[pjc50]

> 300MM into 1.4B is ~21% of total population dead in 50 years

This is old age we're talking about. All of those three hundred million people are going to die anyway over that time period.

> much worse than any wars I can think of

The Taiping rebellion killed somewhere between 20 and 30 million people, approximately 5-10% of the population of China at the time. See if you can spot it on this graph: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_history_of_China - it's lost somewhere in the steep vertical climb on the right.

For a part of that period of dramatic population growth, China famously had a (badly enforced) one child policy.

(also, I guarantee you that there's some maniac in the Chinese ministry of defence looking at a prediction of deaths in a nuclear exchange with the United States that runs into the hundreds of millions, and declaring it winnable. There certainly were on both sides of the US-Russia Cold War, fortunately ignored all the time)

[mensetmanusman]

They would, but the ‘support staff of the dying’ to ‘dying of old age’ ratio is going to change by orders of magnitude. It will be a difference of kind.