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Comment by mytailorisrich | Hacker News Reader

Currently, China mainland's population: 1.4 billion (inc. about 240 million under 15, apparently), Taiwan's population: 24 million.

They can almost literally throw millions of people at Taiwan if they want to, and will be able to do so for many years to come.

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The point is that doing so would exacerbate their demographic cliff issue.

Dictatorships don't care. Look at Russia, it's much worse than China, Russia still suffers from ww2 losses. You can distract the people with a "good war". China has so many more people than Taiwan, they can waste a lot. What do they care, many of the leaders believe it's their destiny to be the world leader. That's not a unique view, a certain group of americans believe the same about the US too.

This all may be so. I have no strong opinion on if they will or will not 'waste' their population. But it seems you and others are not addressing the subject issue of the demographic cliff. That point of the demographic cliff is that there are a surplus of old people and a deficit of young (economically productive) people to sustain those old people. Comparison to the population of Taiwan or others are irrelevant in a sense.

Après moi, le déluge

-King Louis XV of France to Madame de Pompadour, his favourite.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apr%C3%A8s_moi,_le_d%C3%A9luge

Considering the numbers I quoted, it would make little difference (which was the point of my reply).

When the issue is already manifest, the margins presumably matter. But either way, the point was just to align the reply with the original comment's point.

TW has worse fertility than PRC at any rate.

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