Paul Ehrlich - secret weapon

From China's population shrinks despite two-child policy.

China's population shrank last year for the first time in 70 years, experts said, warning of a "demographic crisis" that puts pressure on the country's slowing economy.

The world's most populous nation of about 1.4 billion for decades limited most families to one child in an attempt to keep population growth sustainable.

But since 2016, it has allowed couples to have two children in response to concerns about an ageing society and shrinking workforce.


The number of live births nationwide in 2018 fell by 2.5 million year on year, contrary to a predicted increase of 790,000 births, according to an analysis by US-based academic Yi Fuxian.

[snip]

Last year marked a "historic turning point for the Chinese population", said Dr Yi, who studied publicly available data on births in towns and villages across China.

This downward trend may be irreversible, he cautioned, due to factors such as a decrease in the number of women of childbearing age and the reluctance of couples to have children due to rising education, health and housing costs.

Dr Yi's calculations show that the number of deaths in 2018 was about 11.58 million and the total population shrank by 1.27 million.

"The Chinese population has started to decrease for the first time since the founding of New China in 1949, the ageing problem has accelerated, and economic vitality has weakened," he told AFP.

When you deliberately break the cultural Humpty Dumpty Egg, it is usually pretty difficult to put him back together again. A shrinkage of 1.3 million in a population of 1,400 million is a statistical blip, but it is a harbinger of a dangerous trend which economists have been concerned about for a decade or more: will China get rich before it gets old?

Japan has been living with an aging and shrinking population for more than a decade now but are so far handling it very well. They got rich and sophisticated before they got old. It is a much closer run thing for China. They might be entering demographic decline before they have been able to pay off the huge accumulation of capital debt that they incurred to spur growth and certainly long before they achieved Japan levels of financial prosperity. That does not bode well. However, globally we have no real track record of managing demographic decline in a prosperous nation so much of this is philosophical and pragmatic terra incognita.

For the first five hundred years of globalism since 1500, and certainly since the modern industrial era, circa 1750, all developed nations have achieved their long run increase in prosperity in tandem with a long run increase in population. We have no portfolio of experiences to refer to in order to understand the mechanisms when prosperity is decoupled from demographics. All we can do is speculate about how one might increase prosperity when you have sustained demographic decline.

The Soviet Union's most effective weapon against Western civilization has been the bequeathment of the pernicious toxicologies of postmodernism, deconstructionism, critical theory, social justice theory, anti-colonial studies, gender studies, etc. In many ways those have come closer to laying low the West than their nukes in 1970.

Glenn Reynolds speculates in the opposite direction with regard to China.

Now it can be told: All that “Population Bomb” stuff was actually a long-range plan to fatally weaken China just as it threatened to emerge as a superpower. Somewhere in CIA headquarters, there’s a plaque with Paul Ehrlich’s name on it and a Presidential Disinformation Citation.