2.1 is the replacement rate for well-developed countries. It does not apply universally to all countries.
For example, the US had a fertility rate of 7.0(!) in 1800 and saw no significant population growth due to births because most of those kids died well before reaching the age of reproduction.
Historically, fertility rates have always dropped once basic standards of living have managed to get rid of excess child mortality.
Unless those countries have increasingly western lifestyles, stable political systems and growing economies, then it actually doesn't matter. The grim reality is that all those places have substantial modifiers on their death rates, and aren't exporting their increasing population to the world in any meaningful way.
We know from experience that if those places actually started to improve, then the birth rate would drop precipitously.
The Google hit China TFR 1.705 for 2023 is bogus (and 2023 isn't even over yet, which should have alerted you), it's single-sourced from macrotrends.net which is quoting an old (pre-pandemic) UN forecast; you can see from their graph their (forecasted) numbers for 2020-2 turned out totally wrong. Lots of other sites are quoting the Google and macrotrends as fact. So now the #1 Google hit on that is misinformation. (Always look for attributions and dates).
As to 2022, China did briefly drop to a TFR of 1.09, like GP said [1]; but the moving average over several years is more like 1.3. You have to put the 2022 drop in context that their very strict lockdown went into its third year, and there were two cases of pregnant women losing their babies e.g. because the hospital denied them entry for having negative Covid tests but a few hours too old [2].
Its now dropping even lower in 2023, long after the lockdowns have ended.
Turns out the East Asian style of hyper-competitive child rearing has its downsides, namely the high costs dissuade parents from having children altogether.
China faces every antinatal problem the west does, except far worse.
1. Extremely high housing prices making family formation expensive
2. Small apartments suppress large family formation (Seen in Europe)
3. General collapse of marriage rates due to changing incentives and thus moral norms
4. Higher education decreasing fertile years.
5. Economic depression, especially for young people, euro debt crisis level of youth unemployment.
You add to that, that China still officially has a 3-child policy (not that many people even have 2), because the birth control bureaucrats still need a job.
China is probably 2nd lowest in the world behind South Korea, and will stay there, if not
When a country makes the one-way generational jump(s) from a TFR of 3 to 2 and then sub-2, and to a post-industrial economy, a bunch of near-irreversible changes set in, from cost inflation and scarcity of education, expectations of years of education and marriage, apartment size etc.
Scott Galloway (and others, like Elizabeth Warren) have been saying this, about the US, repeatedly: US education costs rose (or at least, were allowed to rise by the politicians who were nominally regulating them) by 1400% since the 1970s [https://www.profgalloway.com/inflated/]. This was not sensible policy but if GDP growth via financialization of (third-level) education etc. is your economy's chosen indicator, it's what you get.
Anyway the low TFR is not necessarily a demographic crisis, it's up to the country whether it lets its population decrease (Japan, China), or uses immigration to sustain whatever its target population growth is (US, Canada, EU, SG, Aus).
> 2. Small apartments suppress large family formation (seen in Europe)
You're getting the direction of causality wrong: apartment size was a reaction to the decrease. Contraception, more years of education and other social changes were the drivers of smaller apartment sizes, not the effect.
I suppose that would be replacement rate if there were 42% more women than men in China. But according to Wikipedia there actually 4.5% more men than women.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_fer...