Comment by xgk

"Are China's demographics appreciatively different from other industrialised countries?"

Yes. Also, it is very likely that China has been covering up the true extent of the demographic problems. And not necessarily to hide it from its geopolitical rivals, but to hide it from its own leadership fearing purges and punishment. Like ... there's a 100 million people "missing".

"it's also easy, at least for a dictatorship, to increase the birth rate"

No it's not, because those changes take a while to implement, and even if the birth rate skyrockets, you don't get usable workers for 20 years.

Plus, China's economy is urbanized, and its economy is built around cheap labor that is worked to the bone (996). To make urban areas viable for raising kids, you need to decrease hours worked and increase wages.

And, people need to feel optimistic about the world and the future.

So lets say a massive sweeping change was implemented to make having children quite a bit more appealing. It would probably take about 5-10 years for the policy changes to trickle through the various layers of state control (China is kind of feudal in nature), monetary incentives will likely be greatly reduced by corruption.

Then 20 years later, you start to get a blip upward. Because the issue is, the people that will have the kids are ALREADY THE SMALLEST GENERATION EVER from one child policy. So to move the needle, they need to have ... like ... 8 kids each.

One child policy forced families to pick a gender as well. You won't believe this, but culturally people preferred boys. So the smallest generation ever, which would be 50-50ish, is more like 40-60 or 45-55 (maybe not that stark, but ... kinda is) then ... well, your expansion is limited by the wombs.

https://zeihan.com/new-chinese-demographic-data-population-c...

So, keep in mind Zeihan is a bit of a clickbait artist. He sells himself and makes bold claims. But if he is right about those new vs old/fake numbers, that is some bad stuff.

The solution to falling birth rates is immigration. And while China does see a lot of immigration, it does have a large rural/urban divide, so it might be able to "immigrate" people from the rural classes (who as I understand it are currently treated as a lower class of people).

Nice propaganda. Meanwhile China is building islands in the South China sea and provoking violent encounters with fishermen and coast guards, causing nearly everybody in SEA to build stronger military ties with the USA.

The only ones to switch allegiance to China will be the ones who have been bought off.

Countries like the US have not seen as large of a drop in birth rates like China. Many countries in the West have also successfully used immigration to blunt the impact of falling birth rates.

Countries like China are unable to take advantage of immigration. If increasing birth rates were easy for authoritarian countries like China, they wouldn’t be in this mess in the 1st place. This is a terrible argument. This situation is made worse with many mainlanders are trying to leave China.

The US and its allies like Japan and Australia have already implemented containment of China in the island chains. Pretty sure that thr Philippines and Vietnam are on board as well. This wouldn’t have happened if Wolf Warrior diplomacy weren’t a thing. All anyone has to do is cut off imports from the Middle East to cripple China. (No, Russian imports aren't enough. Most of their pipelines were destined for the EU. )Even India can cut off Middle East energy exports on its own because China doesn’t have a long range navy.

The BRICS coalition has also largely been a failure because no one can agree on what currency to use.

If either the Hu or Jiang faction were still in power, none of this would have happened because unlike Xi neither faction was delusional.