And yet all of them have an even lower fertility rate than China.
On the one hand, you're proving my point. On the other hand, if you think that China's headed for a demographic disaster, so are all of those countries, and your thesis of blaming the CCP for everything... Falls a bit flat.
China has extremely low fertitily rate given that they haven't yet reached the status of a developed country (which Taiwan, SK and Singapore have reached).
Developed countries tend to have lower fertility rates (i.e. less kids per family) than undeveloped ones. Comfortably off, well educated people tend to put thought into whether to have kids or not. In poor countries people tend to have large families so they can send the kids out to work.
Having a high fertility rate isn't "high status" and a sign of a country's progress, but rather the exact opposite.
Of course this is separate from this issue of having a shrinking population, which is a sign that your citizens are not optimistic about the future, not a positive thing.
Still, a stupid governmental policy cost them at least 100 million people compared to the expected spontaneous development. Probably more. That is the sort of punishment that omnipotent governments sometimes visit upon their folk.
I don't believe that even the CCP itself, in hindsight, considers the one-child policy to have been a good decision. At the very least it should have been ended some 15 years earlier.
Well, I've been reading on The Economist how China is seriously struggling with youth unemployment right now. Lots of fresh university graduates are sitting unemployed, or doing manual labor. In my home country (Finland) we have had way below replacement birth rates for a long while now, yet youth unemployment is at all time high.
The problem with low birth rates is assumed to be that there are less workers to take care of the pensioners. But right now it seems like even the few young workers available often aren't needed anymore, thanks to increasing automation of industries. I predict youth unemployment will be made even worse by AI soon enough. So, why do we need children, if capitalist economies don't need workers? Unemployed people do not pay much taxes to sustain the non-working age population.
I believe low birth rates might become a blessing soon enough. It just means less people for governments to take care of when robots and AI take away most jobs.
No, a remarkably farsighted policy that prevented PRC from having to deal with additional 200m-400m subsistent farmers. If anything it wasn't done sooner/aggressive enough. Like you can literally wipe away 200-400m from PRC button quantile and PRC would be net better off due to increase per capita resources and wealth. This hindsight will be historically obvious in 20-30 years when you see the outcome of India with 1.6B people with 1.2B poor, vs PRC with 1.4B people with 400m poor. The drag of having disproportionate, bluntly, worthless bodies is not linear for governance, and it's not because India hasn't tried aggressive family planning of their own, they simply failed unlike PRC. Who very much regards family planning as largely successful demographic management system that enabled proper allocation of resources away from generating peasants to building industry and the largest pool of high end human talent in recorded history, where frankly any tertiary dividend is worth 50 farmers in terms of productivity.
China is headed for a demographic disaster, though. High schools are incredibly packed, middle schools, not so much and primary schools and kindergartens are kind of empty.
It's hard to say that it's stupidity (at least not country-specific stupidity) - it seems that globally, presumably due to the state of the world along many axis, many people are choosing to have fewer children, and it's happening on a large enough scale to have major consequences for things like the size of your tax base, trying to keep your economy growing, demographic concerns over an aging population with no-one to look after or pay for them etc, etc.
Different countries are handling this in different ways, with encouraging immigration being the major one. Japan is facing a major lack of workers, with many businesses having to shut down as a result, but have decided to tackle it in a different way relying on advanced robotics as an alternative to immigration.
There are very few developed countries NOT having this problem. Most of the population growth is in poorer parts of the world like Africa.
Well, if there are >0 developed countries that have solved this (Israel, the GCC, dare I say fairly well-off MENA countries like Jordan, Algeria, Morocco, etc., and to a minor degree Botswana) then this proves wrong the hypothesis that modern hyper-development must inherently mean population collapse.
Going purely by the evolution theory and natural selection, having so few children that there is a serious risk a population will disappear in a century or two, means losing. Needless to say, this is stupid. From the entire American continent, to Europe, India more recently, Thailand, China, the Koreas, Japan.
Africans, Arabs, and some non-Arab Muslim populations will carry the torch. Much respect for not falling into the trap.
Algeria and Morocco hardly seem "fairly well-off" countries, considering how many of their citizens prefer moving to the low-birth rate European countries you loathe. High birth rate of Israel is also unsustainable from economic perspective, as it relies mostly on orthodox Jews who on average are much poorer, less educated, and contribute less to the Israeli economy.
I'm not saying fast fall in birth rates isn't a problem, it obviously is. However, nearly all countries that don't have this problem offer much worse quality of life than those which do.
Young southern europeans are in turn migrating north. Are Spain, Italy, Portugal not well off?
There is a saying. More is better. Morocco has issues with tourists and diaspora pricing out locals from houses to food even, but Algeria is an honestly good country all around. With its issues of course. But there is more to life than earning $$$.
Westerners forget the tiny detail that these countries are extremely young unlike them, hence why it feels like there are so "many" people.
Edit: oops, I glossed over the part about Israel. Trust me, it's still a billion times better than nothing, which is the case for the entire West.
Edit 2: Oh my oh my, I missed this too. I "loathe" European countries? Do I? I mildly not respect European populations for wiping themselves out. I cannot loathe land.
> this proves wrong the hypothesis that modern hyper-development must inherently mean population collapse
I don't know the exact correlation but even in Morocco, total fertility rate is declining very rapidly, down from 6 children in 1980s to now around 1.7 in urban areas. UAE (Dubai) has similar TFR to Belgium or Portugal.
> then this proves wrong the hypothesis that modern hyper-development must inherently mean population collapse.
Honestly you're reading the data completely wrong. You cannot look at it at the country level. In Israel for example the populations that are producing the most population are highly religious and less educated than those that are producing less population.
It's more about memes. Religion is a meme driven breeding cult. This is why said religions tend to have very long term staying power. The particular problem here is these religions come at a cost of having to ignore a lot of reality to get to that point. Because they are faith based anything that presents a direct challenge to that faith must be setup as an enemy or it may risk the religion. Yes, religions can incorporate new information but it tends to be a slow process as it needs to involve slowly changing peoples mind to avoid instability.
What this looks like in the long term is large populations of highly religious that have a fundamental disconnect from the technology that's keeping them alive. A new Late Bronze Age collapse.
So? How does the population being religious disprove the fact that they are developed and having children? Not to mention that I have listed around ~10 countries after Israel.
Uh... Meme-based? This is such an unserious argument I don't even know what I can possibly say to that.
How are they disconnected with the technology keeping them alive? All people, in GCC countries especially, are working to make 1st world development happen.
Implying that religious Jews or Muslims are stuck in the Bronze Age is ignoring reality. Most European development itself came from men of science who were Christian, I thought this apparent conflict of ideas was something taught in schools.
First, you seems to think a meme is something unserious. Read Richard Dawkins The Selfish Gene so you know what meme actually stands for rather than the thing you see on Reddit.
GCC countries are resource economies mostly. They must weave a very narrow path to success to non-oil based means of income or the entire region collapses. I will say they do realize this is a problem and are using oil money to diversify, but resource curses are very hard to break and collapse can happen very quickly.
"My grandfather rode a camel, my father rode a camel, I drive a Mercedes, my son drives a Land Rover, his son will drive a Land Rover, but his son's son will ride a camel." --Sheikh Rashid bin Saeed Al Maktoum
>Most European development itself came from men of science who were Christian
This is just stating that that in 1700 you were a Christian or you got hung (hell, pre-independence America was founded by people that thought that too few people were being hung). As we see when you take out the hanging or social shame part of the religion people tend to flee them as they are oppressive structures. You could say them being men of science either had no bearing to their religion, or was in spite of their religion.
I am saying, for example, that the Abrahamic religions are bronze age (ok, sorry, Iron age) social structures. I don't think studied scholars are going to disagree on that point very much. People saw how people worked and could be sheppereded in societies without formal education and turned it into a series of stories that were effective in modifying peoples behaviors. Kings later came along and added their stories so they could further control the population. Over time a semi-coherent story about how people worked was formed below a set of rather incoherent stories regarding things that didn't happen that people are supposed to accept with faith.
Notably, it is hilarious how ‘modern western society’ seems to believe that people somehow work differently than they always have, while clearly mimicking the same rough structures they are deriding.
(Comic book superheros, cough cough. The references to Canon in what are essentially liturgical disagreements - I mean power scaling arguments - are particularly hilarious.)
Not me of course, I’m different and unique. Just like everyone else.
On the one hand, you're proving my point. On the other hand, if you think that China's headed for a demographic disaster, so are all of those countries, and your thesis of blaming the CCP for everything... Falls a bit flat.