed nations education, infrastructure, technology etc...
AssassinsMace
Lieutenant General
Geographer
Junior Member
What do you consider "unchecked population growth"? Is it Chinese parents deciding for themselves how many children to have? The horror, the horror!
Maoist China's economy was terrible because of communist economic policies, not because couples had more than one child. The Great Leap Forward was caused by insane ideological socialist policies and the importation of Soviet pseudoscience in agriculture. China's economy took off in the 1978 following Deng Xiaoping's economic reforms plus warming relations with the West that opened to the door to foreign investment. It had nothing to do with the One Child Policy.
I'll concede that some part of current Chinese economic growth can be attributed to the One Child Policy but at the expense of long-term growth. When you have fewer children, you can spend less on schools and more time working instead of taking care of children. That represents a short-term economic boost of 15-20 years. But in the long-term there will be fewer people to take care of the elderly or pay taxes to a social security system to take care of the elderly. When elderly Chinese retire there will be future people to take their jobs, causing a fall in overall GDP that can only be filled by immigrants.
Maybe Chinese citizens can better understand the economic value of children if you compare children to something they know well: hard infrastructure. China has been expanding its road, railways, airports, metro systems, power grid like crazy over the last two decades. Hard infrastructure is always a long-term investment. The government has to pay a lot of money up-front to build them, which the government gets through taxes or borrowing. This represents the same short-term cost that a new baby does. But over time, that infrastructure provides value that exceeds its cost. When the child grows up and begins a 40 year career, that represents value exceeding the 20 years of raising the child.
Defenders of the One Child Policy say the Chinese government could never afford to educate so many children. Yet it somehow finds a find to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on hard infrastructure. Why should the money for investing in children be harder to come by than investing in railways? If you don't have the money, issue bonds.
India will never EVER come within touching distance of china.
Their state is totally incompetent and their level of corruption is staggering.
Just look at the disaster of the New Delhi commonwealth games vs the success of the Beijing Olympics.
India has alot of ambitions, but nothing to back up those ambitions.
India has the biggest problem......OVERPOPULATION.
They are trying to fit in the same amount of people as china but with only 1/3 of the land area as china.
Indian overpopulation will drain their national resources over the next 50 years.
Besides I highly doubt India will remain a unified state over the next 50 years.
The British glued little Hindu kingdoms together and called them india.
There are so many separatist movements in India, the Sikhs and Tamils want independence and so do many other minorities.
I believe they will gain independence over the long term.
Sikh independence was crushed by operation blue star, but like the Soviet Union, unions with many different ethnicities won't last long.
The Baltic states wanted independence and got it eventually, same will happen with many different pro-independence groups in India.
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Equation
Lieutenant General
Interesting read, seems many forces are pushing at each other.
Government intervention lead to extreme overcapacity in solar company and solar panel production, this lead to overproduction lead to lower revenue for solar company. At same time can't export enough solar to other nations because not enough demand and price trade barriers. But yet, solar is not yet cheap enough to take over coal production.
So on one hand price is too low to make a profit for solar, on the other hand, price is too high to take over traditional energy source.
So they need to even lower the production cost of solar, but only way to achieve this is by investing more into solar technology, so those company must be kept alive, or the big ones must be kept alive. Because solar will be the future for sure, can't give up now.
I guess they have no choice but to keep subsidize the solar company, and maybe more solar installation in China. Maybe they should close some factories that are not efficient.