Chinese Demography
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I do wish more countries thought about childcare as part of their industrial policy and engineered large social changes to make it easier for parents to raise children.
Basic things: free, organized weekend activities (give parents back some leisure time), free babysitter services from teens on wednesday nights (give parents back going out nights), free child care accessories like carseats, diapers, bottles, etc (stop the implicit massive tax on having a child).
Imagine if we lived in a society where public school didn't exist. It would be virtually impossible to raise children while earning income. We live in that world in many regards, and then wonder why people don't want to have kids.
But really, the population-level malthusians have it wrong. Greater population has both helped drive innovation, economies of scale and innovation. What we need to do is direct our attention and fiscal polices to where this fails. Like pollution, carbon emissions, overfishing, etc ... If we can either tax these failures, or set up sustainable markets, or innovate our way out of them we should. We should be putting tremendous amounts of time and money to these problems (and we are, but clearly not enough). If the price the trust cost of the problems, you'll get behavioral changes throughout the economy. That will include choices like how many children to have, but also industrial policies and practices that probably have more direct impacts on our ability to sustainably thrive on this planet.
They were not wrong at all if their goal was to stem all of what you listed. They just knew from the beginning that all of what they said is not true. What they were saying was a lie.
The Population Council, eugenics freaks, and other yellow menace panickers were funded by the very same people who were running natalist policies in the West, and were trying to ban abortion, and women rights movements.
It's not correct to call them "Malthusians." The best name for them will be Luddites, and massive beneficiaries of economic status quo classes.
Such a comment needs a lot more supporting evidence to be considered anything but an outlandish conspiracy theory.
All on record, and US congressmen panicking daily on "yellow menace" was on record as well.
Look at a developed economy. Look at Japan. Their economy has been struggling for almost three decades, their central bank struggles to create a healthy level of inflation (it is historically too low), frighteningly large swathes of their population between the ages of 18 and 35 have little interest, time, or money for dating, marriage, and having children. Their fertility rate is well below replacement rate. And all of these things are interconnected (too expensive to have kids = no kids = fewer workers = fewer taxpayers and contracting economy etc).
Modern economies are still largely a Ponzi scheme that relies in there being more younger people than older. Technology is changing this to a small degree, but not enough and not fast enough.
If the US doesn't want a Lost Decade of their own, we're going to need to look hard at how we can keep our fertility rate at least at replacement.
Immigration is a potential solution but relies on being able to import the labor at all skill levels, and unfortunately at the higher end, I worry the US's monopoly on foreign university students is beginning to wane too.
Many of my friends and coworkers have decided to have children and I watch how it seriously mars their ability to do the things they would like to do in life. The costs associated with a child are so high (USDA put it at ~$250000 for a first child from age 0-18[1]) the incentives are aligned against having children.
Many commenters are pointing out that population decline might be a good (something I agree with) but your point still stands. My SO and I are in a stable loving relationship and would be fairly good candidates for adoption but because the incentives are aligned against having children, adopting a child is still off the table.
1. https://fns-prod.azureedge.net/sites/default/files/crc2015_M...
Oh yes, we do have those in China, it's called Work ;)
This assumes the market wouldn't self correct and private schools became the norm.
I think the scale of public schooling is not widely understood. A bit over 56 million kids attended school in the U.S. in fall 2020. Of those, almost 51 million attended public schools—-almost 90%. Private schools cannot take up that volume; they never could. Again, that’s why we created public schools in the first place.
It’s not so different from why we created public roads, even though private versions already existed.
Any of the other charter schools in the state, not employing these tactics, produce gains on par with public schools.
Although it’s great for the students who graduate from the elite charters, it’s unscalable.
When you look into what it means to have a public school system it really means that the system is expected to support everyone, including the neediest and most expensive students. So of course by declining these students charter schools can boast being much cheaper.
>>> This assumes the market wouldn't self correct and private schools became the norm.
> What about poor people? I think there are 60 million of those in the US.
The invisible hand would decide, in its infinite and sublime wisdom, that society is better off if they get no education....which is as clear an illustration as any of what market failure is.
So in the end men who never father children are being taxed for other men's children. Is that moral?
The easier, ethical way to increase fertility back is to bring morality back to society. If you make sure your kids are raised near other people like you, you cheat the system that the most advantaged people in society have (better looking, better finances etc). Why isn't the character of a person a valuable trait? It's because people who have those traits take it for granted, and those with other traits want character as a trait to be devalued. Imagine if every man would taught their daughter/son/wife to judge people by their character. Taught that loyalty is a virtue.
And then only let their children hang out with people who also value those with character.
Current society is bad for men and women. Men who would also want sons? What if your son is ugly? Women who would want both daughter and son? Can they ensure that their son will have a nice life? They cannot. Even if those women/men go for someone with model tier looks, they will likely be less good lookin than them. And someone else will always be better looking than them. Better finances than them.
There is no winning for anyone longer term like this. It doesn't matter if you're the richest person. Or the best looking one. Someone must lose in today's game. And if you don't lose today, someone from your descendants will. Why?
Humans are intelligent enough to understand these things, and we're likely the end of prime biological evolution. The next step is obviously not humans. What's there to fight for?
Nothing. Maybe bear the fruits of the collective hard work ancestors have done? As peter thiel said, competition is for losers. Stop competing in a rat race.
In most Western states, care for the elderly (and especially childless elderly) is funded by the working age professionals, and those need to be born. So unless that 25% doesn't plan on growing old it’s not only moral but essential for them that the other 75% do have kids.
My government is currently desperately trying to paper over this pyramid scheme by importing as many foreigners as possible under the apparent misconception that they will be instant net taxpayers (the opposite is usually true), compounding our economic collapse with a social and cultural collapse as well.
I'm quite sure the average young man here would do better with that cash in his pocket than the government is doing with it. It borders on overtly hostile.
In short, there is no money. It's gone. If anything, there's a moral obligation to avoid contributing.
This is unethical, and will bite your decedents back in the ass even if it doesn't bite you. You think your so good looking? Imagine if your grand son was in that place where he wasn't that good looking. Would you want him to end up like that? Is that really fair to him.
Aren't we supposed to make the world a better place? When we realize that some things are wrong?
You're doing every man who does hard work injustice. You can defer the problem by importing women from 3rd world countries, but for how long?
Not only is it unethical, but immoral.
Remember, no matter how privileged you are, there is no guarantee that your decedents will have the privilege'. Even if you're the most selfish man/woman, it's in your interest to advocate for it.
There's no woman/man who is a better human except for their character. We need to put incentives for these traits in humans. Not discourage them.
> So in the end men who never father children are being taxed for other men's children. Is that moral?
Don't those kids grow up, enter the working force and contribute with taxes? Rough math would suggest a father with 2 kids will contribute together via taxes over their lifetimes more than a single person (no kids) would. I'm sure most governments already made the same calculation.
If at 50 or 60, when some parents have their offsprings already contributing, they got 2-3 times more than you get from the state (pension, welfare, subsidies, whatever else you can imagine) you'd probably not be happy with the explanation "you contributed alone, they contribute together". If you don't care for contributing for someone else's kid, why would someone else's kid contribute anything for you?
This can be taken further with anything that works based on pools of contributions like insurance, pension, schools, public transport, internet, etc. They're all working exclusively because not all contributors actually need to benefit equally from all services. Some need more education, some need more health services, some need more transportation. Trust me, you get plenty of things you didn't pay for.
This does appear to be a major problem everywhere that is going to be one of the big challenges we face in the coming decades.
Not sure what the answer is but off hand it seems that conservatives and those that are religious have higher birth rates than those who are secular and liberal thus part of this problem is clearly values/cultural.
It’s the best thing that could happen to reduce our destruction of the environment, and the pyramid scheme of ‘endless growth on a finite planet’ had to end at some point.
This means generally tolerance and science literacy could decline. That worries me.
I don’t know where politics is going in the short term, but I suspect it goes in cycles. Conservatism might be winning at the moment, but it will reach its limits, mistakes will be made and there will be a resurgence of liberalism.
Also, just because you believe your set of looney beliefs is not a religion does not mean that it's any different from any other religion.
I completely agree that magical thinking and conspiracy theory delusions seem to be growing and that's a real problem. I won't quibble about you equating it to religion, it's a valid point.
No. There is a lot of conversion from religious/conservative backgrounds to liberal/secular affiliations. Religious/conservative demographics having birthrates several times higher than the mainstream is a phenomenon that's been going on for centuries.
Poor, non and under developed nations with poor living standards are the only ones that still have persistently neutral to positive replacement birth rates. And, yes, this has many consequences, which his why I hope S. America, Africa and South E. Asia are the benefactors of a weaker China and they too begin to modernize as the whole Species stands to benefit from that and we decouple from the CCP's violent and belligerent stance against the World.
I agree that in the immediate sense a lower population is net boon to allow the Planet to heal itself from myopic Human action/pollution/over consumption, but as we're getting closer to becoming a multi-planetary species we will have to increase this population size significantly to meet the demand of those efforts and I think their is a significant lag time if the culture of having 2 kids per married couple and has been reduced to 2 dogs per married family for my generation and likely those to come and has become the norm in order to remain relevant in the ever shrinking labour market.
There are plenty of belligerent countries in those regions, it's just that they're not considered important enough for their saber-rattling to be noticed internationally, and their enemies tend to be sub-national groups formed around shared ethnicity, control of resources (drugs, oil, mines) or religion who are even less likely to attract attention.
By now, lots of people have heard about Mexican drug cartels, Kurdistan or Joseph Kony's "Lord's Resistance Army", but who cared about the Houthis in Yemen before their civil war turned into an international proxy war? Who could've predicted the civil war in Ethiopia? And who knows whether the Movement for the Autonomy of Kabylie, the Naga nationalist movement, the Wa state or the Free Papua Movement will be next to make international news?
Modernization doesn't guarantee peace and democracy; it also means higher availability of more powerful or more, cheaper weapons. Combined with population growth, even small areas are able to raise substantial armies, while declining resources (relative to population) incentivize wars to secure a larger slice of the pie.
I expect that we'll continue to see large countries only held together by shared colonial history disintegrate violently into smaller regions with more complex borders.
Not necessarily. It depends on the environment too and can shift with new generations. For example Poland was nearly 100% catholic a few decades ago and there's still lots of that influence, but even the official number is trending down. (Which means the real one of people who actually care is likely below 90%)
Very democratic governments are susceptible to be overthrown by this tactic again.
That's why they do it!
If it turns out it is the modern way of life/thinking, then that modern way of life/thinking is doomed, isn't it?
If the world population ends up stabilizing around one billion, for example, or half a billion or whatever, we would be far from "doomed", only a lot more sustainable than we currently are. Absent a whole lot of global catastrophes, it might take a couple of centuries for us to get there. Meanwhile everybody cries bloody murder because they have no idea how to extrapolate current trends into the far future.
We already have the capability to decouple sex and procreation.
Environmentalism is a luxury good that people think about when basic needs are met and requires capacity above that. It's going to be hard to care about coral reefs when we need to devote more of our scarce young people to the practical needs of a gerontocracy.
Who knew that the technology game will be won by some loonie that declares his basement a sovereign country?
I’m still amazed how many politicians think a pyramid scheme of population increase is a good, sustainable way to pay for pensions and healthcare.
The real crisis is the zombie crisis -- zombie empires and zombie societies that lost all touch with family values and morality, or mental sanity; the problem is all of the developed world is the same, so no winner to take over.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_and_d...
Thanks!
Wikipedia states this about the referenced 'demographic transition' model. Note the last sentence:
> It must be remembered that the DTM is only a model and cannot necessarily predict the future. It does however give an indication of what the future birth and death rates may be for an underdeveloped country, together with the total population size. Most particularly, of course, the DTM makes no comment on change in population due to migration. It is not applicable for high levels of development, as it has been shown that after a HDI of 0.9 the fertility increases again.
Mainly an issue with feminism being widespread but living/working conditions not having caught up with it. Society is set up assuming that the wife will stay home to care for the kids. As a result having children pretty much requires either enough disposable income to outsource caring for the kids (nanny, extracurricular activities, etc), or one of the parents staying at home.
For conservatives it's less of a problem because it's more accepted to have the wife stay home.
If we want birthrates to raise again we're going to have to figure out how to make having kids not be a stopper for your career.
Are you sure that women entering the workforce wasn't _because_ of economic reasons? It seems to me that "feminism", as you put it, may have only been allowed to win, because it was desirable economically.
In other words, could feminism be a result of living/working conditions and not the cause?
Following this, people are having less kids because there is huge economic incentive not too.
I'm not sure where the disagreement is there. Yes, one of the reasons women entered the workforce was the increase in income for two-earner households.
The point is that both having two earners per household and having good birth rates are beneficial to society as a whole, but we don't yet have a system where both are compatible; we just exchanged one for the other, as the negative effects of low birth rates aren't immediate.
The economic incentive to not have kids is where the problem lies, and it's what needs to be tackled. Flexible schedules, paid paternal/maternal leave, free education/healthcare, access to affordable housing for young couples... There is no silver bullet, it's a sea of deal breakers that need to be addressed individually.
Nobody cared 50% of children died before turning 5, nor that they got shit education, nor that women were oppressed.
Our expectations and sensibilities grew much faster than everything else, not the least or biological natures.
Long term yes. But did women enter the workforce because of the economic benefit originally? Then as women continued entering wages fell (supply and demand) and the working class ended up trapped, as you say.
Another huge factor is globalization. Women maybe had to enter to earn enough when work started being outsourced.
Some people making a choice causes a cascade, taking the choice away from everyone else, kind of like car ownership in the mid 20th century.
(And bad for all the men, too.)
"Feminism" is many things to many people.
To me it is like the abolition of slavery, makes perfect sense in a modern context.
"Feminism" as it stands today in the west, just like other "-ISMS" to me, are abominations, both the cause and effect, the narcissistic, entitlement and victim culture combined with hating (average)men -- it is the dragon eating its own tail that destroys the modern society.
A society with a lot of elderly = demand for huge amounts of daily care, which is hard to automate away, though probably not impossible. (The Japanese are definitely trying.)
The only way out of this conundrum would be a breakthrough in longevity, where people would live to 110 in a relatively good shape and being able to care for themselves, then die within weeks from some fast degenerative process.
Unless it was very well paid, this job is far from enticing. Trying to keep a doubly incontinent geriatric patient from smelling for decades is an arduous and depressive job with no perspective of improvement. Geriatry as a subset of medicine is struggling to find new recruits, because as far as prognosis of the patients goes, it is the single worst branch of healthcare.
There are people with wherewithal to do this for decades, but this pool of willing is going to be overwhelmed.
Most old people aren't anywhere near that bad. For those who are, it will have to be operating almost on rotation and with large financial incentive.
Let's don't forget that we are soon 8 billion people on this planet. Imagine 8 billion elephants or 8 billion Tigers living on earth. We are too many and that's not sustainable.
The rise of the far right in Europe is mostly caused by clashes of cultural norms of native Europeans vs. immigrant Muslims.
As of 2020, it is not entirely clear if France, for example, can prevent emergence of dozens of alienated urban zones which aren't part of the national whole in any meaningful sense - a scattering of small Gaza Strips across the map.
Neither is it clear whether all of the grooming gangs (mostly Pakistanis of Mirpuri origin) in UK have already been extirpated and how long will the P.R. disaster be remembered.
This is a huge headache, because even in the Islamic world, high fertility is typical for backward, bigoted regions. Secular urban centers like Tehran and Izmir are no better than Europe, as far as total number of kids goes, so they cannot serve as a reservoir of workforce.
Total fertility today is strongly negatively correlated with education of women, which means that most kids are born in places hostile to female education attainment. Such as Niger, Afghanistan or Yemen. But these are precisely the places whose cultural norms work as a bombshell when suddenly transplanted into Europe.
To think that we are in any kind of equilibrium is to delude yourself.
We've never been in equilibrium. We've continuously expanded at the expense of other species. It's just that now the limit of this expansion has become very visible
What makes you think that these countries will let in the desperate fugitives? No, that won't happen.
[1] For example, there would be serious problems in the German society if not for Eastern European immigrants who take care of millions of older people for pennies. If these immigrants were not there, the older people and their families would have to pay 3-4x times the amount for German caretakers, which would of course break the budget of many.
Not a sound argument.
Earth can easily sustain hundreds of billions of people even at modern day technology level in supreme comfort. By some calculations, even one trillion is possible without having anybody switching to algae diet.
Which doesn't mean it couldn't be done, but not the way it is done currently.
This obviously requires a paradigm shift but ultimately can be a net positive for the environment, quality of life, and individual wealth.
But let's remember that we were less than 1 billion not too long ago while we're on course to be 10 billion soon, with individual consumption massive increased on top of that. We won't solve climate and environmental problems unless this is tackled. The aim of civilization is to make people better off, not to squeeze them into a dystopian world of overpopulation and environmental collapse.
The easiest way to make everyone able to participate in that high-tech is to have high-density population centers with little infrastructure benefiting the most people.
A battery one order of magnitude better than what we have today would obliterate that need for infrastructure.
Internet from the sky, VR, remote education, remote(AI) medicine, flying electric cars, compact fusion power, would mean unchaining the whole world from the sociopaths that are running it today, but we can't have that, because the sociopaths at the top like centralization in order to leach off the rest of the world.
Let's just take one example; VR. For VR, you need VR googles. These need to be produced somewhere, in an industrial mass production because otherwise these VR googles would be prohibitive expensive. That means industrial scale energy production and industrial scale energy transportation and industrial scale energy storage. This industrial scale industry needs to be repaired and upgraded, probably by people. These people need housing, food, education, ... Now take a guess on what you need to provide each and every one of these? Yeah, right; infrastructure.
It's a rat's tail. You cannot get a way from infrastructure if you want any kind of technological civilization.
Preindustrial cities can't serve as reference.
Because the devastation would be unimaginable by preindustrial standards?
I don't want it to happen either, but that's not a valid reason why it couldn't happen.
Why are pre-industrial cities not a good model, i.e. why didn't pre-industrial cities provide the protection we have knowadays?
Exactly because we were able to leave out pre-industrial cities in times of turmoil. Since we cannot rely on our self-sufficiency to survive, we need to maintain infrastructure to keep us alive. Maintaining infrastructure is cheapest when the infrastructure is used by as many people as possible. Having a widely distributed population requiring well maintained, widely distributed infrastructure will not be possible.
Who and when will do it?
Are we willing to take away women's rights if its the only way to stop a population decline?
There's nothing to cheer if you really look into it.
Taking away women rights? Where does that come from, that's ludicrous. Countries where women have the most rights are the ones with lower birth rates as it happens, and for good reasons.
1. at some point we "HAVE" and humanity WILL put an end to birthrate decline.
2. "Countries where women have the most rights are the ones with lower birth rates as it happens"
Therefore, one solution would be to take away women's rights.
That's not something I would stand for, but for certain totalitarian countries, it would work.
That's a very easy solution any idiot could come up with, just like slavery.
The other, MUCH, MUCH harder solution would involve completely changing world order, creating a much flatter and equal society, which is IMPOSSIBLE to do by the current world wide idiocracy.
In many many many ways this Chinese system is more resilient to the downsides of aging compared with the western individualistic lifestyle.
The primary issue these days with grandparents taking care of kids is that for many people the jobs are no longer nearby, but in neighboring provinces. Parents leave for years at a time, only returning during the Fall and Chinese New Year breaks. It puts a lot of pressure on the older folks.
In my mind China will be resilient less so because of how families work, and more because of the investments they're making with regard to automation and an expansion of social welfare policies.
Indian families are also similar, but never before (at least in India) so many young people have to work away from their home (normally some small town). This puts enormous pressure on young, double income couples in cities.
Let me rephrase that so it's clearer:
"in China. Children MUST take care of their parents 100% FINANCIALLY in old age."
Because of the former one-child policy, that means you're it.
This is a problem for the Chinese military and police, because if you're a one-child, you're very risk averse.
This is seen in Chinese police allowing people to drown instead of even getting their feet wet.
"Chinese police and onlookers watch a girl drown"
This might have been feasible in the past, with multiple children, but now, the woman becomes part of her husband's family or vice versa so(but I presume the former, since having a daughter is so undesirable in China), 50% of the parents get the short stick?
Those children then grow up seeing the hardships and stress of their parents, who complain about how expensive they were and now they won't be able to retire and decide to either wait for things to get better before having children or not to have any at all.
Then the elder statesmen complain about low birth rates.
Until the United States creates policies so that someone who works 40 hours a week, regardless of the job, will be able to retire and afford healthcare, only the top 10% of earners ($150k+) and the extreme poor (medicaid, food stamps, subsidized housing) will have more than 1 child.
1. Locate the factories in Africa as it is huge and has untapped natural resources.
2. Establish special economic zones in China where immigrants can enjoy a higher standard of living than back home but with no possibility of citizenship or even settling there in the long term.
The old propaganda that they are a government of technocrats who can make good farsighted decisions without the pressure of elections has proved wrong time and again.
Racial and cultural integration is not easy.
Singapore could do this with its small size and hands-on approach (ethnic makeup of apartment buildings is dictated by law), but even America has difficulty doing so.
At Chinese scale, it may lead to worse than what Uyghurs are being treated in Xinjiang.
Although most of these claims seem to be “obvious” and logically sound, there are I think a number of caveats to consider:
1. While overall population is shrinking, by and large china is replacing a huge population of low-skill farm and industrial laborers with medium to high-skilled educated workers who are likely to out-earn them by large margins.
2. If anything the problem for the Chinese economy for the past 20 years hasn’t been under-investment but Over-Investment. What that means is that all those ghost cities, empty roads and suboptimally run factories leave a lot of slack in the system for growth to continue at lower investment rates.
3. It may actually benefit China, as it shifts from an export driven to a consumption driven economy to have a large population of idle old people spending money on the economy, it means that the government can grow the economy by directing more funds to people rather than to hard assets whose ROI becomes increasingly dubious.
4. China is investing heavily in AI, automation and creating other types of competitive advantages in order to supersede their historical dependence on raw numbers of cheap labor. Although the judge still is out, I think this article is premised on backward looking assumptions (You need lots of workers to have a growing economy!) rather than forward looking... (what type of society may technology enable us to build?). Furthermore it misses out on how all the investments China has made in the near past will be leveraged in the future. I’d argue that what a small population can do with good infrastructure, education, etc. is orders of magnitude higher than what a huge population can do with poor infra/edu. By any measure even in a hundred years China will still have a working population roughly equal to the west/NATO as a whole... they will also have thousands of miles of bullet trains, subways, roads, waterways and if things go to plan an unrivaled manufacturing capacity and a digital infrastructure (in terms not only of internet connections, but also an ecosystem of big and small companies, VCs, etc) that although powerful in the US is almost nonexistent in europe.
5. China is building a domestic financial infrastructure that is likely to rival that of the west (already how many IPOs were there in Germany, or all of europe ex-UK last year vs NY or HK+Shanghai+Shenzhen?) which will enable it to create a self sustaining domestic ecosystem for allocating capital more effectively.
All this goes to say that -and I’m no China shill- that I find the whole article rests on some sort of western progressive complacency that diminishes the scale of geopolitical rivalry that China presents and thinks that we can overlook our problems because in due time the public will come around to some easy, invariably obvious, solution. For instance, if you think that national power derives from sheer numbers of people the logical conclusion is that all the west’s problems will be solved once massive numbers of immigrants -mostly uneducated- are let in. Nevertheless although there is undoubtedly a role that immigration can play in growth (just look at the number of companies started by first or second generation immigrants) I think this obfuscates the real factors that enable economic growth and which often times are opposed by the type of facile progressive arguments that often underlie pieces like this and are also often against business and growth friendly policies. In particular I don’t think that immigrants themselves are that important if you think of them without also considering the enabling factors, such that it wasn’t Elon Musk alone that made paypal/tesla/spacex, but Elon Musk + America. Why I say this is that I believe China is heavily investing to make this type of thing a reality there and so I think any analysis of the country that looks at it through “anyplace-glasses” errs, because in fact we should look at China through “exceptional-place-glasses” and more importantly, we should think more about what the consequences may be for the future of all of us outside China of an exceptional place fully becoming its own but with an almost all-powerful 21st century tech enabled authoritarian regime.
China has much worse social security than many other countries.
Chinese retirement pension is expected to dry up by 2035 [1], and close to half of the population earn only 1000 RMB (140 USD) per month [2] (it is reported that 900 million earn only 2000 RMB per month, 1/3 of the poverty line of US).
This means there will not be a large population of idle old people spending money on the economy, but they will take up resources to support. (That’s the reason behind the proposal to delay the retirement age [3], but as the article Chinese Demography explains, this barely changes the overall trend.)
[1]: https://www.scmp.com/economy/china-economy/article/3020602/c...
[2]: https://www.scmp.com/economy/china-economy/article/3086678/c...
[3]: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-11-29/china-sti...
The aging and poor population, plus the excess production and over-investment in the last decades, means China must grow without the high GDP growth. This might be possible elsewhere, but would be difficult for CCP, and increasingly so when the employment reality hits [4].
[4]: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/10/30/as-chinas-economy-picks-up-n...
I think when people predict the future of China, they are extrapolating the previous economic growth since 2000. But such growth is typical for an export-driven economy, and the Chinese numbers are actually worse than those of its neighbors Taiwan, Japan, and South Korea [5]. If technology or shifting to more skilled works can propel future growth of China, why can’t Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, or India?
[5]: https://www.wsj.com/articles/chinas-state-driven-growth-mode...
Our fight concerns morals. Things like:
- Power is subject to the same law.
- Orders that demand perfection are not laws because power is imperfect.
- Instead of command economy, you must convince people and create the consumer demand first.
- Wealth does not concentrate and instead tends to accelerate bad habits.
- It's better to just walk away. Bad things are going to happen no matter what you do. Trying to control everything just makes it worse.
I've long maintained that Chinese demographic bomb is overplayed and is actually a blessing in disguise. Some considerations:
Birthrate of 1.4B people is sufficient to generate more absolute replacement human capital compared to most developing countries, even factoring in immigration. For comparison China has more people than OECD countries combined. This is important in cultivating future competitiveness as long as brain drain is blunted. It's enough to retain advantages for regional power balance.
There are still 600M Chinese living on less than 1000rmb per month. This represents a massive internal underclass that can be arbitraged for caretaking and other labour intensive duties for a fraction of the cost. China is both a developed and developing country, this is an advantage that is not going to change until population decline stabilizes. Or rather China cannot be uniformly well/highly developed precisely due to there being too many people. Which leads to the next point.
At the height of Chinese export economy, manufacturing sector "only" accounted for 400M jobs. There was also less automation then. The takeaway is world demand is not sufficient to uplift even a majority of Chinese population to barely middle income status. There simply isn't enough global demand or resources for every Chinese to live as well as the west. Manufacturing is increasingly automated, China is rapidly integrating industrial robots to retain industrial base. Even when those 600M can work wages cheaper than Vietnam or Bangladesh. Pending focus on neglected interior development, maybe they will at the expense of rest of region trying to replicate export led development.
A lot of issues related to food, energy and resource security would be alleviated with less people. Despite import dependencies, China is also one of the largest domestic producer for many raw resources. A relatively food and energy secure China can start pursuing more flexible foreign policy goals in the 2070s.
None of this is to imply it's not a difficult problem, especially socially. But unlike many countries, long term Chinese goals is better met with less people. Demographic dividend can be a demographic curse as well. See India, who needs to (and hasn't) maintained an 8% growth per year just to keep up with employment. Technological paradigms and geopolitics dictates they won't get a fraction of the 400M manufacturing jobs that China did. They're projected to have 1.7B people. That's a recipe for disaster.
> At the height of Chinese export economy, manufacturing sector "only" accounted for 400M jobs.
Based on highly doubtful statistics, and methodology. It might have been a double digit percentage lesser than that.
> There was also less automation then.
The total ratio of labour per output of light industry for lion share of goods did not change since eighties.
> The takeaway is world demand is not sufficient to uplift even a majority of Chinese population to barely middle income status.
This is the sole ultimately true point.
> There simply isn't enough global demand or resources for every Chinese to live as well as the west.
A moot point with resources. We have enough of pretty much everything as extraction technologies improve. The only natural resource we may ran out soon is wood..., ammusingly a largely renewable one.
> Manufacturing is increasingly automated,
No
> China is rapidly integrating industrial robots to retain industrial base.
No
> Even when those 600M can work wages cheaper than Vietnam or Bangladesh. Pending focus on neglected interior development, maybe they will at the expense of rest of region trying to replicate export led development.
Again, no. Chinese establishment don't give a flying .... about those 600M Chinese in inland provinces. Why would they? Why should they? They didn't even at the time when the digit was a double of that.
And the Chinese business, it has largely no interest working with middle age, expensive to train, and largely unruly social bottom feeder workforce.
They will rather go where they can get prime rib workforce for cheap. They need malleable young workers who are well schooled, trained, have low demands, no family to feed, no health issues, and are cream of the crop of their part of the social ladder. And yes, they need them in tonnes, and rock bottom prices on top of that.
China largely ran out of high quality factory employable workforce.
Estimates vary, picking a lesser estimate only reinforces my point that export driven development / manufacturing is simply not enough for China -> too many people.
> output since the 80s
Ditto.
>sole ultimately true point.
You're reinforcing my argument is tearing into it how specifically. The broad point is China has too many people for current development models. Unless you think my argument is something else.
> A moot point with resources.
On that matter what is your argument exactly? That things will be fine because science will solve all roadblocks? You may subscribe to future tech + earth can support 100 Billion Ecumenopolis in your other comment, but I do not. At analysing hypothetical trends in the next 50 years, which itself is a shitshow, but needn't enter scifi wank territory. If your argument is the world can technically support 1T algae eating people comfortably without an actual road map for such transition then why bother obsessing minutae of individual statistics when your hypothetical outlook is a handwave.
>no / no
Normalize robots per 10k worker metric, China has more industrial robots than Japan, US, SK, Germany combined. Most of this growth was last few years.
> don't give a flying, why would they?
They haven't given a flying historically, these regions were neglected, only so much political focus and direction to go around. Hence "pending" and whether they actually deliver on interior development pivots that's being hinted at this year. You don't think the fact that Chinese literacy rate exceeds most in the region while 600M interior poor who are already subsisting on rock bottom prices, a pool comparable to size of entire ASEAN, is a useless potential workforce? By your own admission the sector employs less than official statistics, are all 600M and their offsprings useless dregs? Are Chinese businesses all of a sudden not beholden to CCP industrial policies? Do state run enterprises not have massively wasteful job creation components already purely for stability maintenance. All I posited is "maybe" CCP will actually give a shit about long neglected interior development, they don't have to, but if it's establishment policy, business will fall in line. And if they don't, that's manageable too. Those 600M / 40% of the population can be bought off perpetually with 7% GDP, a few years of slow growth. Worst case they'll languish as underclass to support the demographic transition.
My point is that demographic decline is not a blessing at all. Manufacturing is leaving China for all kinds of reasons, econo-demographic factors included.
China had a chance to continue a much longer road on the path increasing industrialisation, but its journey seem to have ended so much earlier than anybody expected.
I worked in OEM goods since around 2007, my first job. I can say that light industries in China peaked at around 2010, and been on decline ever since. I'd say there only 1/3 as much factories left in the immediate vicinity of Shenzhen as there were in 2010. The situation is not as dramatic further inland, the decline is still very visible.
No robots, automation, or informatisation will save the Chinese industry, or anybody's else, and anybody saying that they will likely have zero hands-on experience with manufacturing.
China ran out of cheap, and high quality labour force. Middle age people don't spend, because they save for their retirement, and as the labour force get thinner, everything get more expensive, requiring people to save even more.
Business suffers from that too as much as everybody. Land prices reach extremes, skilled labour costs almost as much as in US, and you get worse, and worse workers for the same money.
The promise of domestic market taking off was empty. Few of the 600M people locked away in inland China will ever manage to up themselves on the economic ladder when the ship of industrial expansion has already sailed. Most of China's poor can nor earn, nor spend. Middle class don't spend, unless on a new apartment. And higher classes do spend, but not in China, or leave the country altogether, and take their capital, and skills with them.
The blessing is the stabilized end population post decline, though far away and difficult to manage is preferable to demographic curse and uniformly unrealizable dividends due to resource constraints. It's preferable to have an unequal society where 1/2 underclass takes care of 1/2 globally competitive class. It's about as optimal for tackling demographic decline as one could hope for given Chinese geopolitical constraints, which is real and requires actual response than hypotheticals of fully automated luxury algae eating Utopia. Meanwhile, there's going to be efforts to retain manufacturing and industrial capability in particularly strategic sectors and the inertia of demographics will generate enough new human capita to maintain relative competitiveness. Metrics / indicators in the last few years suggest China share of global manufactured exports is maintaining / increasing. Automation is not a panacea, it's part of the response for competitiveness in certain sectors. Stability maintenance of the people is easier than great powers competition. The people matter, but only so much, and as component of comprehensive national power.
As for journey ending earlier than expected, no one expected Trump, but pivot against China happened under Hu, so friction and competition also not unanticipated. I'm less pessimistic on prognosis of domestic consumption. Savings rate is high, real estate is a bubble, capital flight and brain drain is real. All true. IMO there's unused levers for those, though [x] doubt dual circulation. That said, 600M poor are frankly so poor that taking care of them is trivial. 1000 rmb is... so little that 600M / 40% of the population is 7% of national GDP - they can be bought off. Alternate framing, 2 years of slow 5% Chinese growth means the economy has expanded enough to take care of these people with 40% income increase. Forever. Manufacturing won't save China, less people will, the sooner the better, preferably the poor. It's ugly. Hard times are ahead. I'm rooting for algae utopia, but not holding breath.
> Fully developing China simply was/is/will not be possible with so many people. Hence demographic decline, in China's case is a forgone necessity, and the massive disparity between the haves / haves nots is essential in managing the transition. The end of which will situate China to better deal with a variety of issues.
I feel the same sense of resignation, and defeatism in these words as when a man on road to Chinese officialdom regurgitated that official line to me.
1. 600M of non-salvageable rural poor is a direct result of Beijing elites with attitude exactly like yours treating rural people as human garbage needing to be disposed off, walled off, and forgotten of.
2. Even if Beijing elites gave as tiny bit of concern as just building technical institutes for rural youth, and didn't perpetrate a nationwide policy of discrimination against them, China could've rode the manufacturing train for at least one more decade at full speed, and could've been incomparably more well off, possibly ahead of US economically by today already.
The biggest curse of China as it is now is that elites in Beijing don't have to give a round fuck about developing the country further knowing that China's economy is destined to become world's biggest in their lifetimes, no matter the amount of abuse, and mismanagement. More than enough to buy a luxury apartment, and an annual supply of maotai for a few millions in politically engaged class.
So why not give some credence to the point if its coming from a presumably subject matter expert?
> even if Beijing elites gave as tiny bit of concern
The issue is more complex than elites from ZhongNanHai not caring, after all, every official who climbs up has to go through shit tier postings before advancing and has every incentive to succeed. The fundamental issue is China is massive and difficult to manage, especially after misguided purgings of political equity. There is only so much attention and resources to go around. Otherwise wouldn't need five year plans to prioritize. Edward Luttwak roughly summarizes this phenomenon as Great State Autism, rulers of large countries have so much on their plate, yet attention of decision makers who are ultimately human can not scale linearly with population. It's harder modernizing a massive country where every segment of society must be developed. China is not a middle country with US protection umbrella where the population can coast through on a few key industries. Add on indigenous defense, space, nuclear programs and other geopolitical considerations and it's like comparing building regional franchise into a multinational compared to running a mom-and-pop shop that has sponsorship from rich family. An alternate reality where the entire country got commiserate growth is a world where China ran 20 years of 20-30% growth. That expectation is fantasy.
> biggest curse of China as it is now
This is very true. Hence, Xi, and actual believer seems like the most suitable person for the job. Central / western cities Chengdu, Chongqing, Wuhan, Chansha etc grew under him. Efforts to limit growth of large cities to spread development into smaller centres. Hukou reforms. So I take his focus on balanced interior growth more seriously - "pending focus on neglected interior development". It's one of the largest reasons I find his centralization of power justifiable. I didn't think elites gave a fuck under Hu, now they're forced to. But ultimately there's only so much that can be done given real life constraints. The possibility space is limited and all things considered the cards have been well played in the last 30 years. New constraints in the next 30 are going to be harder.
> needing to be disposed off, walled off, and forgotten of
I'm confused why you think "non-salvageable rural poor" is my position when I'm hoping they'd be put to good use while you (seem) to think high quality factory workers are exhausted and resign to the fact that nothing will be done. I want more to be done, and think more will be. Just less optimistic that much can be. A bunch of technical schools and good management isn't going to add demand for 600M well paying jobs.
> I feel the same sense of resignation, and defeatism
I am resigned to the fact that 1.4B cannot possibly be elevated to western living standards in their lifetime, but I am optimistic their lives will see steady improvements if only because the bar is so low in the first place. Rebalancing inequity and redirecting development so 1000rmb end up 2-3000rmb over the demographic decline cycle would go a long way in terms improving QoL.
> rode the manufacturing train for at least one more decade at full speed
Could you elaborate on why you think this is possible.
In fact, a lowering population but increasing gdp will actually increase gdp per capita. The living people there will become richer per capita.
For developed countries with already low populations, the story is different. Fewer hands means lesser manufacturing which means lower gdp and thus, lesser power in the global stage.
Demography is one of few areas of social science where decade-scale prediction is reasonable. As well as China, check out projections for India, Indonesia, the USA, Brazil, and Nigeria. (And then Japan, Mexico, Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Egypt.)
The global demographic transition will form a mostly unremarked-on background to events this century.
As their roles in the rural economy is replaced by automation they could potentially compensate for the loss of urban workforce due to retirement.
It is only a worry for those that exploit poverty (both on the political left and the political right).
Politically motivated/supported unions