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China News

China To Report First Population Drop in Five Decades 165

Posted by msmash from the closer-look dept.
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 The population figure is very sensitive and will not be published until government departments have a consensus on the data and its implications, the Financial Times added on Tuesday, citing its sources.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."
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China To Report First Population Drop in Five Decades More

China To Report First Population Drop in Five Decades

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  • No women (Score:4, Insightful)

    by mveloso ( 325617 ) on Thursday April 29, 2021 @12:33PM (#61328332)

    Without women it's hard to grow your population.

    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      by maxeji9815 ( 8040160 )
      So THATS what I have been doing wrong. Thanks.

    • Re:No women (Score:4, Interesting)

      by saloomy ( 2817221 ) on Thursday April 29, 2021 @12:39PM (#61328374)
      Population growth stops or significantly slows down as the middle class rises. I dont understand why we need to encourage endless growth though, as populations stress ecosystems and demands for jobs as well. With more and more of our labor being automated, do we really need 8 billion of us to operate our civilization? Why not encourage couples to have 1 or 2 children, which would mean all of still partake in our genetic future, and the future is healthy?

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        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, Informative)

      by Chas ( 5144 )

      It also helps when you're running death camps for certain groups of people.

      • Different cultural norms: https://nypost.com/2021/02/17/... [nypost.com]

        • Re: No women (Score:4, Informative)

          by nagora ( 177841 ) on Thursday April 29, 2021 @03:14PM (#61329190)

          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: (Score:2)

          by Chas ( 5144 )

          YeahNO...

      • Which ones?

    • 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

      • 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.

    • 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.

    • 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

  • A population drop will add pressure on Beijing to roll out measures to encourage couples to have more children and avert an irreversible decline.

    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.

    • So just like us then. :/

    • 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: (Score:2)

      by stikves ( 127823 )

      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)

        by dryeo ( 100693 )

        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

  • Decline is good (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Gavagai80 ( 1275204 ) on Thursday April 29, 2021 @12:48PM (#61328426) Homepage

    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.

    • The solution to aging populations is not immigration. That's just pretending that you can keep growing the population, just not by making babies but by importing them a little later. The solution is to realize that a slowly shrinking population is not a problem. Productivity keeps increasing due to automation. All you need to do is spend the productivity better.

    • Re:Decline is good (Score:4, Insightful)

      by fabioalcor ( 1663783 ) on Thursday April 29, 2021 @02:21PM (#61328962)

      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.

    • Welcome young Indian migrant workers.
      You forget an important thing: on a scale of 0 - 100 for [non racist at all ... complete antisocial racist] most asian countries are in the range of 80 - 90. China however is at 115.

      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 seats will that cost them in the US House or Representatives?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by chill ( 34294 )

      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)

    by Hodr ( 219920 ) on Thursday April 29, 2021 @12:50PM (#61328440) Homepage

    So what dropped their population 50 years ag.... oh, never mind.

    • So, what was it that you think it was?

      The 'great leap forward' ended a decade before that.

      Here is some info on what it was:

      ertility declined most rapidly between 1970 and 1981 from a birth rate of 33.59 to 20.91/1000 and from a fertility rate of 5.8 to 2.6 children. Regional variation in fertility was extreme: 1.3 children/woman in Shanghai and over 4.0 fertility in Tibet, Guizhou, Xinjiang, and Hainan provinces. The family planning program in China is the largest and politically most powerful in the wo

      • PS, the One Child Policy wasn't introduced (1978) until almost a decade after 50 years ago (1970)

  • 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)

    by lazarus ( 2879 ) on Thursday April 29, 2021 @01:06PM (#61328516) Journal

    A decline in population / birth rates is an artifact of a more affluent society [wikipedia.org].

    • Or the result of laws limiting how many children you are allowed to have. Guess which one causes China's population decline?

  • Per Xi's command, the data WILL show an increase.

  • 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)

      by tinkerton ( 199273 ) on Thursday April 29, 2021 @02:32PM (#61329030)

      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].

      According to China specialist Martin King Whyte, the one-child policy was accompanied by a long-term pattern of abuses in its implementation, including âoeintrusive menstrual monitoring, coerced sterilizations and abortions, staggering monetary fines for âover-quotaâ(TM) births, smashing of furniture and housing of those who resist and withholding registration for babies born outside the plan.â

      Uyghur families, however, were exempted from the one child policy. Urban Uyghur couples were allowed to have two children, and rural Uyghur couples three. In practice, moreover, rural Uyghurs often had large families, with as many as nine or ten children in some cases, as even Zenz acknowledged.

      In 2015, the Chinese government announced a relaxation of the decades-long one-child limit on urban Han couples, allowing urban couples to have two children and rural families to have three. In Xinjiang, where birthrates routinely exceeded previously established limits, local officials urged the equal application of family planning policy between Han and Uyghur couples.

      In July 2017, Xinjiangâ(TM)s regional government ended the exemption on the old child limits for Uyghurs. Uyghur couples were thus expected to follow the same limitations recently imposed on Han couples: two children in urban areas and three in rural regions.

      As the Chinese government has freely acknowledged, a 5 percent decrease in the birth rate in Xinjiang between 2017 and 2018 was the result of the equal enforcement of family planning policy across ethnic lines.

      • 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.

      • 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)

      by labnet ( 457441 )

      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.

      • 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.

        • 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..

          • 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.

  • 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

  • This is a population drop in the bucket. Its not even a rounding error. We will run the earth dry in less than 2 more generations. Have fun!
  • What do they do over there? Fuck ALL the time?
    • America built it's population from a much smaller base than either China or India. After almost exterminating the original population, of course. Even allowing for the addition of significant numbers of immigrants before the Atlantic slave trade was stopped and of white immigrants after the slave trade was stopped.

  • I thought the news was that the population still increased despite the predictions.

    Is this more of that fake news they talk about?

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • Does it matter that most of the world would love to marry Chinese women?...certainly much more so than the men. In US cities, particularly well educated ones, you're as likely to see an Asian woman with a white man as with an Asian one...this is not just Asian Americans...I have small kids who I take to park all the time and nearly every Chinese woman there, including ones with super-thick accents who only speak to their kids in Chinese and look like they just came here, have half-white kids. I occasional

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