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Comment by throwSZ99 | Hacker News Reader

I think that the 996 work culture will be the next domino to fall. Many ambitious Chinese "work" from 9am to 9pm, six days a week. It's "work" in the sense that 996 is well-padded with unproductive face time and phone time. Office buildings stay lit well into the night and young office workers barely have time to date let alone form families.

In the last two years, the popularity of foxi (buddha-like apathy) and more recently, tangping (lying flat and abandoning the rat race), show the degree of stress young people are under. Stressed out people are less likely to form families and have children. China needs more children.

Here's a video that discusses the rat race and potential effects: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WDc8-lNSFR0

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Maybe more children isn’t the answer. Not only for China. We’re pillaging the planets resources to the point where there will be nothing left for future generations unless we find a different economic model AND improve the efficiency of current technologies and methods.

The population has to decrease in a gradual and manageable way. In demographic collapse we cannot support retirees. Unless we have a totally different economic model, but then we would not be in this in the forst place.

China has terrible demographics right now. Their population will get old and their economic dominance will disappear. As a CCP politician you will have a big angry mob knocking at your door who believed that you were the one bringing them to prosperity.

But the problem is that if we in China weaken now, then others will benefit from the planet while we struggle in a long slow decline.

It's probably of our own making and not something foreigners do care about - but the problem today is how to make people comfortable at life enough to at least have 2 children, something that is the basis of a functionning society (meaning it can renew itself).

You can have less children if you want, but us I think we need this as a goal: we already do pretty much less than 1 per woman, so we already achieved your dream.

> But the problem is that if we in China weaken now, then others will benefit from the planet while we struggle in a long slow decline.

We all will struggle in a long, slow decline, given that the earth will be able to maintain fewer and fewer people in the century to come due catastrophes like global warming.

The "China cannot get weak because that leads to others prospering and we wouldn't want that" thinking is deeply flawed.

It's both highly flawed and highly logical. It's a major failing of the nation state model.

It's logical within a lose-lose mindset that most of the world hopefully abandoned in the 50s. It's what leads to wars.

Ah, no, the world has not abandoned that model, sadly. Relative dominance is as important as it ever was.

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