Posted on 03/15/2023 9:06:41 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
Not long ago, Japan stood where China does today: top threat to America’s title as the world’s preeminent economic power. In the 1980s and 90s, Japan even appeared likely to succeed, with books such as Japan as Number One: Lessons for America becoming best sellers.
Then, in a blink, Japan’s economy collapsed with the bursting of a massive asset bubble from which it never truly recovered. Overnight, the Empire of the Rising Sun became a setting one.
Analysts have recently taken to highlighting stark similarities between Japan before its fall and China now. Begging the question of whether Japan’s fate foreshadows China’s own.
If demographics are destiny, then China has much to fear in this regard. Demographic reversal was after all at the heart of Japan’s fall. And like Japan then, China has a rapidly aging population. If anything, China’s demographics are even more severe.
China’s population is already declining and poised to continue to do so. Indeed, China is facing what has been described as a demographic time bomb. By 2035, China is projected to have more than 400 million people aged 60 and older (for perspective, the entire current U.S. population totals only 335 million.) China is also staring at population loss on a historic scale, with some studies showing China’s population nearly halving over the next 45 years. Based on China’s current population of just above 1.4 billion, that would equate, in less than half a century, to the loss of a staggering 700 million people.
This demographic catastrophe in the making was largely caused by China’s one-child policy, implemented in 1979 and not abandoned until 2016. This terribly ill-conceived and cruel policy suppressed China’s population growth for decades. It also resulted in a considerable gender imbalance in China, due to a strong cultural preference for boys, that has drastically reduced family formations, as well as produced a great many very lonely guys.
Exorbitant living and education costs, the Covid 19 pandemic, and an archaic hukou household registration system that separates rural citizens from urban ones, have all furthered depressed Chinese fertility rates in recent years. And to date, economic incentives and other pro-childbearing policies have had no real effect in reversing the trend. Like Japan, for cultural and political reasons, China is also unable or unwilling to bring new young people in through immigration. To the contrary, people are far more likely to emigrate out of China than in.
This “Japanification” presents a massive impediment to China’s grand ambitions of becoming the world’s paramount nation. After all, how do you sustain robust economic growth with a precipitously declining workforce? Or build military strength and project global power while spending enormous chunks of GDP supporting and caring for nearly half a billion elderly people?
To make matters worse, the calm global conditions that enabled China’s meteoric rise have disappeared. China is now faced with exactly the opposite: a deglobalizing world of intense Cold War competition with America and its allies actively seeking to thwart China’s economic and geopolitical aspirations.
But while Americans may feel somewhat comforted by the prospect that China, like Japan, will simply extinguish harmlessly as an economic and geopolitical adversary, there is also cause for serious concern.
As author Hal Brands posits in his book The Danger Zone a declining China may be even more aggressive and prone to risk-taking than a rising one, as the window of opportunity to achieve its ambitions closes. In this respect, Brands views the next decade as the critical period before China’s demographic and other domestic challenges truly take effect.
Magnifying the pressure, Xi Jinping, who has cast himself in the role of a great man of destiny and compelled others to as well, has stoked the fires of Chinese nationalist sentiment to a fever pitch. Domestic expectations of China’s “unstoppable” rise are now simply enormous. If Xi fails to realize them, would he or the CCP, even be able to survive? Xi may deem it necessary, and politically useful, to increase tensions with the United States, as nothing distracts from domestic travails like an existential external threat.
Indeed, China is already becoming more aggressive. In recent weeks alone, China has brazenly sent a spy balloon across the continental United States, openly threatened imminent conflict with the US, and announced huge increases to its defense budget. These actions may be merely a harbinger of things to come as China’s demographic condition worsens.
Of course, it is possible that China could successfully disarm its demographic time bomb or perhaps at least diminish its blast radius. China could, for instance, discover a novel way to suddenly juice fertility rates, or supplement lost economic production through technological innovation. And if all else fails, the CCP could simply resort to forcing people to have children, something based upon past experience, they are certainly not above doing.
But time is not on China’s side. With each day that passes by the demographic situation grows ever more dire, and the specter of Japan looms larger.
At this point, though, the future is still uncertain. And whether China can ultimately avoid Japan’s fate and overtake America, or become just another failed contender, remains an open question. Discovering the answer, however, may prove to be an extremely dangerous endeavor.
Buckle up, the highway to China’s demographic danger zone is sure to be a very bumpy ride.
Japan is still no. 3. They have shown tremendous resiliency, in that way. And that includes the disaster from keeping interest rates too low, too long.
China, like Nazi Germany, is resource poor. China could not survive sanctions or embargoes very well. They import food to support their population.
Technological innovation? What technological innovation Is tge PRC responsible for?
We could send a bunch of our “Valley Girls” to China for breeding stock to dumb down the Chinese while keeping their men too busy to go to war.
What is the natural thing to do if you are the leader of a country with a surplus of men?
I would think war would be the thing to do if you have way more men than women and no prospects of keeping these men content.
China has been preparing for war for decades and the US has been standing by scratching our unmentionables while they have been doing it.
The US white population is in the same condition.
I’m going to use an example of technological prowess, but I
do it only to suggest that China has transitioned to a nation
that now can innovate technologically.
In the 1990s I sought to discourage sending all our manufacturing
to China, and in part it was because innovation will generally
camp out in the same neighborhood as production. You don’t
generally sell the same exact product over time. You create
a nicer more useful replacement.
China is making decent inroads on new battery technology.
It isn’t the same old China copying things others were doing
I’m not saying I never see that anymore, but China does
innovate now. Others may see it differently, but I believe
their televisions and electronics have matured as an industry.
I think other things have also.
The US white population is in the same condition.
As noted above, wbee can export our liberal white women to China (and our non-binaries to North Korea), and it will be a win-win situation.
Have they? Give me an example. Mexican workers are more skilled than Chinese today. And we can’t send the most complex work to them, because they can’t do it.
Duplicating our technology perfectly. Unhindered.
With a population of at least 1.6 billion people, The Red Chinese govt can wage a lot of low-level wars and threats of war all over the Western Pacific and on the land, if only by proxy - Burma, India - Himalayas region, Thailand, Philippines - the NPA and Islamic terrorists, Laos/northern Vietnam, and even in Africa. Don’t forget about Taiwan and it’s islands, some of which are only a few miles - been there, seen the mainland from Quemoy. Throw in Sri Lanka/Ceylon for key intervention with troops and ships.
Did has the manpower, ships, air force and troops to do a lot of this simultaneously while we have Gen. Silly Vanilli, the Drag Queens Navy, a PC equity Air Force Academy, and a Sec of Defense who won’t call out Russian aggression, Red Chinese threats of WW3, Iran’s nuclear weapons threats throughout the Middle East, No. Korea’s nuclear arsenal, and a possible South Africa-Red China alliance that would cut off all shipping around the Horn of Africa.
Be happy, don’t worry!! All is well, and we have a brain dead fool in the White House with his laughing hyena of a VP, and more drag queens heading our key government agencies, plus the corrupt security intelligence agencies going after conservatives instead of enemies, domestic and foreign.
With a population of at least 1.6 billion people, The Red Chinese govt can wage a lot of low-level wars and threats of war all over the Western Pacific and on the land, if only by proxy - Burma, India - Himalayas region, Thailand, Philippines - the NPA and Islamic terrorists, Laos/northern Vietnam, and even in Africa. Don’t forget about Taiwan and it’s islands, some of which are only a few miles - been there, seen the mainland from Quemoy. Throw in Sri Lanka/Ceylon for key intervention with troops and ships.
Did has the manpower, ships, air force and troops to do a lot of this simultaneously while we have Gen. Silly Vanilli, the Drag Queens Navy, a PC equity Air Force Academy, and a Sec of Defense who won’t call out Russian aggression, Red Chinese threats of WW3, Iran’s nuclear weapons threats throughout the Middle East, No. Korea’s nuclear arsenal, and a possible South Africa-Red China alliance that would cut off all shipping around the Horn of Africa.
Be happy, don’t worry!! All is well, and we have a brain dead fool in the White House with his laughing hyena of a VP, and more drag queens heading our key government agencies, plus the corrupt security intelligence agencies going after conservatives instead of enemies, domestic and foreign.
Ever looked at the fish section of a Save-a-lot store in the US? Or Walmart? Or any grocer, really...
Product of China
On American-looking packaging.
And the Chinese own Smithfield ham and bacon, as I recall.
The author does overlook one thing the CCP might do to reverse the economic strain of supporting an aging population. They could go Andrew Cuomo on it.
When you are strong but weakening, it makes sense to use your power while you still have it.
China's problem, like the US's, is that their economy is dependent on most women being in the workforce rather than being home caring for kids.
The problem is most of those men are getting long in the tooth to be used as cannon fodder in a war. 20 years ago They were of prime military age - not so much now. Median population age in China is 38.
Actually, some young Chinese men have traveled to countries such as Thailand and Vietnam to find brides.
China doesn’t have 1.6 billion people. It never had and never will have 1.6 billion. China officially claims 1.4 billion (and acknowledges that number is declining) and plenty of demographers believe that the official number overestimates the population by at least 100 million.
The 21st century won’t be the Chinese Century, American Century, Russian Century or any other country. It will be the Century of Destruction, Decline and Disintegration.
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