"... that China’s population in 2023 shrank for the second straight year.... China said on Wednesday that 9.02 million babies were born in 2023, down from 9.56 million in 2022 and the seventh year in a row that the number has fallen. Taken together with the number of people who died during the year — 11.1 million — China has more older people than anywhere else in the world, an amount that is rising rapidly. China’s total population was 1,409,670,000 at the end of 2023, a decline of two million people, according to the National Bureau of Statistics...."
From "China Told Women to Have Babies, but Its Population Shrank Again" (NYT)
"The authorities have tried to silence China’s feminist movement, but its ideas about equality remain widespread...."
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China has more older people than anywhere else in the world, an amount that is rising rapidly
…ain't got anybody going the other way, do they?
The authorities have tried to silence China’s feminist movement, but its ideas about equality remain widespread..
Now there’s a cause every American feminist can get behind but will unanimously choose to ignore…
Why bother to have children when you are just another brick in the wall?
I think the conventional wisdom is that the Enlightenment never reached China and, of course, Christianity has failed there. There is little belief in the dignity of the individual and the afterlife. Just work for The Man and go gamble.
Charlie Munger was widely admired in China and he admired the Chinese. But Charlie didn't go to Omaha Creighton Prep so he was missing a piece and he didn't know he was missing it.
Women's shoes and birth control brought us to this. - Xi's lament
Peter Zeihan, au courant economist & predictor of the future,* has said that China's best days are behind it. It still has a lot of spunk and will continue to give the world trouble and is loaded with people who have really stupid and dangerous ideas (e.g., "Hey, lets abort our future for as far as the eye can see"), but it, along with much of Western Europe, Japan, have oodles of elderly coming into the pipeline, who must be supported, with a dwindling number of workers who can pay the taxes to support the elderly.
*Really, his business card says that.
Our neighbors are a couple from New Zealand (him) and mainland China (her). I asked him once about the One Child Policy and he surprised me with the news that his wife has two sisters.
How so? I asked. The answer was that the culture was still so Confucian that her father was allowed to try for a son . . . He left unsaid the fact that her father must have been in tight with the Party, or at least rich enough to buy some indulgences.
That said, they have been well and truly hoist with their own petard.
China is nearing a tipping point. While they are a world power, they are dying off, and doing so more quickly than the US (though the US is now also on the wrong side of replacement rate). Which means that China may need to make their more aggressive moves around the world, sooner rather than later. They will need to absorb more young people willing to procreate. Look...over there...young people in Taiwan. But wait! They don't have babies either.
Ah...us moderns. We're so sophisticated, we're sophisticating ourselves out of existence.
Pro-Choice as State's Choice now her Choice is a progression of devaluing human life. Perhaps immigration reform will compensate for the wicked solution and class-disordered ideologies of secular states.
I read the article. The writers state that "China hastened the problem with its one child policy..." The writers don't describe the horrendous way the one child policy worked. What's worse than not being able to get an abortion? To the minds of a NYT reader, nothing. However, there are some who believe that being forced to have an abortion, as frequently happened during the years that the one child policy was in effect is worse. Worse still is carrying the child to delivery and then abandoning it by the side of the road. The one child policy was a nightmare, but, like the mass starvation associated with collective farms, the kind of nightmare that is immediately forgotten upon waking by the woke.
The question for China for the last several decades has always been: Will it grow rich before it grows old? And apparently the "grow old" part is happening sooner than expected.
All my life, I used to hear about how overpopulation was a big problem, especially in China. I think the one child policy was portrayed as the committed response by an informed government to do something about that problem. True, there were some excesses, but the forced abortions didn't cause the Commie government much grief among western feminists....Western feminists are kind of picky about their issues. Gang rape and murder by Hamas, for example, is not what Whoopi would define as rape-rape.
Well the USA has about 10 million new residents we would love to send to China, and about 50 million old residents that would love the totalitarian Chinese government so much that they are trying to establish it here in America.
"The authorities have tried to silence China’s feminist movement, but its ideas about equality remain widespread...."
As the grandson and son of strong-willed women who would not consider themselves "feminists," I would urge all non-Western societies to reject modern feminism. From the 1970s on, it has been mostly a destructive force (even though my wife and daughter may have benefitted in some ways.)
I don't have a NYT subscription so I can't read more, but the idea that "equality" must mean putting career over family has been disastrous for many women and is fueling the death of the West.
Not only because of declining population, but by the high levels of immigration needed to replace the natives and keep the economy afloat.
This is called a preference cascade. Meanwhile the left is promoting chicom values and actions.
Libs are fascist terrorists in word, deed, and belief. Treat them accordingly.
Seems to be a disaster waiting to happen soon. The one child policy resulted in a majority of men anyway, as more girls were aborted so families could have a male heir. Now the relatively few women want nothing to do with raising a family anyway. Lot's of frustrated young men I'm sure.
Most countries will have lower populations at 2100 than they do today, but few will shrink as dramatically as China. That's why Xi is getting so belligerent now--China is in its last days as the 500 pound gorilla. Any moves it wants to make will be harder in the future.
Boy that one child [former] policy sure looks brilliant today....
I thought this was a win for the planet.
Greta Thunberg highest praised.
So much for being loved long time...
In 1950 China had a population of @550mm
In 1975 @920mm
In 2020 @1,450mm
Was China better off with a smaller population or the larger population? That is, was the typical chinese person better fed, education, fed, clothed, transported and so on after or before population explosion?
In 1966 Paul Ehrlich published "The Population Bomb". He predicted that by 1985 there would be widespread famine in the US and the rest of the world as well as all sorts of other dire horrors due to increasing population. He is still dining out on that book and people still think he was right. The book is still in print.
In 1966 world population was @3.4bn
In 2023 it is a bit over 8bn
For the typical person anywhere in the world same question as above: Better or worse off today than in 1966?
Population figures from Wikipedia and worldometer
John Henry
What percentage of Chinese men are gay? I wonder if it is higher than might normally be expected due to the lack of women.
As Tony Soprano said "In prison you get a pass on being gay. No women." Is that true in China?
John Henry
From Marginal Revolution:
"Yemen now has more births per year than Russia, far more than Germany or Japan. In a few decades it must end up with a larger population than Russia"
"there are nearly as many births in Pakistan (6,374,741) as in all of Europe.(6,879,818)"
"Bangladesh already has a larger population than Russia."
People in non-poor countries are not having many children because they are wealthy enough to have what seem like better alternatives at the time (media consumption, restaurant meals, vacations, building a career, not to mention for many men, a variety of sexual experiences beats months of pregnancy, and then years of being "tied down" by this new creature).
People in poor countries, which are often also anti-feminist, have a much higher birth rate.
I do not think this bodes well for the future.
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2024/01/tuesday-assorted-links-449.html#comments
What a meaningless statistic. Japan has a far older population than China. The media age of the Japanese is nearly 49 years old, while China is nearly 11 years younger than that. Here in America our median age is nearly identical to China's. Sure, China has more older people than anyone else. They also have more people than everyone else too (except maybe India). They have four times our population.
Don't worry, taxing the rich fixes everything.
China, of course, did something very foolish to cause this problem to be far worse than it would otherwise be. However, there is the question if modern feminism is unsustainable. Any system that cannot replace itself is doomed. It can remain as a luxury good for a small percentage of the population, especially if that small percentage is productive, but once it takes over it becomes an existential crisis to the society at large. The best-case scenario is the feminists get outbred - not difficult - and the future belongs to those who show up. The worse-case scenarios are society collapses and is reformed with something that works, and/or feminism is forcibly curtailed. Do keep in mind that I would expect some societies to intentionally commit suicide rather than give it up, but again the future belongs to those who show up. People with really stupid ideas but can handle the fundamental basics are far superior to the opposite.
Good. The world population is not healthy. We need a keystone species target zone.
Plus - So many women were tortured into killing their females babies. A crime.
No wonder they don't want to risk it.
The central and south American world are populating the planet just fine.
Greg said...Lot's of frustrated young men I'm sure.
Cannon fodder in China's wars.
Men and women are equal in rights, and complementary in Nature. Life is not so short... reconcile as adults do. Now, what does a viable civilization normalize?
we have the great fortune, to be living at the time of PEAK Human Population of the Earth..
It Will ALL Be DOWNHILL From Here
I'm assuming it is something similar which has happened here in the US and Western countries. As women achieve more and more in education and professionally then fewer and fewer men appear suitable to them. If a woman has gone to university and gotten a degree then men without a degree appear beneath them. This creates somewhat of a pairing mismatch because as women achieve more and more in education and professionally it doesn't increase their attractiveness to men.
Always with China, it's the starling effect.
I think there has been a social/government movement to try and stigmatize unmarried women in China as well. There is a term called Sheng nu, which translates into "Leftover Ladies." It is used to refer to women who are 27 and unmarried. Now the real question is, is the point of this article to give information about social trends in China, or to reassure unmarried NYT-reading women that globally lots of women are married and its because they are good feminists.
"Western feminists are kind of picky about their issues."
They know FGM is a Muslim or African problem, just as sex abuse in the Church is a gay issue.
Anyway, not much of a feminist movement right now. It died when it went academic, like jazz.
I wonder if anyone would howl if China banned birth control?
Also, no one has mentioned that China does not allow immigration generally.
Birth control is the reason that births are less than replacement everywhere except sub-Saharan Africa.
What do you think?
Is it ironic that China is now encouraging women to have children while at the same time supporting and conducting research in COVID mutations that result in 100% death rates for humanized mice?
[Lower birth rate] Taken together with the number of people who died during the year — 11.1 million — China has more older people than anywhere else in the world, an amount that is rising rapidly.
Here's journalistic innumeracy showing up again. The amount of old Chinese is not "rising rapidly". Having fewer births does not increase your old-age population. What they are alluding to is that some statistic like the ratio of 'old' to 'young' is increasing, or the average age is increasing, but not the actual number of old people. Only something like life-extending medical advances would produce that result in the near term.
You guys all thought this was about China, didn't you? Or something to do with the wemmings, and femunism, and all that dismal stew. Not at all. This is a language usage post. And no, it is not possible to shun something at a rapid pace. One shuns. One fails to shun. No one outshuns anyone else. There is no shun to the bottom.
I suppose you might consider, that someone had failed to shun something fast enough, and had been overtaken by it as a result. No, I don't think so. If you shun it, it is shunned. Period. Even if it is a large, over-friendly dog that wants to lick your face. It is not possible to increase the rate at which you shun the monster.
Didn't Obama opine that at some point, you have enough? He does not seem to have reached that point, but perhaps the Chinese have.
The PRC also normalized prostitution... rent-a-womb... woman, in order to compensate for the dearth of viable females and temper social progress in the wake of their wicked solution. One step forward, two steps backward.
China is like Japan and south in that the social expectations for a married woman are really isolating and burdensome. No career, no help from the husband with the housework, the cooking, or the child care. These societies don't want more children enough to change and make the prospect more appealing to their women.
I don't think that this is about feminism and equality. Having children is a big responsibility and most people know that. It must be extremely scary to be pregnant with no family support system to help raise the child. It takes two people to make a baby and men should be compelled to share in this responsibility.
I suspect that this is more about young couples wanting more years of having a lifestyle about just the two of them. (Without being burdened with having to raise children.)
I think that this is about modern couples having a different priority than procreating the species.
When you have children, you give up a large part of your life to them. They just don't want to do that.
As I've mentioned before, I've been spending a month or two most years since 1985 hiking the alps; mainly uphill south of Interlaken. As time goes by, different groups appear in great numbers and kind of adopt a particular village or region.
The Brits have been part of the landscape forever. Japanese, Koreans, Indians, Islamists, Orthodox Jews and Chinese followed in varying number and visibility. Visitors have become crowds and, now, can only be described as hordes.
About the Chinese: For the first few years they were remarkable only in a "if you've seen one, you've seen them all", kind of way. I'm sure they had money but little understanding re. flaunting it. They seemed more like a great gaggle of peasants who, for some reason,considered themselves so superior to others that others did not exist. That was a rude bunch of people.
I returned this year after an abscense of five or six due to a couple of health issues and, of course, Covid travel bans.
Near the main routes and attractions, the Chinese and Indian presence is now almost at "in your face" levels. Aside from increased visibility, the Indians still seem pretty much the same.
The Chinese visiting the area are NOT the same.
They have become quite westernized in manner and, if not actually outgoing, they smile more readily and are quite polite to non-Chinese. At lease a modest display of wealth and individual style is common.
The BIG change, in my eye, was the very large number of middle-age and "older" Chinese men traveling with stunningly fit and beautiful Young Chinese women. What this bodes for the demographic and cultural future of China is beyond my understanding (or interest, for that matter) but, if feminism is ascending there, it may be time for wealthy westernized Chinese men to get the hell out of "Dodge".
Old: 'Make Room! Make Room!' by Harry Harrison
New: 'Make Babies! Make Babies!' by Xi Jinping
>snort< Jupiter trying to tell us that language can be binary. Dude..... Language ain't binary, dude, like that's a construct, there are at least 53 different types of shunning.
"The central and south American world are populating the planet just fine."
Maybe. The total fertility rate for Latin America and the Caribbean was 1.958 in 2023 (replacement requires a rate slightly over 2 because people die). That's down from 2.772 in 2000 and 5.851 in 1960. If the countries actually get more prosperous (they don't get stuck in the "middle income trap"), the rate may go down further.
https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/LCR/latin-america-and-the-caribbean/fertility-rate
@Static Ping: However, there is the question if modern feminism is unsustainable. Any system that cannot replace itself is doomed.
Actually, there is a much more fundamental question. Never has there been a species where the female had the capability and capacity to decide her fertility. What if women, on average, prefer fewer than 2.1 (for industrialized countries, up to 3.5 in poor countries) children in their lifetimes?
Because that certainly seems to be the case. Almost nowhere in the world are women achieving replacement fertility.
@tim maguire:. Greg said...Lot's of frustrated young men I'm sure.
Cannon fodder in China's wars.
Yes, but. For all those elderly Chinese, their only son (and likely only child) is their sole source of support.
Which makes Ukraine a very cautionary tale for the CCP. More than 300,000 dead Russian men in an invasion that was a doddle compared with getting across 90 miles of water.
Roger Sweeny said... Maybe. The total fertility rate for Latin America and the Caribbean was 1.958 in 2023 (replacement requires a rate slightly over 2 because people die).
Replacement fertility is a widely misunderstood concept, and typically cited as 2.1. UN population documents do this, without acknowledging that number varies significantly.
Why? Because replacement fertility is the number of children a woman must have in a given milieu in order to have one daughter survive long enough to have a surviving daughter. Because female mortality in rich countries through the end of child bearing years is near as darnnit to zero, replacement fertility is 2.1.
In large parts of Africa, it is around 3.5.
For countries like S. Korea, Japan, and China, if Total Realized Fertility is around one, that means population will decrease by half roughly every 80 years.
That is unprecedented.
Long term this starts to look like an exaggerated version of what Japan saw with disinflation and accelerated population decline due to the one child policy. I don't see a way China can escape this.
As long as I have been alive, China has birthed about 105 males to 100 females every year. Do that long enough, as they have, without losing too many males versus females, there ends up being about 20,000,000 men of military conscription age in China who will never have a wife. What to do with that many excess males? Well, conscription. The 2.5 million member PLA could expand rapidly to 5 million. Or 10 million. Then Chinc could use those military bodies to help expand China's hegemony from the Himalayas to the Spratleys and hey, why not all of Taiwan while they're at it. Interesting times are right around the next corner.
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