China’s Looming Crisis: A Shrinking Population | Hacker News Reader

China’s Looming Crisis: A Shrinking Population

nytimes.com

21 pointsjseliger6 comments

With increasing prosperity of the average citizen in China, more people would create further ecological pressure in a heavily populated geography. Gradual contraction of population in that circumstance is better than overcrowding and competition for scarce resources.

It won't be easy to navigate, but it's a necessary step as people become richer and consume more per capita.

Are there any other countries besides China where we doubt nearly any "fact" they produce? What causes this? Its incredibly odd to read an article where the government makes a claim and then follow it up with a claim from someone else that is entirely different.

> China’s fertility rate has officially fallen to 1.6 children per woman

> Yi Fuxian, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, ... [claims] the fertility rate averaged 1.18 between 2010 and 2018

(dis)credit where it's due?

They NYT article intimated that the OCP is part of the reason for the discrepancy as the gov't is loath to admit its policies could have had a "negative" effect on the country's outlook, given they frame declining pop as negative.

> Are there any other countries besides China where we doubt nearly any "fact" they produce? What causes this? Its incredibly odd to read an article where the government makes a claim and then follow it up with a claim from someone else that is entirely different.

IIRC, Soviet and Eastern Bloc statistics were regarded with similar skepticism. I would imagine the same would be true of any dictatorship where information is subject to strict political control. Without reduced capability of independent verification, distortions can multiply out of control (http://brucefwebster.com/2008/04/15/the-wetware-crisis-the-t...). In China it's apparently so bad that not even the government trusts its own GDP numbers (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li_Keqiang_index).

I think another way of looking at it is the same way people try to avoid taxes.

In China, with the One-Child policy, you would be fined heavily for having more than one child (now the limit is two). However there will be scenarios where rural and poorer folks have more children so they will under-report or even neglect to report the size of their children because they don't want to be hit with heavy fines. The disadvantage is however that extra children won't be officially registered and have a hukou and won't enjoy official protections of a Chinese citizen. On the other side of the spectrum, very rich to rich Chinese can pay for the fines and thus might choose to have 2 or more children because the fines are not that expensive to them. I have observed both scenarios when I was in China.

Note that there are exceptions to the original one-child policy, ethnic minorities don't need to abide by the one-child policy and rural parents whose first child is a daughter can have an extra child. As well, people from the previous generation who don't have siblings can have two children to make up for the lack of people in their family.

Thus the official numbers will have to be taken with a grain of salt in the same manner people and companies report their taxes as there will be individuals with more than one child who under-report to not incur fines.

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