I think China could easily fix their demographics if they wanted to.
They have sufficient control of their population that if they said "everyone of child bearing age must try for a child this year and next", they'd probably double their population within 2 years.
The 'demographic problem' is only a problem because they don't see it as an issue worth fixing.
Lots of them don’t want to have kids. The government has many ways to influence the public. But I don’t think it’s true to say that they have so much control over their populace that they could do anything like double their population in 20 years, let alone 2.
People in China are just people, right? Many of them don’t want to have kids. What’s the government gonna do?
Of course, hypothetically, the government blocks people from leaving the country and literally forces them to procreate but that’s getting a bit imaginative (it would be turning the China that exists today into something very different).
Realistically I think the government is worried about their demographic problem and is using every reasonable tool in their arsenal to attempt to address it.
> See the Cultural Revolution and Great Famine etc for examples of what it can do. Basically anything.
Even assuming China is all powerful and can achieve "anything" here, the policies would still have a latency of an entire generation. Unless you include time-travel as part of "anything".
There's nothing that needs solved. It's ideal to shrink the global population while boosting per capita quality of life. The focus should be on improving per capita, not on expanding the overall economic size or population numbers.
Providing housing to young families will not make a meaningful dent to declining demographics in the affluent world. People do not want to have so many children (3-5 or more) and it's not due to lack of housing. That's a cultural change and no amount of housing is going to reverse it. And even in the financial scenario, the housing aspect is only one chunk of the huge cost of raising several children.
> There's nothing that needs solved. It's ideal to shrink the global population while boosting per capita quality of life. The focus should be on improving per capita, not on expanding the overall economic size or population numbers.
Then why do we simultaneously import millions of workers each year to make up for the supposed shortage of natural population growth (caused by policy)?
But many of those coming here are not well educated. Hard working maybe, adventurous certainly, but often economically deprived and undereducated as a result, or so I’ve read.
I don't think you can fix population issues in 2 years. Takes ~20 to make an adult (unless you have a liberal, multi-cultural society -- American adult citizens could be made in an afternoon if we shifted some laws around).
PRC demographics are extremely advantageous for great power competition / building comprehensive national power going forward. The TLDR is PRC leadership has been too preoccupied with sustaining 1.4B people, huge% of which are old and undereducated (to be blunt: a drain) that drags on her potential. Shedding quantity while improving quality will significantly improve PRC competitiveness.
Family planning / One Child Policy = concentrating resources on only kids = PRC now produces comparable STEM talent as all OECD countries combined. Demographic bomb collapists narrative fixate on absolute population decline without realizing PRC is starting to undergo the largest (by an order of magnitude) high-skill demographic divident in "recorded history" that will last decades. Meanwhile reducing net population = declining import dependency over time = more strategic (military) flexbility. Combine with massive home ownership % and high savings rate, and most of population likely settle around middle / low high income = no expectation for onerous social safety nets.
Over the next 10-30 years, we will see PRC (even with shit tier TFR) close/lead in technology due to having the largest and likely best talent pool (courtesy of PRC scale), that exceeds what US can produce domestically + immigration. Which will also erode western dominance/economy for high value niches it tried to fence off for itself. Also a PRC with increasingly less import vunerability due to lower absolute population, which mitigates much of the geographic shortcomings, i.e. first island chain "containment" nations that will be forever import dependant will lose their geographic leverage. Meanwhile increasingly burdensome social nets will drag down / destablize developed economies vs PRC who can sustain domestic serenity on relatively lean welfare estate.
Yes, generally, PRC nationals (Tier 2/3/4 cities) will (continue) to have worse QOL relative to developed societies. But in terms of overtaking US, and improving existing strategic enviroment, demographic trends are pointing up, up, up.
They have sufficient control of their population that if they said "everyone of child bearing age must try for a child this year and next", they'd probably double their population within 2 years.
The 'demographic problem' is only a problem because they don't see it as an issue worth fixing.