Attrition: The Chinese Family Collapse
strategypage.com
strategypage.com
The Great Cousin Decline - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38719249 - December 2023 (329 comments)
+ The simulations show that the Chinese family is about to undergo a radical and historically extraordinary evolution, as extended kinship networks weaken across the nation and close blood relatives disappear entirely for many.
+ In terms of sheer quantity, Chinese networks of blood kin were never before nearly as thick as at the start of the 21st century. Due to dramatic increases in survival, men and women in their 30s as of 2020 have on average five times as many living cousins as in 1960. China’s kin increase may be a significant, previously overlooked factor explaining the Chinese economy’s astonishing performance since Mao Zedong’s death.
+ The kin explosion has reached its peak, and China is now on the cusp of a severe, unavoidable, and relentless kin crash, driven by its sustained and progressively steep sub-replacement fertility relationships. The implosion of consanguineous family networks, in the models, means that China’s rising generations will likely have fewer living relatives than ever before in Chinese annals.
+ Any encounter by China’s security forces involving significant loss of life will almost inevitably foretell lineage extinction for many Chinese families.
+ Researchers and decision makers in China and the West pay close attention to many major Chinese population trends and their consequence. Among these are pronounced and continuing sub-replacement fertility, shrinking working-age manpower, rapid population aging, and emerging surpluses of marriageable men, partly due to sex-selective abortions.
+ Despite this, the looming macroeconomic consequences of old- age dependency burdens, the most significant economic impact of China’s coming revolution in the family, may actually concern the micro-fundamentals of the national economy. Since earliest recorded history, China’s guanxi/social & business networks have helped get business done by reducing uncertainty and transaction costs. Just as propagation of blood relatives likely proved a powerful stimulant for growth during the era of China’s extraordinary upswing, the severe coming plunge in living biological kin in China between now and 2050 may prove an economic depressant.
+ The ability of China’s increasingly sparse younger working age cohorts to support many times their number of elders is very much in question.