Posted on 07/05/2016 1:18:43 PM PDT by Petrosius
Healthy economies need young workers. And thanks to its one-child policy, China is facing a less-than-rosy economic future. Here's a lesson in demographics and worldview.
It’s widely believed that China will supplant the United States as the leading power in the world by no later than the mid-21st century. Not only will China’s Gross Domestic Product exceed that of the United States, it may climb two or even three times as high.
But an increasing number of experts have begun to doubt that China’s GDP will ever even match ours. And the dream of restoring “the global centrality that Chinese consider their birthright” will remain just that, a dream.
There’s a reason for the doubt: There are simply not enough Chinese.
The idea would strike most people as ridiculous. They’d say China has too many people, not too few. With a population of nearly 1.4 billion people, China is home to one-fifth of all the people on planet Earth.
But that huge number obscures the country’s looming demographic crisis. That crisis is the subject of an article in the June Atlantic Monthly entitled “China’s Twilight Years.” In it, Howard W. French, the author of two books on China, tells readers that “In the years ahead … [China] will transition from having a relatively youthful population, and an abundant workforce, to a population with far fewer people in their productive prime.”
Today, China has slightly less than five workers for every retiree, a ratio French calls “highly desirable.” However, by 2040, the ratio is estimated to be 1.6-to-1. Folks, that is a staggering change.
The demographic downturn is already having an impact in some unexpected places. Last year, China announced it was reducing its armed forces by 300,000 men. While the official spin was that it was part of its “peaceful intentions,” the more “compelling explanation” was demographic: “With the number of working-age Chinese men already declining … labor is in short supply.”
As French puts it, “The consequences [of this demographic downturn] for China’s finances are profound.” The downturn is already becoming a “drag on economic growth,” and what it portends for China’s future is really scary: by 2050, the number of Chinese over 65 is projected to rise to nearly 330 million from 100 million in 2005.
This will leave China with a choice, in the words of Mark L. Haas of Duquesne University, between “guns and canes.” In other words, it can only pursue global centrality at the cost of ignoring its rapidly aging population or vice-versa. It will have to choose between avoiding social unrest at home or pursuing global influence.
This unenviable choice is a self-inflicted wound. I’m referring, of course, to China’s infamous “one-child policy.” Nicholas Kristof, writing in the New York Review of Books, said that “Perhaps no government policy anywhere in the world affected more people in a more intimate and brutal way than China’s one-child policy.”
Which is now, of course, a “two-child policy,” a policy that is scarcely better. Because, folks, it’s a worldview problem. As John Stonestreet has said before on BreakPoint, “Christianity sees children as gifts of God: the natural, desirable result of the loving, lifelong commitment and physical union of husband and wife. The secular and certainly communist worldviews see children as commodities: subject either to parents’ desires and ‘lifestyle choices’ or to a government’s economic and political goals.”
We in the West are not immune. John went on to warn that Western “cultural values are leading to our own similar, though personally chosen, ‘one-child policies’ and demographic decline.”
In the end, China will get old before it enjoys the widespread prosperity and the global leadership it considers its birthright.
And that is because it has spurned birth in the first place.
Well, we see unintended consequences of their one child policy.
Not only do they have too few young people to support an aging population, but a shortage of girls, because so many people wanted their one child to be a boy.
And that creates other issues. With no marriage prospects, will they welcome wars to attrit their male overabundance and achieve their political and territorial goals while they can?
I’ve decided the hectoring about demographics is BS
Its the justification that statists and social engineers in Europe and the USA now use to import millions of illiterate, un-assimilable, in-bred immigrants from the 3rd world into Europe and this country. I’m convinced its the scare-mongering of progressive-leftist and their evil twins in crony-capitalist finance who simply are facing a maximum debt armeggedon and need to find some way to keep the game going with more taxpayers and supposedly productive citizens to milk.
Populations rise and fall over the centuries due to health/disease, peace/war, economic stagnation or growth, etc... Japan and Korea are facing the same demographics as the West, but have chosen cultural survival over mass migration to support their economic edifice. They will figure out the problems for themselves. And I guarantee you - their societies will exist long after the Cultural Marxists in the West have destroyed ours.
Without a doubt, the Marxist social engineers in China have created a huge problem for themselves. The law of unintended consequences and blow-back are hard for tyrannical central planners - but using the failed Western Progressive outlook to judge the failed Eastern Marxist situation is just stupidity times two.
It could become worse than expected. When a country industrializes its productivity initially surges but then tapers off. And as a country becomes affluent its birthrate declines.
Should these generalities come into play for Red China, it will have significant challenges. When faced with significant challenges, count on political leaders to make a hash of it!
China should invade some random country in the Middle East.
Engage in a policy of doing away with every male in the entire country, leaving only the female population from grandmothers to infants. Join the female survivors with appropriately-aged Chinese bachelor males, and proceed to protect the future for all these new couples, allowing them latitude to procreate right up the limit reasonable and practical for replacement of the Chinese population that was never born, and there shall be plenty of future generations to sufficiently support the now-aged original population.
Oh, and completely forbid the practice of Islam, which was never much of a good deal for females anyway.
No problem. They will just buy as many as they need. (Sarcasm)
You have a GREAT POINT. The real test case is Japan, where they are ahead of the curve, with an already-diminishing population.
Rather than employing millions of Third World savages, they decided to USE THEIR BRAINS to deal with the problem and are furiously automating as many labor-related jobs as possible, even taking care of the elderly (to some extent). I think they’ll come out fine. I think China will follow and also be fine.
Sadly I can’t say the same about Europe, they’ve already reached the point of full-scale civil war (to clear out the trash), or a meek surrender (probably the second option).
We are not far behind, but we still have a ONE CHANCE LEFT to turn our boat around - and that, of course, is Trump (regardless of where he stands on Planned Parenthood). If he can at least slow the immigration train down, it buys us time - maybe enough time to be able to watch Europe turn into either open warfare or slavery - and maybe we would try to learn from that. Maybe.
from 2007:
The World a Century from Now
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/bloggers/1311725/posts?page=17#17
[snip] the population of the US will rise to at least 1.5 billion, and as much as 3 billion, by 2100 A.D. China’s population will decline to about 300 million by that time. India’s population will peak in about thirty years, and then begin to decline... [/snip]
Coming suicide epidemic in China as population collapses
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/1774468/posts
from 2014:
The year 2034, your predictions?
http://freerepublic.com/focus/chat/3188319/posts?page=62#62
[snip] By AD 2100, the population of the US will exceed the combined populations of India and China. [/snip]
from 2012:
Popular Mechanics: 110 Predictions For the Next 110 Years
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/chat/3242774/posts?page=48#48
china screwed up big time by the one child birth. They are quickly diluting the chinese race by taking brides from other races.
I wholeheartedly agree, but I’m also glad they did.
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