The Wall Street Journal reports that China's fertility rate dropped to 1.09 last year:
Fertility is down nearly everywhere, but China is in a class by itself. For some reason, starting in 2018 Chinese families simply decided they didn't want children. Fertility has dropped by nearly half over the past five years, an unprecedented decline outside of famine or war.
Why? This decline obviously poses problems from a purely demographic standpoint, but it also points to a souring mood among families. A slow, steady drop is one thing, but a sharp fall like this says something new and serious about deteriorating views of life in China—both now and in the future.
The article in the link has this:
"China’s economy is staggering under challenges..."
staggering??
"Struggling" is the closest that I can think of, but how do you go from "Struggling" to "staggering"?
Evergrande has filed for bankruptcy which will hit the housing market hard. A lot of people their have their money tied up in housing--including paying for apartments that have yet to be built. The building spree it what funds local governments. This wills stagger China's economy. Will it be minor or like the S&L crisis or our 2008 great recession--not sure.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/aug/18/china-property-crisis-deepens-as-developer-country-garden-at-risk-of-default-evergrande
Not just Evergrande. Another large developer, Country Garden, says they're burning through cash at an alarming rate. https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/realestate/chinese-property-giant-country-garden-warns-of-76-billion-loss-as-it-nears-default/ar-AA1f7YSz
Note that the drop off started a year or two before the pandemic and Great Lockdown of China.
It's also got to be more than "Isn't life great without kids!" People would have been having fewer all along. Xi Jinping came to power in 2012 according to Wikipedia; maybe his policies have had something to do with it?
I'm out of my depth.
Life without kids: A friend ignored a cold and was hospitalized. Her daughter saved her life. The daughter visited mom and was told they were informing family that they were going to pull the plug. The daughter raised bloody hell. She was a nurse so knew how to raise bloody hell. In today's medical world, if you don't have an advocate, you are just a number.
Check out the Serge Obolensky story to find out how fucked you can be without an advocate. Blown For Good has the story.
My children live 1,000 miles away from me. My wife's one child is handicapped and not able to advocate for anybody. Fortunately, my wife and I have each other if an advocate is needed,
Good lord - the idea of bringing a person into the world to advocate for you in the hospital. Jeebus.
It's not the desire to live without kids, but it is (somewhat) the desire to have a life. Many Chinese mothers are expected to give up any career they might have in order to focus on child-rearing, especially education. Even for those who do not have a great career, the time and cost of shepherding a child through the education system is substantial, and not very rewarding, so most women do not wish to do this more than once.
There are exceptions of course: rural areas have higher birth rates and the rigors of the educational system are slightly less expensive and time consuming. There are also women who are self-employed and can design a schedule that fits both work and child-rearing. And there are wealthy people who can pay someone else to do most of the work.
In all these things, China resembles Japan and Korea, which also have low birthrates.
The protests in Hong Kong started in 2019.
Thanks!
It's around the time that China vastly increased surveillance of the populous. In addition to millions of cameras they already had, they added smart phone based surveillance, and started rating folks on their "social credit." Maybe it is all just too much to bear (more children).
"rating folks on their social credit"?? Wasn't that on "The Orville"?
Kind of. In the Orville social credit was based on getting likes and views on social media. Basically life as a popularity contest.
In China social credit is based on pleasing the Chinese Communist Party.
"Fertility is down nearly everywhere, but China is in a class by itself."
This is factually WRONG
Look at South Korea.
Maybe there are other countries worse than Korea but it is FAR WORSE than China.
East Asia seems to have low fertility. Japan is also very low.
In any event, China is NOT in a class by itself. It isn't even the worst in the neighborhood.
That is amazing. South Korea’s rate is down to about 0.84. Japan’s is about 1.3. Hard to understand. My impression from visiting Asia on business is that it was a hard place to live. Lots of rules, hardship. It doesn’t seem worse now than before. Maybe there is the loss of hope. Even if life is hard if you have hope of better times you can go on.
Those places are grossly overcrowded. I suspect it's as simple as that. Even New Yorkers would rebel if asked to live at the density typical of major East Asian cities.
Yah. South Korea is 50,000,000+ people living in a land the size of Kentucky. Japan is land the size of California with 3X as many people. Their cities are crowded and living spaces are pricey and cramped. China has historically not been like this, but today the major cities are indeed beginning to resemble other Asian megacities.
If you and your spouse lived in a 1-bdr 500 sq ft apartment that you could barely afford, would you want to have a baby?
Hard to understand?
FFS have you LIVED in these places? People packed into tiny apartments stacked 500 deep have decided they would rather live lives that are, perhaps unfulfilling along some dimensions (no kids, yes) but are more fulfilling along others (they will have more space available to themselves, and somewhat more access to the pleasures of material life).
The whole thing is perfectly sensible and will right itself as soon as population crowding is not so dire. IMHO that should be at populations about a 10th of where they are now, but my guess is enough people really want kids that the drop won't be lower than to about half where we are now.
Things will adapt, like they always have. Running around screaming it's the collapse of civilization is a sure way to show the world that you have both zero analytical skills AND zero knowledge of history.
And there's something deeply insane about the EXACT SAME PEOPLE bemoaning climate change also bemoaning fewer people. I mean, where the hell do you think the demand for resources driving climate change comes from???
You make good pointts. Remember, "unrestrained and constant growth" is the logic of the cancer cell. Also of American corporations. Coincidence?
Living in Tokyo is totally awesome. Most Japanese people think so, too, because so many of them move there, and away from the countryside which is less crowded and expensive. The same is true for Seoul and Shanghai. Hell, for that matter, the same is true for Boston and San Diego: crowded, expensive, and a hell of a lot more desirable than most places in Kansas or Kentucky.
I think the thing that stands out for China is the large drop-off recently. Yes, other countries have lower fertility rates, but South Korea hasn't had an enormous recent drop. Their huge drop was in the 70s, and it's just trickling down now.
China's large drop recently suggests that there is a significant increase in economic pessimism. That pessimism is probably due to the housing market, which drives much of the economy, and has been very shaky for several years.
South Korea and Japan also have very expensive housing and cultures that make motherhood especially burdensome (which is why birth rates have been low for a long time), but they don't have economies that are as dependent on housing construction or that are as at risk of a housing construction crash. I think that is why SK and Japan have slowly dropping fertility, while China's is dropping faster.
China's decline is somewhat steeper, but South Korea's does have a decline, and to a significantly smaller fertility rate.
Google "china last generation". Essentially, not having children is a form of silent protest in a country where you are not allowed to protest.
Hey, at the Germans are doing it for Deutschland!
China still has a very high ratio of working age people to total population:
https://skeptometrics.org/China_Demographics.png
and according to the projection (I think from the OECD), it would be down to 60% by around 2050. This was the approximate fraction in the US in 1900, again in about 1965, and was the last Census projection for the US for 2050. That could hardly be a crippling ratio.
Of course the China projection does not include the recent sharp downturn, but still there is no good reason to think that China is going to run out of workers. If the reports of extremely high unemployment are correct, it has a huge surplus at the moment. Various things affect birth rate - and also affect reporting thereof - and there could be new baby booms at any time. Reproduction is the most basic and powerful instinct.
It’s raw economics. As a progressive father of two young children, it is patently obvious to me that having children is an absurd choice from a rational, utility-maximizing perspective: my free time and disposable income are down ten-fold, easily, since our kids were born.
If we want to reverse this trend of low birth rates, fixing this fact has to be the root of any strategy.
I don't know... I got (and continue to get) far more utils from my children than the money I spent on them would have gotten me otherwise. And I expect that you already feel that way as well.
Enjoy your time with them @Ogremaniac, they grow up fast.
I get joy from my kids, but utility? No way! Maybe when I'm 90, but by then all the childless will have helper robots who will complain less than my kids will about taking care of old people.
China ended its one-child policy in 2016.
Is it possible that what you're seeing is the adjustment of record-keeping, from falsified data to honest data? That is to say, families were (mis)reporting deaths where they had none, to accommodate an extra birth?
China never maintained a policy allowing extra births if deaths were sufficiently high, so this theory seems implausible.
The more likely explanation is: after several years of increasingly hamfisted and authoritarian rule by Xi (who came to power in 2012), the Chinese economy began to visibly falter starting around 2015: that year saw a plunge in Chinese equities markets. This likely translated into a drop in optimism, consumer sentiment, etc., and so Chinese couples soon began delaying starting families in ever larger numbers. Relatedly, Chinese couples began delaying marriage in larger numbers, too (which would have downstream effects on births). Then Trump came to power in 2017, and the economic atmosphere began to deteriorate yet more, with the arrival of the trade war. Also, increased geopolitical tensions have purportedly precipitated all manner of risk-mitigation behaviors in China (capital flows, emigration, etc): a reduction in births would be consonant with such a dynamic. And then Covid arrived.
I think we're seeing a real time, slow-motion (or not so slow) collapse in confidence about the future in China. The rapidity with which this has played out and crunched birthrates isn't unprecedented: the US experienced a similar decline in birthrates in the 1930s.
I'm not saying that policy changed based on deaths; I'm saying that people, along with the collusion (corruption) of local officials wrote off deaths of newly born girls, so that families on paper appeared to only have one child. We know that there were actually over 4M more girls than what was actually registered.
IDK, whatever.
Wouldn't the "one-child" policy (now no longer operational) have created a fertility rate of less than 1? (since one would not expect 1000 females to have 1000 children — some surely would not have children).
A fertility rate of 1.09 seems to mean that the "one-child" practice has resumed, albeit unofficially.
The "one-child" policy actually only limited couples to one child if they were ethnic Han Chinese living in an urban area. Rural Han couples were allowed two children, and non-Han couples and those living in sparsely populated remote areas weren't limited at all. There were also exceptions, allowing for an additional child if the first had a disability, for example.
And if a couple were each themselves the only children of their families, then they were allowed more than one child. And there were other exception to the one-child rule.
Which, again, is now defunct.
In reading more, the one-child policy does see to have had an impact, though it does not account for the steep decline that started in 2018: see https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/11/04/china-one-child-policy-fertility-rates/
The fertility rate typically focuses on the number of children women have. It does not cover the lack of women.
Aside from the post-Covid drop, it's similar to the ultra-low rates in Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan (although Japan's has slightly improved).
I'm convinced it's a combination of three things:
1. Older maternal age (something which they share with all the countries going through collapsing TFR rates).
2. Sexism and lack of support for working mothers.
3. Extremely high "cost" of "investment" per child. Basically, east Asian children require very high parental investment per child for stuff like exams, college, etc - to say nothing of the cost of forming a household altogether, not easy when the unemployment rate for people in their 20s is very high.
fertility rates falling across the world?
this is great news...fabulous news. I have heard that Italy is emptying out...I have seen entire villages in the Pyrenees full of empty house...more greatness.
I have also seen the logging disaster along the Amazon...fewer people, the better the carrying capacity of earth.
Earth is the only home we have, the only home we will ever have....and we have not been kind to her.
Fewer people fine....too few young people? We oldies will just have to figure out our way to somehow get along. (what we need is not more production, but rather greater wealth distribution).
There! I've fixed your thinking for you.
Best Wishes, Traveller
Come on, folks. It's not the "weakening economy", it's EMPEROR XI and "Socialism with Chinese Characteristics". Xi started "cracking down on corruption" -- [e.g. shaming and taking successful peoples' wealth] about 2018.
China has been here before when the previous Emperor Mao unleashed the morons of the Cultural Revolution. Millions of people died at their hands and five to ten times as many starved to death.
Would you want to give birth to a Xi-Thought-spouting little spy in a Mao suit?
In 2018, the CCP also abolished term limits for the president, which probably made it clear to everyone that Xi wasn't going to be bound by the more pragmatic policies of the CCP in general.
As an aside, it is weird talking about the Chinese Communist Party as the force for stability and sanity in China.
The starvation was from the Great Leap Forward, not the Cultural Revolution. As bad as the GPCR was, mass deaths and a low birth rate weren't part of the results. In fact, Mao ENCOURAGED births in order to make China a "population superpower." The one-child policy was, in part, a response to that.
So, will our Open Borders advocates head to China to make the case that they should admit millions to combat population decline?
China could potentially attract immigrants from poor countries with the promise of a better economic life, but the degree of repression and social control would be a deal breaker for many, and China's economy is still much less attractive than a truly rich country. An open-border China wouldn't get nearly as many takers as an open-border US.
The problem is that the only region of the world that is still seeing a high population growth rate is sub-Saharan Africa. Ask yourself if China is likely to want immigrants from that region.
There is an enormous difference between high immigration rates and "Open Borders".
I don't know what happened in China in 2018 to reduce the birthrate, but I can say that having kids is expensive. More expensive in some places than others.
Maybe 2018 in China was a tipping point. A perfect storm.
In the past decade or two, millions of Chinese have moved from the countryside, where they had extended families for economic support, but where mass starvation from crop failures was a real possibility, to the cities, where they were able to eat regularly but were far away from their familiar support systems.
When you give people a low-paying job which only has lots of promise, plus high housing costs and take away their family support, then start massive layoffs and show them that all the money they invested in housing simply blew away, then you are going to have a population which loses faith in their future well-being.
Not the best environment in which to start what will be a very expensive family.
I have no explanation, though, for the other low-birthrate Asian countries. Maybe it's the chemicals in the water.
Maybe this is people reaching a point where it’s obvious that more isn’t better. Maybe this is the post population-bomb explosion era in China.
Is it that contemporary Asians are the first to live in modern economies where individual people can have savings and retirement plans and don't have to rely on their families in old age, and without that incentive they are less motivated toward parenthood?
The lifting of the Chinese people to prosperity happened relatively quickly and the fall of fertility rates reflects this swift transition to affluence. Well educated, materially satisfied people do not procreate like a downtrodden proletariat.
Remember, one child... Unfortunately, the one child was generally a male and there was/is a surplus of "little emperor" males in China. The young woman can't tolerate them and are looking elsewhere for husbands, maybe even outside China. Could be this is a bigger part of the problem. Too bad "they" didn't think this one out in the future.
In the long run, depopulation is a good thing, in that it's going to happen one way or another, so best for it to be by choice instead of by famine/disease/war.
Anyone want to take bets on when China bans abortion?
I'm obviously just guessing, never having even been to China, but in 2018, Xi abolished term limits, and perhaps people started worrying that China was going to go back to the bad old pre-Deng days, now that it is effectively under one man rule, instead of being run by a committee.
As we've seen in Russia, when the supreme leader has no checks on their behavior, the leader can go pretty far down a rabbit hole and cause a lot of damage.
2018 was the year that the first CRISPRed babies were born. From that time on, becoming a parent entailed a profound amount of risk. One could spend the next 20 years investing your entire life energy into the optimal development of your children only to find that the children born any time somewhat later than your children had overwhelming genetic advantages. Anyone want to compete with others who had a 100 point IQ advantage?
It is clearly understood now that such an extreme phenotype shift is entirely possible. Children born at such disadvantage would from the day they were born only be a burden to their families and community for every day of their life. They would require permanent welfare.
China is at the leading edge of the genetic revolution and would be highly aware of this logic. Given that this technology has already been demonstrated, the international moratorium on gene editing only makes things worse. Preventing parents from actually accessing CRISPR and other genetic engineering technologies simply means that the above logic will become locked in and that the profound fertility collapse underway in China could become permanent. It is entirely possible to stop technological progress, it is just that the social consequences can cause even more disruptive changes: for example, the complete demographic collapse of your society.
I sincerely doubt that there are large numbers of people in China who even know about CRISPER let alone use that fact in making decisions about child bearing.
CRISPR was very big news when it was reported that babies had been born gene-edited. This development has profound implications for the economic value of humans. ChatGPT also poses similar risk to human fertility.
China has rapidly transitioned into a new mentality based upon economic self-interest in the context of current technology. China does not have the same historical reference points so eugenics lacks the associations present in Western nations.
It has also embraced genomic technology and IVF at population scale. It would not be overly difficult to imagine that China sees genetic enhancement as part of its industrial strategy to gain economic and social advantage.
For nations that have largely achieved economic success a certain slacking off in terms of genetic engineering might be expected; yet for nations that are on the way up, advantages such as genetic enhancement would make their rise all the more smooth and effortless and would not be casually ignored. Adding in genetic uplift would turbocharge China's ascent and largely result in it lapping all other nations.
I don't know what China does wrong, but I do know what France does right because I raised two kids there, almost entirely alone. And it's not money, since I got nothing at all for my first child and only 50% benefits for the second (full benefits kick in as of the third child, but first you have to get there). No, what France does right is create an atmosphere of no worry about children. Preschool child care is free and available. School is free and there's day care until 6 PM for kids whose parents work that late. University is practically free, and entirely so if you're low-income. There's a cultural side too: family and friends are used to helping out. Last but not least, if it gets hard in the city, it's oh so easy to move to the countryside.
I don't think China has much of the above, except maybe the family part (but not the babysitting friends).