How Severe Are China's Demographic Challenges? | Hacker News Reader

How Severe Are China's Demographic Challenges?

chinapower.csis.org

41 pointsbelter23 comments

It's always a fascinating sight to observe how dictatorships inevitably ruin countries. Simply because there is a force too strong for anyone to be able to object, and over time it starts making fatal mistakes not having any feedback. Chinese did that to themselves in XIX century and are repeating it again.

I hope you're not implying that the Chinese government is responsible for its declining fertility rates, because South Korea, Japan, and pretty much all developed countries in East Asia are having the same problem.

You have something of a point, but to be sure: the Chinese government was very explicit about it, for quite a long time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-child_policy

Right, so the 1 child policy was never something that the Chinese government enacted?

They did, there were lots of forced abortions and sterilizations.

The sex ratio per age group gives one a crazy sense of the scale of this.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/282119/china-sex-ratio-b...

China probably gave a bad name to dictatorships for their 1-child policy, but the guy you are replying to has a history of denying that birth rates in most of Western Europe is pretty much only held up by immigrants.

So what's the problem if so? U.S. is a country entirely built of migrants. And they give citizenship by birth which Europe does not. And seems to be doing pretty well.

CCP on the other hand, has no chance in the world to attract migrants, because people are not fools.

Problem seems to be modern ("postenlightenment") liberalism:

https://ifstudies.org/blog/the-conservative-fertility-advant...

You can see rayiner's nuanced take above.. rayiner is a well known republican here.. US liberals full on supported fertility reduction in Asia (not to mention contributed to such in their own country)

You seems to be pretty confident in China prospects. Are you willing to bet $1000 against my $100 that if China tries to lure in immigrants from a wide range of countries it will fail?

about 10% of the US is immigrant, that number is less than 0.1% in China.

dictatorship + failing economy + xenophobia + han-ethnocentrism goes brutally hard against immigration from other nationalities. immigrants would be beaten, harassed, and killed en mass in China.

Plus, Chinese really see everyone except Han as subhuman. White westerners for them, are a curiosity, sure every Chinese would be proud of hooking up with a white woman, but even those, they don't see as their equals. Everyone else, they take for pretty much human trash. It's hard to imagine anyone wanting to immigrate there. Plus, well, main reason for immigration is to give better future for your children. Vast majority of people have no hope of regulating their kids' future by bestowing them money, so they want to do it by giving them better level of rights. In this regard, China is worse than almost any large country in the world. I'd much rather go to Belarus (you need to keep your mouth shut, or nasty stuff happens to you, but man, the CHICKS!!!), than China.

All those countries had intense anti-natal campaigns by the government. They didn’t outright kill babies like China, but they persuaded two generations of people to closely link the idea of lower birth rates to development and civilization: https://www.firstthings.com/article/2023/05/anti-natal-engin...

This was supported by intense efforts from western countries to reduce birth rates in Asia. Family planning and contraception promotion is a key segment of USAID, for example.

Good job. And people say U.S. authorities are inept and incompetent.

This is when I wish @dang would unban HN user dirtyid. His takes on Chinese politico-economics are as insider as it gets this side of the globe (he's Canadian, with some family background in supplying the CCP military equipment) without offending my admittedly Republican sympathies. Hell, I also always presumed from his username that's he's a self-deprecating Jew.

Why was he banned in the first place?

> Hell, I also always presumed from his username that's he's a self-deprecating Jew.

I would guess anti-Semitism based on the above.

Last straw was for correctly pointing out that Canada had inadvertently harbored, nay, honored a Nazi.

I was pretty convinced he was a CCP plant here. He would stretch truths to always put the CCP in the best light.

Once you imagine that he's Efraim (Jonah Hill) in War Dogs (or rather the real person the character is based on), you can apply reverse filters for "buttering up the client" and get some insights :) dirtyid has said that Xi Jinping isn't the sharpest knife in the drawer, is that good for the CCP?

We can only hope for baybal2, as well but that ship has probably sailed

hasn't baybal2 been unbanned? I saw him here last month. Probably (wisely) avoiding china topics

The chart is likely way off and extremely optimistic. Based on a few key metrics, the 2022 UN report data has pretty much been debunked, and China's population will roughly halve by 2060, much faster than 2100 (what the UN predicted).

"The UN's projection, for instance, was based on the assumption that China's fertility rate would remain at above 1.7 children per woman. China had 12 million newborns last year, 25% lower than the UN's..."

These researchers showed a halving by 2065 based on a the official fertility rate of 1.3 in 2020. :https://www.bangkokpost.com/world/2190995/chinas-population-...

That's a big assumption to even believe the official birth rate, but it's much lower than the UN's number.

In 2022 the official number plummeted even more: "released data indicating that last year’s fertility rate fell to 1.09 from 1.15 in 2021, below Japan’s rate for the same time period and only slightly higher than South Korea’s, which was estimated to be 0.8."

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/aug/16/china-fertilit...

At this rate I wouldn't be surprised if China's population halves before 2060. I wonder how long it will take before the CCP, vowing control over any thing else, starts to implement a draconian multiple child policy (the exact opposite of a one child policy).

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