China demographics thread.

Eventine

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IDK though, South Korea has low female labor force participation but lowest birth rates. Many Korean women just sit home watching TV or being on Naver. Meanwhile Vietnam has one of the world's highest female labor force participation but almost replacement birth rates.

Can't blame on culture either, both are Sinosphere cultures.

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Check education levels of women, specifically percent enrolled in tertiary education. It’s one of the most useful indicators when it comes to East Asia.

College = delayed marriage/children, even more so for masters, doctorates, etc. These are straight up roads to a child less life.
 
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FairAndUnbiased

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Check education levels of women, specifically percent enrolled in tertiary education. It’s one of the most useful indicators when it comes to East Asia.

College = delayed marriage/children, even more so for masters, doctorates, etc. These are straight up roads to a child less life.
College is worse than working for having kids?

I understand MS/PHD being bad but college is just 18-20 for AS degree and 22 for BS degree. Is there any developed or middle income country with average age at 1st child lower than 24 or so?
 

Eventine

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College is worse than working for having kids?

I understand MS/PHD being bad but college is just 18-20 for AS degree and 22 for BS degree. Is there any developed or middle income country with average age at 1st child lower than 24 or so?
Yes, rural women working labor intensive jobs have much more children than urban women working desk jobs. It’s not just the time spent in college but what it leads to - educated women have different expectations in life & this leads them to sacrifice children.
 

FairAndUnbiased

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Yes, rural women working labor intensive jobs have much more children than urban women working desk jobs. It’s not just the time spent in college but what it leads to - educated women have different expectations in life & this leads them to sacrifice children.
US has good statistics on this:

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looks like it hits rock bottom at the undergraduate level, but picks up a bit for MS and PHD.

going from high school dropout to merely high school graduate drops 27% TFR.

going from high school graduate to an AS graduate is another 36% drop.
 

fishrubber99

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Some good news in the near term for demographics, marriages increased last year by 12.4% y-o-y to 7.68 million. Most of the increase happened in the last quarter of 2023, very likely due to COVID restrictions dropping.

Long-term the prospects still aren't very good in terms of overall aging and population decline, but this might indicate a slightly more optimistic outlook if this trend can continue for a few more years.

For some perspective, this is higher than the total number of marriage registrations made in 2021 which was 7.63 million, but lower than the 2020 count of 8.14 million marriages.
 
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gadgetcool5

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Some good news in the near term for demographics, marriages increased last year by 12.4% y-o-y to 7.68 million. Most of the increase happened in the last quarter of 2023, very likely due to COVID restrictions dropping.

Long-term the prospects still aren't very good in terms of overall aging and population decline, but this might indicate a slightly more optimistic outlook if this trend can continue for a few more years.

For some perspective, this is higher than the total number of marriage registrations made in 2021 which was 7.63 million, but lower than the 2020 count of 8.14 million marriages.
That is better than expected. The COVID restrictions dropped at the end of 2022, so I do not necessarily attribute the rise in the fourth quarter of 2023 to that.

The divorce rate dropped drastically in the 4th quarter, I am not sure why. Either way, this is good news. The Global Times, however, did not provide data on the number of people first married, which would rule out second and higher order marriages. The first married figure is more important for forecasting future births.
 

siegecrossbow

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That is better than expected. The COVID restrictions dropped at the end of 2022, so I do not necessarily attribute the rise in the fourth quarter of 2023 to that.

The divorce rate dropped drastically in the 4th quarter, I am not sure why. Either way, this is good news. The Global Times, however, did not provide data on the number of people first married, which would rule out second and higher order marriages. The first married figure is more important for forecasting future births.

Economy crashed so people don’t have enough money to file for divorce. Duh!
 

asiandemographer

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We don't know a lot of things, which is why I don't expect this technology for many decades. But I'm certain that eventually it'll be viable. The precursor technologies are being developed as we speak, for entirely different reasons. Check out this project, Sc2.0, which aims to develop an entirely synthetic yeast genome:
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Yes, a yeast is very far from a human. But it's yeast today, tomorrow it'll be nematodes, then fruit flies the day after, then mice, then primates, then a special kind of primate.

Firstly, this as you say is a yeast, and this is their aim, so they haven't reached a stage of an artificial yeast as yet. Then, you are underplaying the progression to another organisms. With additional cells, which have to interact predicatably with each, specialize, regulate, etc. the complexity increases many folds, the complexity doesn't scale linearly. I would argue it is factorial. Hence, in the next 50 years, there is pretty much zero chance of this moving to even a mouse, leave alone humans.


Engineered pigs are being developed for organ transplants. There was a patient recently who received a heart from an engineered pig (the second such experiment):
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The results are still crappy, he died after a month, as did the patient before him. But they'll get better. More engineering will be done on these pigs and then one month will turn into several months, then years, then decades. The crucial thing to note here is that these changes will persist in that pig lineage. The changes will be cumulative, and decades from now when foreign implantation is attempted, it will be on pig lines that have had decades of engineering done on them.

This xenotransplantation is being attempted for decades, it's getting better, but slowly. It should continue to get better, but how does it play into the Demographics debate? Yes it will extend life, but as I have already shown medical progress over the years has actually slowed down in increasing life expectancy, not accelerated.


This is truly the final frontier, the root solution to China's demographic problem. People made to be better than "natural" in every way: healthier, stronger, longer-lived, smarter, resistant to illness, etc. Olympic athletes with Gauss-tier intellects.

Humans are not computers, biology is messy, not well understood, and we are far away from this science fiction. This dream of artificially created humans with selected traits: Not in this century.

It's not taking it too far at all. Technology can be unpredictable but it can also be predictable. Cloning, flying machines, heart/organ transplants were also imaginations of the past. As a matter of fact, nearly all technology was dreamed about before it was made.

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FYI, Nature is the most prestigious journal in biological sciences

The term artificial womb for them is wrong. It is a marketing gimmick.

Think of them more as an advanced form of neonatal incubators. They provide incredible support to babies who are born extremely prematurely, which is say 24 weeks (around 6 months). At the max these devices (still far from being commercialized) will provide mothers with around 2 months of support, however that is far from being a solution to the extreme demographic crisis that will emerge.

Well, that's an important aspect of the evolution of society. You go from 20 pig farmers with no middle school or possibly even elementary school education carrying buckets in the baking sun wading in knee deep mud to 8 college-educated technicians, 2 mechanical engineering PhDs and a management PhD working in a highly automated 10+ story facility to raise 10x more hogs than the 100 guys in a field while occupying the same floor space. Education and automation is the future.

Agreed, education and automation is indeed the future. However, that is the case everywhere, from now 20 pig farmers, you perhaps need 4 people to manage the facility, however, the other 16 people will be needed to design new robotics, perhaps design space stations, general virtual worlds etc. Meaning new industries will be created, and that is the same for all countries. I get it that not all countries are equally good at using talent, but I would argue the natural trend is towards convergence, which is already happening.

But with swaths of undereducated, it would appear that the bottle neck is education rather than population. And then, with many highly educated who are jobless, we are at another bottleneck of development rather than education. So in this bottleneck pyramid, pure population is still in overabundance.

It is both, education and population. Also, don't forget population also provides you with a market, which is perhaps the most important resource for a country.

Also, I would say that there are also jobs where education (at least as defined conventionally) is not as useful. Progress in AI and Robotics is surprisingly leading to pressure on skilled jobs, not on unskilled, manual jobs.

In that case, there is no disagreement. I was simply arguing against the claim that artificial wombs are just "meat machines" that churn out babies that are "not the same" and thus it's dehumanizing people. That would be an argument to not invest in artificial wombs, and I strongly disagree. It's a technology that needs to be invested in and you seem to agree. However, long before you made your account, there was a debate here regarding strife between the genders with some users claiming men and women don't need each other anymore with artificial wombs. I came out strongly against that sentiment because 1. you could lose a generation or even more waiting for this technology since we're not anywhere near getting it to work and implementing it in mass with affordability and 2. once the technology is made, it should be a boost to what we already have, instead of a reason to shun each other and break down the connections and weaves of society.

Totally agreed, I didn't know the context. We need each other for companionship and to make life bearable as well.

Once again for the hard of comprehension, what's the number of children in China in 2100 going to be when the technology exists where people can be essentially manufactured?

It won't exist.

This exponential advance:
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I was mistaken in calling it an exponential advance. It's actually super-exponential.

This has nothing to do with biology, it's chemistry/physics (refinement of sequencing processes), economics (economies of scale), and computer science (processing power, and cost of compute).

Nothing here happens inside any biological body.


Who said it's a huge goal? How much money has been invested in it over decades? How huge a goal is it versus heart replacement?

Agreed, heart replacement/transplant is probably a bigger deal. But again, this is to elongate life, which is not proceeding as smoothly. To repeat again, increase in life expectancy has actually slowed down over the last decade in rich/developed countries.

I've already shown you clinical trials of humanized organs. I don't care how many decades it's been underway, it's breaking through now. Human flight had been a goal for thousands of years before it was achieved. Why? Because flight is messy and hard... until it wasn't because the tools we have to address the problem matured to a sufficient degree. If you don't understand that basic fact, it's pointless to continue this conversation.

You had better hope a scheme like the one I described works because it's either that or accept extinction. Social incentives or taxing people or Handmaid's Tale garbage people talk about in this dump of a thread isn't going to work.

You have literally not presented any trial, none. I went even two pages before my first post. There is no evidence or even inkling of anything happening that could alleviate the central place of a human woman from the birth process. Leave alone that after birth, raising children is extremely expensive and laborious.

No one predicted before the first flight that human flight was possible. The first flight attempts were even mocked. And here, where the goal is even bigger, people have become delusional in predicting such major leaps.

Incentives and Disincentives work, people haven't tried hard enough.

Israel has a fertility above replacement (in fact above 3), primarily with some positive incentives and cultural reinforcement.
 

asiandemographer

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Affect of declining births:

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The number of births have fallen by 41% in just 5 years. This is just brutal!

Inertia of demographics makes people too comfortable when the number of births has declined by 41% in just 5 years, and way less than half of the peak birth rates.
 
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