China To Report First Population Drop in Five Decades 165
China is poised to report its first population decline in five decades following a once-in-a-decade census, the Financial Times newspaper said, citing sources familiar with the matter. Reuters: A population drop will add pressure on Beijing to roll out measures to encourage couples to have more children and avert an irreversible decline. The National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), which is due to release the results of the census conducted late last year in early April, did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment. The population figure is very sensitive and will not be published until government departments have a consensus on the data and its implications, the Financial Times added on Tuesday, citing its sources.
"If China confirms such a decline, it would be a big deal," said Zhiwei Zhang, the Shenzhen-based chief economist at Pinpoint Asset Management. "The consensus expects China's population to peak at 2027, based on the projection made by the United Nations. This would be much earlier than the market and policy makers expected."
"If China confirms such a decline, it would be a big deal," said Zhiwei Zhang, the Shenzhen-based chief economist at Pinpoint Asset Management. "The consensus expects China's population to peak at 2027, based on the projection made by the United Nations. This would be much earlier than the market and policy makers expected."
No women (Score:4, Insightful)
Without women it's hard to grow your population.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:No women (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3)
The problem is our societies are built in the assumption that the population continues to grow.
If they don't grow then suddenly there isn't enough money for pensions and old age care. Retirement ages have to be pushed up and pensions slashed.
People then get upset that the deal is being changed and they have to work longer for less money. Old people vote so governments don't want to push the burden into them.
Re: (Score:2)
The problem is our societies are built in the assumption that the population continues to grow.
That was hundred years ago.
Populations do not grow in highly industrialized populations since decades.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
LoL Wut, what?
US population is "growing" if you want to call it that: by immigration. Not by breeding.
And you might know that we consider Europe to be "western" too ...
Re: No women (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Those people who pick up cans for recycling, often these bums will be the first to mitigate problems within a tent city, what they do have for money, they will spend it.
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
It also helps when you're running death camps for certain groups of people.
Re: No women (Score:2)
Different cultural norms: https://nypost.com/2021/02/17/... [nypost.com]
Re: No women (Score:4, Informative)
Different cultural norms: https://nypost.com/2021/02/17/... [nypost.com]
Very misleading headline. If you read it, Biden refers to different American cultural norms as the reason he's "going to speak out against what he’s [Xi] doing in Hong Kong, what he’s doing with the Uighurs in western mountains of China and Taiwan — trying to end the one China policy by making it forceful..."
The whole article is bullshit:
Asked during the town hall whether there would be repercussions for the CCP over the genocide, Biden sidestepped the question, saying the US would “reassert our role as spokespersons for human rights at the UN and other agencies.”
“Well, there will be repercussions for China and [Xi] knows that. What I’m doing is, making clear that we, in fact, are going to continue to reassert our role as spokespersons for human rights at the UN and other agencies that have an impact on their attitude,”
Note how the first bold part is a flat lie contradicting the second bold part.
The writer clearly assumed that she could say anything she liked which played to the reader's prejudices and they wouldn't bother to actually read the actual Biden quotes she included, thus reducing her workload to fulfil the word count as well as giving her a "but I quoted him directly" weasel defence if challenged.
Re: No women (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
YeahNO...
Re: (Score:2)
Which ones?
Re: No women (Score:2)
Uum, overpopulation isn't a good thing.
I'm not a friend of how they handled the one child policy, but imagine if they had let it run free like India.
Basically, they are the reason we're not already past the point of no return regarding global warming. (They could have done better by not fucking polluting so much though. Then againy we paid them to do, especially because the polluting made their crap so cheap, so we're not free of sin either.)
Thankfully, countries like Germany halted their population growth
Re: (Score:2)
Comment to undo fat-finger mod.
While I agree with your statement, it isn’t that population growth in and of itself is good, but that economic growth is much easier when coupled with population growth... and growth is always easier to do than improve efficiency.
Re: (Score:2)
China's massive (unprecedented in the history of the world) growth happened without a massive population growth.
Far fewer babies were being born, but the population of working adults soared, both because of high birth rates in the 1960s and 1970s and the plummet in birth rates from the 1980s onward that allowed far more women to enter the workforce.
Re: (Score:2)
This isn't wrong. It's long been known that selective abortions in China to prefer a male child has created a populations where men highly outnumber women. In this scenario alone, millions of men in China will not be able to marry just on the basis of numbers alone.
This is the primary reason the one-child policy was abolished.
Re: No women (Score:2)
In-vitro gametogenesis.
The ability to make sperm or egg cells using DNA from skin cells (already accomplished in mice, and will likely be possible in humans in about 15 years â" more research/funding is needed to figure out how to fully recreate the methylation pattern imprinted on DNA â" also testing beyond 14 days in the US is banned). Combine that with artificial womb technology (record so far is that an artificial goat womb works for about 4 weeks â" human testing of the technology beyond
Re: (Score:3)
Population slows in every country as they get richer. No one is surprised.
China isn't so rich. America has a per capita GDP five times higher, yet American women have more babies.
Re: (Score:3)
Don't compare USA to China. Compare USA now to USA 1950, or USA 1900 - and China now to China 1970 and China 1930 (because China's economy has been maturing faster than the USA did at the time it did).
Re: (Score:2)
Go check out the stats: https://www.statista.com/stati... [statista.com]
It's pretty clear to see that the ratio suddenly changed from right around 100:100 to 100:114 or so about 25 years ago. China implemented their "one child" policy in 1979, which was about one generation before this change happened. It could very well be that while the CURRENT population in China didn't really follow the policy, all the people that were raised under the policy follo
Re: (Score:2)
First of all, friendly reminder that "stats" in China are sourced from local governments, that will be punished if their numbers differ from Party goals. A good example of how such "stats" work in China are their covid numbers. Officially they have fully exterminated the virus. In real world on the other hand, we get a work of things like province-sized lockdowns every couple of months, and things like "jail warden being sentenced to death for having an explosion of covid in his prison".
I.e. local governmen
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Gambler's Fallacy: expecting events that have already occurred (first child is a girl) being able to affect future outcomes (second child gender)
aka s seven is "due"
Always remember when calculating odds, the chances of something happening that has already happened is 100%.
Re: (Score:2)
Mass infanticide is unlikely.
But mass abortions did happen. They never made a secret about that.
Re: (Score:2)
I heard quite a lot of that happening. I don't know how much of it is true though. That's not a statistic that China is likely to report on.
Remember, just because YOU think it'd be a terrible thing to do, doesn't mean it wasn't at least a little common. There are still a lot of cultures in the world where boys are considered valuable and girls are considered a burden. In China or Japan for example, if you own a big business and only have a daughter, it's VERY COMMON for you
Re: (Score:2)
I heard quite a lot of that happening.
Would not make any sense, as you have born your only child already, and you do not get a second one just because the first one "mysteriously died".
And then there's dowries. That's where the *wife's* parents pays the husband's parents to marry their daughter.
That is in Europe.
In Asia it is opposite around. The male has to pay.
Re: (Score:2)
There is a significant, not only very slight, preference for FEMALE conception. However their natural abortion (how do you call that in english?) is higher so it ends up with roughly 100(M) : 102(F) in adult age.
The reason is pretty simple, male sperms don't live long. Female sperms live up to 5 - 7 days in the female body. However male sperms aswim much faster. That way timing with the ovulation of the woman, you can aim for a boy at the day of or after ovulation, or for a girl by having sex 2 days before
Re: (Score:2)
China is still dirt poor across most provinces. Just because tier 1 cities are close to Western standards in terms of wealth doesn't mean that the rest >90% of the nation are anywhere close.
And sadly, they're not. One of main China's problems today in fact is that according to current demographic projections, China will get old long before it has a chance of getting wealthy.
>China is much less sexist than many realize. Many younger women realize they don't need a man.
This is a country where woman that
Re: (Score:2)
OIder generations are the parents of the current people in their late 20s and early 30s, and the change you're talking about is only beginning for people in early 20s and it only applies to middle and upper classes in tier 1 cities. Everyone else, this is still a norm, including guest workers in tier 1 cities.
solutions, solutions (Score:2)
Or maybe they should stop the ethnic cleansing.
But in reality it will be both. Murder even more people, and encourage births in the "right" kind of families.
Re: solutions, solutions (Score:2)
So just like us then. :/
Re: solutions, solutions (Score:2)
Ethnic cleansing, one child policy, why do we assume China wants greater population growth?
President Biden dismissed Ethnic Cleansing as a "cultural norm" recently, so its no big deal.
NY Post: https://nypost.com/2021/02/17/... [nypost.com]
Smokes: https://www.snopes.com/fact-ch... [snopes.com]
Re: solutions, solutions (Score:2)
That's snopes, not smokes, obviously.
Re: (Score:2)
Snopes contradicts you.
Re: (Score:2)
Of course it does. Here's a very good heuristic: if a right-winger posts a link to a bad source (Breitbart, NYPost, Daily Mail, etc) it's bullshit. If a right-winger posts a link to a mainstream source, it will invariable contradict him.
Re: (Score:2)
The example is better than you think. The snopes article focuses on a detail and fucks up the main claim which they accept without questioning: the genocide claim is garbage. Your heuristic lets you accept it as fact.
Re: (Score:2)
To back it up (it's not that a lot of people on here try to keep up with this ):
https://www.patreon.com/posts/... [patreon.com]
Re: (Score:2)
They are also reportedly taking those minority kids from families and forcibly adopting them to "right" ethnicities.
Murder their fathers, take their kids. The only difference from middle ages is this is not openly advertised, but done slowly and systematically.
Re: (Score:2)
Hey, they're just like us. First we had death camps and death walks, then reeducation camps, then the 60's scoop. From physical genocide to cultural genocide.
My wife for example was forcibly removed from her native birth mother at birth and adopted out to a white family in 1969 as part of the Canadian governments cultural genocide project. At least she missed the reeducation camps known as the residential school system including the medical experimentation done back in 50's.
Gotta get rid of the wrong ethnic
Re: (Score:2)
Ok we got the 50 Cent Army directly excusing genocide here.
Decline is good (Score:3, Interesting)
It's not merely not a problem, but it's absolutely essential that China's population declines -- for the health of the world and local environment and for the quality of life of the Chinese people.
The way to deal with the financial issue of an aging population is simple and obvious: immigration. India's huge growing population is right next door. Welcome young Indian migrant workers.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Decline is good (Score:4, Insightful)
Welcome young Indian migrant workers.
Will never happen. CPP is too nationalist to do that. Even more now that both countries at at brink of a war.
China is more prone to "help" India control their population by nuking them.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Welcome young Indian migrant workers. ... complete antisocial racist] most asian countries are in the range of 80 - 90. China however is at 115.
You forget an important thing: on a scale of 0 - 100 for [non racist at all
They will never ever in the foreseeable future allow immigrants in a large scale. It is hard enough already to live there if you are a westerner married to a Chinese.
How many? (Score:2)
How many seats will that cost them in the US House or Representatives?
Re: (Score:2)
You're confusing population with donations. While the number of voting representatives is fixed by law at 435, there's no limit on how many of those 435 you can buy if the price is right.
First time in 50 years? (Score:5, Informative)
So what dropped their population 50 years ag.... oh, never mind.
Re: (Score:2)
The 'great leap forward' ended a decade before that.
Here is some info on what it was:
Re: (Score:2)
When you're over a billion. (Score:2)
A population drop will add pressure on Beijing to roll out measures to encourage couples to have more children and avert an irreversible decline"
It's one report. Calm down. When you're representing 18% of the human population and over a billion strong, you're not exactly going to disappear tomorrow.
Success (Score:5, Informative)
A decline in population / birth rates is an artifact of a more affluent society [wikipedia.org].
Re: (Score:2)
Or the result of laws limiting how many children you are allowed to have. Guess which one causes China's population decline?
Re: (Score:2)
The one-child policy was in force until 2015, when the limit was raised to 2, still below the 'constant population' level of 2.1. Until 2015, the birth rate tracked the maximum allowed by the one-child policy quite closely.
Other effects of the one-child policy include a male/female ratio of 110-120 vs 100 for the last 30 years, which means there's a shortage of women, which also reduces the birth rate.
Don't worry (Score:2)
Per Xi's command, the data WILL show an increase.
That is what happens when.. (Score:2)
You institute one child policy, meaning that almost no women have more than one child. Totally surprisingly this leads to less generations with abut half the number of people compared to their parents generation.
Combine that with the selective abortions to get that one child to be a boy, leading to a gender unbalance.
Combine that with with the rise of middle class that has lead some women to decide to not even have that one child.
and so on..
But the one child policy is the big one.
Re:That is what happens when.. (Score:5, Interesting)
I would have agreed but the timing is off. The one child policy came up in an article about the Uyghur I read recently and 2 child policy became official in 2015 , 3 child policy in rural areas.
And it is now that the population is declining. So the one-child policy is old and despite distorting the demography was balanced by other factors. It is only now that the balance shifts despite the one child policy being relaxed. So you would have to see it as a long term effect (distorted demography), not a short term effect.
https://thegrayzone.com/2021/0... [thegrayzone.com].
Re: (Score:2)
The timing may be even off by more.
The FT article says it is possible that China will report a decline. While the trends FT predicts are credible China has not yet published its report, so it is quite possible that the official and the real numbers are still positive.
Re: (Score:2)
Except that:
One child policy was more restrictive in cities, there were rural exceptions in rural areas and less and less of the total population live in them, so more and more people were hut by the full version as industrialization took off.
Also the first generations born under that policy are now only about 40 thus they are not yet dying of old age, but their parents are getting there.
You can easily see how the high number of young people changed to much lower starting from 1979 and how that "bulge" that
Re: (Score:2)
Ding ding ding. Mod parent up!
CCP have created a demographic time bomb that will see a positive feedback loop of rapidly reducing population. The one child policy means the new cohort of reproductive women is vastly reduced combined with more wealth means population collapse for China with resulting societal disruption of housing deflation and economic carnage.
Re: (Score:2)
with resulting societal disruption of housing deflation and economic carnage.
Could you explain why a population decline has any negative economic consequences? You make no sense.
Re: (Score:2)
Basically:
Less consumers means less things consumed. That might be good for the environment, but definitely not for the economy.
The economy is built on a system that expects sales to increase year on year, the value of housing to increase and so on..
Re: (Score:2)
That is not really true.
Most western (and some eastern) countries have shrinking populations, and cope with their economy just fine.
Also most economies are no longer based on growth anyway.
once-in-a-decade census (Score:2)
Would that be 'decadent'? Or would we be inclined to see the decline as a 'declination'? Population inflation has always been the goal of governments and religions. It has always worked to enrich the already rich; and the chaos of struggle among the poor for resources keeps them from organizing to protest against the rich.
Economics is changing, however. Even the poor have the means to rebel: money, time and resources. In much of the world, they can afford some internet access, and in turn, education and the
It only took 200 years to go from 1 to 7 billion. (Score:2)
India and China have 4x Population of US (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: India and China have 4x Population of US (Score:2)
Be more impact if you got rid of the other 2/3, and less racism too!
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
It's the unspoken elephant in the room. If you consider yourself an environmentalist, then raw population is the single biggest impact to the environment by a long way. India and China account for over a third of all humans. If they ceased to exist, pretty much every environmental issue would disappear overnight.
But who would build our cheap consumer crap? Run our call centers?
Re: (Score:2)
That would be two more environmental problems which would be mitigated, if not actually solved.
But the population increased, didn't it? (Score:2)
I thought the news was that the population still increased despite the predictions.
Is this more of that fake news they talk about?
Wrong again (Score:2)
Not surprising to see yet another wrong prediction about China.
The aforementioned NBS had already published an official notice on 29th April saying that, while the official numbers were a bit late, the population was still growing in the year 2020.
Irreversible? (Score:2)
encourage couples to have more children and avert an irreversible decline
Irreversible decline means that, once the population begins to decline, in can never get back to that point. I don't understand why it would be irreversible. Sounds like a bunch of FUD to me.
Interesting variable - Chinese women are desirable (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: "avert an irreversible decline" (Score:4, Informative)
Avert?
A decline is *literally the goal*, if you want to save this freaking planet!.
Are we really as dumb as a colony of bacteria that eats their entire petri dish's nutrient layer and dies because the cycle that replenishes it can't keep up with their exponential growth?
Re: "avert an irreversible decline" (Score:4, Insightful)
Are we really as dumb as a colony of bacteria that eats their entire petri dish's nutrient layer and dies because the cycle that replenishes it can't keep up with their exponential growth?
Yes.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: "avert an irreversible decline" (Score:2)
Population isnâ(TM)t the problem. Two humans with nukes hating each other is enough to destroy the planet. Makes no sense to blame an energy production and resource or pollution problem on population. We have enough technology and food production to make everyone fat ten times over. A human just needs 2000 calories of food per month .. that is EASILY doable with indoor farming and even syntethic protein/nutrient technology. A house uses about what, 30 kilowatt hours per day of energy? That is about 30
Re: (Score:2)
Re: "avert an irreversible decline" (Score:2)
The Chinese don't hate Americans. It's really only Americans hating Chinese... not that they only hate Chinese of course... any group of people that triggers America's national insecurity will have the same treatment.
Re: (Score:2)
A human needs about 2000 calories, per day!
Re: (Score:2)
Re: "avert an irreversible decline" (Score:5, Interesting)
Everything is the goal until it has consequences.
A declining population is a good thing for the planet, for resources, for individual prosperity.
It's a terrible thing for an economy based on growth, the dynamism of a country.
I used to spend a great deal of mental headspace trying to figure out the politics of the world. I try not to anymore, because I've just seen it a lot. There's just these big competing goals and narratives that governments bank on that are just looking so unstable.
Good things can become bad things. Even a stable population. Sounds like a good thing. Maybe everyone can have a decent home, and live a good quality life. But wait a minute... what does that do to the economy? What does that to the mortgage and real estate sector? What does that do to the stock market? Does that lead to economic collapse? Then what happened to the good goal of a stable population and people living a good life? Or maybe we stabilize our populations, but then continuously increase immigration to keep growth? What does that do to social cohesion? What does that to the developing world who we are taking potentially their best and brightest? (I'm guilty of this. We left our home country, which is now starved for professionals).
Down the rabbit hole you can go.
I'm legit at the spot where I don't even think we know how to classify what is 'good' anymore. Beyond avoid hitler levels of genocide, everything just seems so prevalent in terms of goals.
Re: (Score:2)
Stability = stagnation in a real sense. Growth is necessary to a degree because growth means change which means progress. Complex systems are probably impossible to balance at that level anyways but for the sake of argument lets say they are. Lets say we do get a nice house a steady job for everyone and leave it that way. How is the higher burden of progress possible when we are just maintaining? Don't we want better technology? Better medicine? Better understanding of the universe? Progress requires change
Re: "avert an irreversible decline" (Score:2)
> but there must exist a limit where too little a population number is also detrimental.
Did you miss the part where he wrote "for the planet"?
Re: (Score:2)
Pandemics don't really seem to be an efficient way to reduce population. With a few exceptions, they're usually a blip in the general upward growth that has been happening since the Black Death, which took about 2 centuries to recover from.
Even the double whammy of WWI and the Spanish flu barely made a dent in the upward trend.
Re: (Score:2)
Chinese culture is "man must conquer nature".
This is different from the US culture in what way? Bonus points if you mention "manifest destiny".
Re: "avert an irreversible decline" (Score:2)
That's bollocks about China, and true of the USA. Typical projection.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
We've become accustomed to both absolute and per capita GDP growth. Very accustomed. You're right, we don't need it, but it would take some serious reorganizing to not expect it as practically a law of nature.
There's no reason why GDP growth can't continue though. In an agrarian economy GDP is tightly tied to labour pool. The more advanced your economy, the less you depend on raw number of people. In the most advanced economies GDP even becomes decoupled from physical resources. You just write a chat app a
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
"This would be much earlier than the market and policy makers expected."
That pretty much says it all. A planned economy facing incorrect assumptions (time to pull out the actuaries).
You don't think America has a market or policy makers?
Does that make America a planned economy too?