K. Not familiar with their situation, but that's because they're niche and not an overall powerhouse. But rather than spend time on them, I'll go with what Seige said.
It's being repeated because it still stands and you're not countering it. You're putting your fiction against fact.
Israel is valid as a counter argument. Even among secular Jews in Israel fertility rates are high, 2.2. The fact that Haredi Jews don't contribute much to the Israeli economy - these people still need to be fed, educated and housed. Yet Israel can manage that while still being a high HDI country. Israel is in the middle of the desert yet the average citizen has a much higher standard of living than the average Chinese person.
There is no equivalent in Chinese society to the Haredi Jews, so a net position fertility rate will be much more beneficial for society.
Even if we throw out Israel as an example, what about every west European and North European countries historically?
The period between 1950 and 1975 aka the "baby boomer" generation was between 2.5 and 3. If those rates would have been maintained the west wouldn't be on the verge of collapse as it is now.
The idea that for a country to be developed fertility rates need to be sub replacement is a myth and certainly wasn't intended. If it's so good to have low fertility rates, why is virtually every developed country spending billions on trying to get people to have children?
Why are they receptive of so much immigration?
What you propose here could work if you kept up the infrastructure building (not a problem for China) but then you need food production as well as fishing to grow. That does increase but it is constrained by arable land and oceanic resources. China's not even fully food self-sufficient with the current population. The waters near China are already overfished. And the point is not to have enough food to survive if there was a war; in order to really increase people's standard of living to where they want to have kids (knowing that will make their lives much more difficult), it has to be good, highly desireable food. We're talking highly affordable fresh high quality seafood, beef, lamb, you can't just make some monster GMO grains and tell people they can eat all the bread/noodles they want because that won't really improve their quality of life.
As long as population growth is managed to predictable improvements in agriculture, there won't be any shortages. Over the last century, food availability has by far outgrown population growth.
Even if there is somehow a food shortage or we reach a bottleneck for food production. Historically what do countries do if they run low on land or resources? They expand, sometimes through war. If you don't do it someone else will.
And then, "could work" is not the same as "will work" because people are not machines; you cannot tell overly stressed tired-to-death people that they must have kids and more kids because you think it would counter-intuitively ameliorate a problem. They will not do it but they will emigrate. If you want people to have kids, you must bring down their life stress and increase their standard of living first. If that doesn't come down, people reproduce less, the population decreases, then the natural resources per capita rise and they achieve a more comfortable population equilibrium that way. This is how nature/the world works. That's how China is working now. What you imagine, won't work, firstly because you're not playing some online civilization game where people reproduce and populate where you want at the click of a mouse.
lol...civilisation was a cool game.
Developed countries don't depend on natural resources for wealth generation, that's what third world countries do. It's a reason why countries like Argentina are now poor. Maybe for a country like modern day Russia a shrinking population is a good idea.
If we were to try what you are advocating, China would need to build more "ghost cities," (easiest part, no problem) drastically increase food availability, making it very cheap to get a lot of (good) food (extremely challenging), and make laws limiting work hours to 40 or so a week with mandated wages to be at a certain level. The dangers are enumerate; businesses could go under. Chinese people will break these laws and promise overtime to get ahead. Chinese people show a lot of elitism in that they would rather work to death in Beijing/Shanghai/Shenzhen than move to a low tier city promised with bigger housing, cheaper food because that is seen as being more prestigious. Then what? Forced relocation? They literally having trouble getting XiongAn to build up because of these issues. It would be extremely difficult and dangerous to try to force horizontal expansion that way, and right now during the tech war, it's just not a good time to gamble like that.
If the population growth is slow enough there shouldn't be a need for ghost cities. That need comes from the urbanisation of rural China which is occurring at much higher rate and is probably the reason why services in major cities feel overwhelmed.
There's no fundamental difference between a two or three child policy and one child policy. No one will flee China because of it. Limit career growth and party membership to couple who have two or three children.
Westerners will talk about how evil CCP is but they'll be jealous as they are forced to resort to more and more migration to fill labour shortages.
Japan had the highest GDP per capita in the developed world for many years post WW2, was more industrialised than any western country for a while. America pretty much sacrificed their domestic auto industry and let the Japanese take over.
Old people are more and more useful in an age of information. 60 year old professors can do a lot more than a few young guys working construction or running food orders these days.
60 isn't a common age of retirement in most countries, especially for a professor. What about a more physical job?
I think old people are less useful than they were historically. Technology is moving too fast and a lot get left behind. In the olden times technology didn't change from childhood to old age. Nowadays the world changes a lot in 20 years, let alone a lifetime.
OECD countries are all gradually increasing the age of retirement. It's because they can no longer afford to offer the elderly the care they used to. Life expectancies have plateaued and will start dropping soon. And this is all despite the improvements in technology and medicine.
In a country like America the age of retirement is only a few years less than the average life expectancy of some groups, like black males. Eventually it will be like that for everyone.
