Comment by AtlasBarfed

"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).