China's crude birth rate dropped again in 2023:
China's birth rate dropped from 6.77 per thousand in 2022 to 6.39 in 2023, a decline of 6%. China's net population declined for the first time in 2022 by about one million. In 2023 it declined by 3 million.
When you can get them to talk about it, you find many Chinese feel pretty despairing about the direction of the country. That kills the desire to have kids. Would be interesting to compare expats to the at home birth rate.
There's a phrase in China that started in 2020 - "tang ping" (躺平) - which translates to 'lying flat', i.e. not expending effort to work hard and get ahead. Youth unemployment was at 21% in June '23 before the gov't stopped reporting the number.
I wonder how this translates to Italy or the Netherlands or even the United States. All these countries have a below replacement birth rate.
Studies show that what actually leads to reduced birth rates are three things. 1) Educated women. 2) Emancipated women who are allowed to exercise control over their own lives. And 3) access by women to birth control.
When given the choice, on average women choose to reproduce below replacement rates. This is not going to change. The story of the 2nd half of the 21st century will be a story of population reduction.
"This is not going to change"
Yeah it will. If the future belongs to educated, free women, then it will belong to whichever educated free women want to have kids.
Exactly.
Frankly, this is not a problem except to those heavily invested in ponzi capitalism that depends on ever increasing marketing to sustain itself.
A rethought social security and pension system can take care of the need for the young to support the old.
There is a clear limit to what the resources of the planet can support without massive destruction long term. Yeah, we can feed more people and house more people but those people have a lot of waste, garbage, and other collateral that cannot be supported.
Right now, the drive to earn greater and greater amounts of money have pushed millions out of poverty while they've pushed millions deeper into it at a huge cost to our climate and water. We're farming animals at a disastrous level and using practices guaranteed to create something awful. We need to make less stuff and buy less stuff so we throw away less stuff.
We, as a species, need to pull back on population increases while we get our sh*t together and figure out how to keep the ones we already have from starving and living in tents. In corporate speak, we need a hiring freeze while we do a reorg and make sure we're using our existing assets to their best ability.
The zig-zag in 2010-2017 looks to me more measurement (i.e. counting) effect than real one. Difficult to see how birth rate of such magnitude (> 10 million a year) can jump up and down like that.
Good news for those of us who believe that the world is overpopulated with humans.
If this data is accurate, birthrates that plummet this quickly are a sign that there is something wrong going on in that country. It appears Xi's reign is not turning out so well for the Chinese, is it? And how many more years are they stuck with this guy?
Last summer I dropped in on the main library in Bellingham during a long break in a jury trial. I picked up the latest copy of Forbes magazine, which had a couple of pretty long articles about some serious problems China was having and what that might mean if they couldn't resolve them.
Some of them were very familiar from almost 5 years before, when I was remotely managing a small SW engineering group - horrible levels of pollution in inland cities - as in life threatening. Xi Jinping got appointed to his 2nd term as president (and term limits were removed shortly after). He then really clamped down on businesses he considered out of control - like banks, construction, and entrepreneurs in general. Kind of a general downer after a period of lighter governance.
I don't think it's a coincidence that the birth rate started dropping in the final year of Xi's first term. They overbuilt apartment buildings in newly created cities, but the builders couldn't be bothered to finish them once their buyers paid them in advance. I think a lot of people lost their savings on that. Tends to throw a wrench in family planning...
If this data is accurate, birthrates that plummet this quickly are a sign that there is something wrong going on in that country. It appears Xi's reign is not turning out so well for the Chinese, is it?
I think that's basically it.
China's demographics now appear to be as "bad" (assuming you think a shrinking population is undesirable, which I'm not sure is the case with China) as South Korea's and Japan's. And there's really not much of a mystery as to why: it's both aging (better healthcare and nutrition) and having fewer babies (economics). IOW we'd expect to see China looking something like South Korea and Japan eventually, as it grew more urbanized and more affluent. But why the sudden lurch to catch up to those countries in the 2010s? Part of it is the echo of the one child policy and its implications for female births (ie, sex-selective abortions). It looks like this really began to hit full force in the 2010s, in the form of a "shortage" of women of childbearing age.
But part of it, I expect, is simply a decline in societal optimism. Gee, I wonder what (who?) happened in China starting around 2010.
And how many more years are they stuck with this guy?
They're not stuck with him. The world is. He gets the best (Western) healthcare money can buy, obviously. How long did Deng live? Mugabe? Castro? I figure we're stuck with him another 25 years, maybe longer, depending on the pace of medical discoveries. Put me down for "He's in power until he's 98, and dies at 101."
It's possible he could one day be forced out of office. But, depressingly, that's not terribly likely. Dictators die in office of natural causes more often than not. Certainly that's the case in China. The only exception is Mao's widow: she and her Gang of Four clique were forced out in 1977, but Xi appears to be vastly more secure than they were. For one thing he's been in power for nearly twelve years at this point; the Gang of Four ruled for mere months.
My question is, is it that China has undergone the greatest reorganization of living conditions of any country in history, moving from rural communities to cities with apartment buildings, so do the Chinese have a greater inherent reliance on the community as a motivator and facilitator of family, a community they no longer have?
Does it take a village and they've lost the village?
But then, also, isn't the same thing happening in Japan and South Korea?
This feels like a very good point.
Who'd want to have a kid there?
If you are employed, you work all the time.
If you are young, chances are very good you're unemployed.
The housing market imploded, and stole many people's savings.
Xi's return to Cunfician views of women means that any woman with a husband and kid is stuck with all the drudgery, and decades of 1 child policy means adding on tons of elder care.
The educational expectations for kids are so high that any kid you have will spend their entire childhood in cram school.
It's a wonder anyone wants to have a kid in that environment.
As an anecdotal observation from the Seattle Asian communities - 2 kids or less is by far the most common family size. It seems like the birth rate goes down as the wealth and health go up no matter where you are.
Not to mention women being allowed to get an education.
Off topic but I started looking around and found a video presentation about a major corruption scandal in China's armed forces. Apparently Xi started a major crackdown sometime last summer, and Bloomberg started breaking the story after the turn on the new year.
Article in Blooomberg - requires a subscription. Newsweek also has an article out on this
Significant and apparently still ongoing purges of the most senior officers and politicians involved.
The Rocket Forces are a center of attention here - very significant since they are key to any plans to invade Taiwan. But the regular army and navy are getting heat too.
Xi might want to push out any invasion scheduling for a bit.
China's 1979 1-child policy was amended in 2015 to a 2-child policy, which was amended in 2021 to a 3-child policy.
It turns out, while you may police the number of births somewhat effectively, you can't force people to have more babies than they're willing to have. China could enact a 5-child policy in 2025 and it still won't change China's fate.
Thus, a forced reduction in births combined with a rapid industrialization plan, has accelerated the birthrate collapse that is observable in all post-industrialized nations.
Let this be a warning for America and other countries: If you want to incentivize population growth, you have to make it economically viable and attractive. You need a minimum basic income and universal healthcare.
There are a number of countries that have tried to address birth rates they saw as undesirably low by subsidizing children. However, none that I've heard of make the subsidies big enough to cover the actual cost of having children. The biggest cost, for stay at home parents, is labor. To really encourage people to have children, a government has to be willing to pay stay at home parents, mostly moms, the wages of a full time job. Smart policy to encourage lots of children would be to pay by the kid, with the pay being enough that having three or four children at home pays an average full time wage. In the US, that would imply about $15,000 per year per child.
No country that I've heard of is willing to subsidize kids at that level.