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> Was it also the Chinese plan all along to annihilate their own birh rate? No, that's generally what happens when countries stop being poor. Taiwan, Singapore

• rmunn 5d ago
  But none of them had a government-mandated one-child policy (maximum, not minimum) for over three decades. That's a pretty major difference between China and neighboring countries.
  • vkou 5d ago
    And yet all of them have an even lower fertility rate than China. On the one hand, you're proving my point. On the other hand, if you think that China's headed for a demographic disaster, so are all of those countries, and your thesis of blaming the CCP for everything... Falls a bit flat.
    • badpun 5d ago
      China has extremely low fertitily rate given that they haven't yet reached the status of a developed country (which Taiwan, SK and Singapore have reached).
      • HarHarVeryFunny 5d ago
        Huh? Developed countries tend to have lower fertility rates (i.e. less kids per family) than undeveloped ones. Comfortably off, well educated people tend to put thought into whether to have kids or not. In poor countries people tend to have large families so they can send the kids out to work. Having a high fertility rate isn't "high status" and a sign of a country's progress, but rather the exact opposite. Of course this is separate from this issue of having a shrinking population, which is a sign that your citizens are not optimistic about the future, not a positive thing.
    • ricardobayes 5d ago
      China is headed for a demographic disaster, though. High schools are incredibly packed, middle schools, not so much and primary schools and kindergartens are kind of empty.
      • lazide 5d ago
        Everyone is, not just China.
        • belowavgiq 5d ago
          Everyone stupid enough to let that happen is. There is a handful of developed countries where this is not an issue.
          • lazide 5d ago
            Population collapse? Who, besides Zimbabwe?
          • HarHarVeryFunny 5d ago
            It's hard to say that it's stupidity (at least not country-specific stupidity) - it seems that globally, presumably due to the state of the world along many axis, many people are choosing to have fewer children, and it's happening on a large enough scale to have major consequences for things like the size of your tax base, trying to keep your economy growing, demographic concerns over an aging population with no-one to look after or pay for them etc, etc. Different countries are handling this in different ways, with encouraging immigration being the major one. Japan is facing a major lack of workers, with many businesses having to shut down as a result, but have decided to tackle it in a different way relying on advanced robotics as an alternative to immigration. There are very few developed countries NOT having this problem. Most of the population growth is in poorer parts of the world like Africa.
            • belowavgiq 5d ago
              Well, if there are >0 developed countries that have solved this (Israel, the GCC, dare I say fairly well-off MENA countries like Jordan, Algeria, Morocco, etc., and to a minor degree Botswana) then this proves wrong the hypothesis that modern hyper-development must inherently mean population collapse. Going purely by the evolution theory and natural selection, having so few children that there is a serious risk a population will disappear in a century or two, means losing. Needless to say, this is stupid. From the entire American continent, to Europe, India more recently, Thailand, China, the Koreas, Japan. Africans, Arabs, and some non-Arab Muslim populations will carry the torch. Much respect for not falling into the trap.
    • inglor_cz 5d ago
      Still, a stupid governmental policy cost them at least 100 million people compared to the expected spontaneous development. Probably more. That is the sort of punishment that omnipotent governments sometimes visit upon their folk. I don't believe that even the CCP itself, in hindsight, considers the one-child policy to have been a good decision. At the very least it should have been ended some 15 years earlier.
      • reeredfdfdf 5d ago
        Well, I've been reading on The Economist how China is seriously struggling with youth unemployment right now. Lots of fresh university graduates are sitting unemployed, or doing manual labor. In my home country (Finland) we have had way below replacement birth rates for a long while now, yet youth unemployment is at all time high. The problem with low birth rates is assumed to be that there are less workers to take care of the pensioners. But right now it seems like even the few young workers available often aren't needed anymore, thanks to increasing automation of industries. I predict youth unemployment will be made even worse by AI soon enough. So, why do we need children, if capitalist economies don't need workers? Unemployed people do not pay much taxes to sustain the non-working age population. I believe low birth rates might become a blessing soon enough. It just means less people for governments to take care of when robots and AI take away most jobs.
      • maxglute 5d ago
        No, a remarkably farsighted policy that prevented PRC from having to deal with additional 200m-400m subsistent farmers. If anything it wasn't done sooner/aggressive enough. Like you can literally wipe away 200-400m from PRC button quantile and PRC would be net better off due to increase per capita resources and wealth. This hindsight will be historically obvious in 20-30 years when you see the outcome of India with 1.6B people with 1.2B poor, vs PRC with 1.4B people with 400m poor. The drag of having disproportionate, bluntly, worthless bodies is not linear for governance, and it's not because India hasn't tried aggressive family planning of their own, they simply failed unlike PRC. Who very much regards family planning as largely successful demographic management system that enabled proper allocation of resources away from generating peasants to building industry and the largest pool of high end human talent in recorded history, where frankly any tertiary dividend is worth 50 farmers in terms of productivity.