2021 TFR in China by province
China demographics thread.
- Thread starter gadgetcool5
- Start date
High density urban lifestyle = low tfr
China already has too many people. its better to increase quality than quantity in these times of crisis. Unlike most animals, humans are endowed with foresight.
Deer who birth too many fawn and eat the last blade of grass on the island will all starve to death. Better for the deer to slow reproduction for a bit and let the grass grow back.
Demographic decline is a natural phenomenon in times of crisis:
I've been waiting for someone to activate this stupid thread again so I can drop this:
The Solution to China's Demographic Problem
I want to begin by clarifying exactly what I mean by "demographic problem" and what kind of solution this essay will present. By "demographic problem" I mean the worst manifestation of the "China is doomed" rhetoric spreading like wildfire in Western popular culture. Let's take as true that China's population will fall by half by 2050, why not?
The solution I consider won't be of an economic kind like improved productivity or a socioeconomic kind like incentives for people to have more children. Let's take the Western position that China's productivity won't grow and every social program and incentive has a 100% failure rate. I also won't consider solutions like raising the retirement age or restricting pension payments since the Orientalist conception of "filial piety" won't allow that. I won't consider the improvement in education that's been going on for decades in China to be of any relevance, or the difference in productivity between rural and urban populations - all individuals in the 16-64 age group are entirely interchangeable.
In short, I'm considering that the most ridiculous Western caricatures of the problem are entirely correct and every conventional solution will fail. Despite those assumptions, I will present a simple solution that will entirely solve the problem and can be implemented today. Sound too good to be true? Read on...
First, the Chinese government is to institute a massive program to gather reproductive cells from the population. There's any number of ways to do this - cash payments, career incentives, etc. Once the cells are gathered, they'll be passed on to another massive program that will use the latest and greatest in biotechnology and artificial intelligence to determine the optimal combinations of these cells into embryos. Once a bank of these embryos is ready, China is to import a large number of young women from poor countries around the world as paid surrogate mothers, and the children born from this program will be raised in state orphanages and educated in boarding schools.
The great feature of this solution is its scalability. Some variant of this is already done on a small scale with celebrities in the West. Wealthy women who don't want to go through pregnancy and childbirth but they still want biological children pay surrogate mothers to carry their embryos to term. What I propose is to massively scaling this up and bringing it under the control of the state.
Another major benefit to this program over "natural" birth is the improved quality of the resulting population. Not only are they optimally combined and selected for traits like intelligence before they're even implanted, they will be raised by the state - which will ensure they're brought up with the proper values and virtues and the responsibilities Chinese citizenship entails.
Now, no solution is perfect, even one as elegant as this. Let's take a look at some of the challenges standing in the way of its implementation.
Cost: Doing IVF on this scale will - at least in the short term - be quite expensive. However, I expect that once China scales up this technology, costs will drop like they did with solar panels. The logistics and labour of raising such a large number of children will also be costly, but given the benefit a generation of Qian Xuesens will bring, those burdens are what you call suffering from success.
Supply of surrogate mothers: I consider myself an avid observer of world affairs but I admit that I've lapsed in keeping up with things lately. Even so, I don't think the world has changed so much that impoverished young women are now a thing of the past. With the expansion of world population (especially in the poorest countries) and mounting climate catastrophe, I don't think we need worry about the supply of this particular input.
Popular opposition: I'd be concerned about this one if China were a liberal democracy. Thankfully, it isn't.
PS: To give credit where it's due, the seeds for this idea were planted by this discussion between Richard Hanania and Steven Chu. While they don't propose this idea, their discussion about IVF set my own thoughts down this direction.
The Solution to China's Demographic Problem
I want to begin by clarifying exactly what I mean by "demographic problem" and what kind of solution this essay will present. By "demographic problem" I mean the worst manifestation of the "China is doomed" rhetoric spreading like wildfire in Western popular culture. Let's take as true that China's population will fall by half by 2050, why not?
The solution I consider won't be of an economic kind like improved productivity or a socioeconomic kind like incentives for people to have more children. Let's take the Western position that China's productivity won't grow and every social program and incentive has a 100% failure rate. I also won't consider solutions like raising the retirement age or restricting pension payments since the Orientalist conception of "filial piety" won't allow that. I won't consider the improvement in education that's been going on for decades in China to be of any relevance, or the difference in productivity between rural and urban populations - all individuals in the 16-64 age group are entirely interchangeable.
In short, I'm considering that the most ridiculous Western caricatures of the problem are entirely correct and every conventional solution will fail. Despite those assumptions, I will present a simple solution that will entirely solve the problem and can be implemented today. Sound too good to be true? Read on...
First, the Chinese government is to institute a massive program to gather reproductive cells from the population. There's any number of ways to do this - cash payments, career incentives, etc. Once the cells are gathered, they'll be passed on to another massive program that will use the latest and greatest in biotechnology and artificial intelligence to determine the optimal combinations of these cells into embryos. Once a bank of these embryos is ready, China is to import a large number of young women from poor countries around the world as paid surrogate mothers, and the children born from this program will be raised in state orphanages and educated in boarding schools.
The great feature of this solution is its scalability. Some variant of this is already done on a small scale with celebrities in the West. Wealthy women who don't want to go through pregnancy and childbirth but they still want biological children pay surrogate mothers to carry their embryos to term. What I propose is to massively scaling this up and bringing it under the control of the state.
Another major benefit to this program over "natural" birth is the improved quality of the resulting population. Not only are they optimally combined and selected for traits like intelligence before they're even implanted, they will be raised by the state - which will ensure they're brought up with the proper values and virtues and the responsibilities Chinese citizenship entails.
Now, no solution is perfect, even one as elegant as this. Let's take a look at some of the challenges standing in the way of its implementation.
Cost: Doing IVF on this scale will - at least in the short term - be quite expensive. However, I expect that once China scales up this technology, costs will drop like they did with solar panels. The logistics and labour of raising such a large number of children will also be costly, but given the benefit a generation of Qian Xuesens will bring, those burdens are what you call suffering from success.
Supply of surrogate mothers: I consider myself an avid observer of world affairs but I admit that I've lapsed in keeping up with things lately. Even so, I don't think the world has changed so much that impoverished young women are now a thing of the past. With the expansion of world population (especially in the poorest countries) and mounting climate catastrophe, I don't think we need worry about the supply of this particular input.
Popular opposition: I'd be concerned about this one if China were a liberal democracy. Thankfully, it isn't.
PS: To give credit where it's due, the seeds for this idea were planted by this discussion between Richard Hanania and Steven Chu. While they don't propose this idea, their discussion about IVF set my own thoughts down this direction.
This thread is indeed a bit stupid and a source of freakouts, but your "solution" veers too far in the opposite direction of being ridiculous.
National scale, directed IVF selection based on desirable traits and use of surrogate mothers from across the world, is neither simple or implementable today, to the extent that I wonder if the entire post is meant to be sarcastic.
I assure you that there's not one iota of sarcasm in my proposal. The more I think about it, the more I'm convinced that's it's something that should be implemented. I've gone from thinking about it as an extreme emergency measure to something that can be done in more normal circumstances to something that must be done in any circumstance. Think for a second about the implications of taking the greatest minds humanity has produced throughout history - the luminaries of their generation - and mass producing them like household appliances.
I anticipate and welcome criticism of my ideas, but I ask that that criticism be constructive. Dismissing them as "ridiculous" isn't constructive.
Well, the fact that it's late November and there haven't been Twitter screenshots of Chinese-language tables with data from the Provinces of horrendous collapses in the birth rate for 2022, or dooming South China Morning Post headlines about the same, makes me cautiously optimistic that the drop in the number of births this year won't be as bad as last year.
Last year, the number of births dropped from 12 million to 10.62 million for a 11.5% drop. This year, China would have to have at least 9.4 million births to match the drop in the birth rate; below that is bad, above that is good, considering expectations and everything.
Additionally in 2020, the number of marriages dropped to 8.14 million from 9.27 million, or a 11.2% drop. That's similar to the 11.5% drop in births for 2021. In 2021, the number of marriages dropped to 7.6 million from 8.14 million, or a 6.6% drop. That would suggest 9.9 million births. If there was even close to that many births in 2022, it would count as good news.
Finally, there is the marriage data for 2022. If marriage is a leading indicator of births, then that is a critical number to project births for 2023. I fear for whether it has been affected by lockdowns and the slowdown in China's economy this year. A rate of 7.1 million marriages would represent a constant trajectory of decline (6.6% annually) based on 2021 numbers. Anything above that is good; below that is bad. A renewed acceleration in the decline of marriages would be very bad news.
Last year, the number of births dropped from 12 million to 10.62 million for a 11.5% drop. This year, China would have to have at least 9.4 million births to match the drop in the birth rate; below that is bad, above that is good, considering expectations and everything.
Additionally in 2020, the number of marriages dropped to 8.14 million from 9.27 million, or a 11.2% drop. That's similar to the 11.5% drop in births for 2021. In 2021, the number of marriages dropped to 7.6 million from 8.14 million, or a 6.6% drop. That would suggest 9.9 million births. If there was even close to that many births in 2022, it would count as good news.
Finally, there is the marriage data for 2022. If marriage is a leading indicator of births, then that is a critical number to project births for 2023. I fear for whether it has been affected by lockdowns and the slowdown in China's economy this year. A rate of 7.1 million marriages would represent a constant trajectory of decline (6.6% annually) based on 2021 numbers. Anything above that is good; below that is bad. A renewed acceleration in the decline of marriages would be very bad news.
manqiangrexue
Brigadier
Nah, there's no trouble and no fire, no matter how much the West wishes there is. Already had this conversation about why there is absolutely no need for China to continuously grow or even maintain its massive population.
China demographics thread.
Come on. This is 2022. Not 2000. China has very dire demographics because of the four decade implementation of the One Child Policy. The Chinese demographics are a clusterfuck of immense proportions. In my view demographics are the biggest danger to Chinese future with the USA in a second spot...
www.sinodefenceforum.com
You can't force it up in a year but it goes up once you reach a healthy balance between work and resources allocated. As China surpasses the US and fosters a work-life balance that is fast enough to maintain its lead but also slow enough to improve the quality of life, the Chinese population will adjust to an equilibrium that is suitable to the resources that it generates to maintain said quality of life.
No it hasn't; it limited China's population growth in an era when China was too poor to support extra mouths to feed and also backwards, meaning that people wanted more children for physical labor. India may have done much better to implement such a policy rather than spending the bulk of its resources talking care of more and more poor people. Today, China's birth rate is low because it is actively kept low by expensive education policies and excessive work load, the former which can be alleviated by policy and the later by technological development and national advancement winning the world's biggest rivalry. Until that happens, China's got the biggest population cushion in the world for it to drop on.
You've still not given one advantage your idea has over natural births. Every "advantage" you've suggested has nothing to do with IVF, eg eugenics.
Bringing up millions of children in orphanages is going to lead to mass autism and criminality in the new generation.