Yes, I’m looking through the lens of America. The old adage applies. “Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Perhaps that needs to be amended with “the lust for absolute power corrupts long before it is achieved.”
Growth can take many forms. Most people conflate it with consumption, and capitalism makes that manifest.
But an increased population needs growth in some senses in order to remain at the previous level of well-being. More people need more schools and hospitals and housing, e.g.
Growth also lifts people out of poverty. According to Pew Research the world population of middle class rose from 800 million in 2001 to 1.4 billion a decade later. The definition of middle class was an income of a mere $40-$80/day for a family of four, poverty level by U.S. standards, yet less than half the world’s population rises even this small amount above local poverty.
The world probably could not sustain a population of 8 billion at U.S. middle-class standards of excess consumption and wastage. The world also needs to raise that other half into the middle class. Growth by some definition is necessity to achieve that.
To put things in context, their Shanghai plant is ~35% of their total production, and this will likely decrease over time. China doing something stupid with the plant would be bad for Tesla, but isn’t an existential risk for them. Tesla also has an advantage in that they are the single exception to China’s rule that foreign automakers must partner with domestic ones. In short: while China undoubtedly still tries to learn as much as possible from Tesla, it is not a direct technology transfer in the way it’s happened with essentially everyone else (that is: invite foreign company to build a plant, but requiring a partnership; transfer all useful knowledge to domestic company; set up new company with transferred knowledge; undercut foreign company with derived products). Of course, China can do whatever they want in the end. It just remains to be seen if they will.
Overall, I agree with your thesis. I would say that while America has a great many other advantages, our relatively sane demographic situation is going to be one of the most important in the coming years. And that China’s demographics will be disastrous for them, and that there’s nothing they can do at this point. A number of other countries face the same problem, but obviously none at the same scale as China.
In 20 years, how much of Indonesia is still going to be above sea level? That’s a lot of refugees that will have to go somewhere.
War is messy and unpredictable, for many reasons. Even with all the best intentions on both sides, sometimes things get destroyed that nobody wants destroyed.
It’s a decent bet that Taiwan has plans to destroy the plants before they fall into enemy hands.
Aside: Why do people keep on saying this? The replacement number is 2.0, and couldn’t be anything else.
To the thread topic, if the root of China’s problems is their one-child policy, well, that’s not set in stone, either. They could repeal that tomorrow, if they liked. A mere twenty years later, the workforce would be growing again. That’s pretty quick, in the face of predictions like “by the end of the century…”.
It has to be higher than 2.0, because some people are going to die without having kids.
To allow for deaths before breeding age.
Which is probably nothing to do with the one-child policy. The USA is I think unique in being the only advanced economy with a birth rate over 2.
They’ve been fighting off a deflationary spiral for 20-30 years (mostly by throwing government money at the construction industry, which didn’t help the general economy hardly at all), only this year has there been any significant GDP growth. So it IS possible to get some GDP growth with a declining population in a non-immigration nation. Whether China has and can use those same levers is doubtful in the extreme, IMO.
Americans, not so much!
The only place that makes the machines that makes the semiconductors is … The Netherlands. Even if China took the plants, how would they maintain and update them? And with US and EU sanctions on those technologies, they’re not going to be able to do that themselves any time soon. They are generations behind as it is.
To the thread topic; yes; China looks to be the first modern economy whose population got old before it got rich.
Googling tells me the U.S. is currently at 1.7. Only immigration accounts for increased population projections for the rest of the century.
China stopped the one-child policy in 2016, allowing for two children. Instead, the number of births dropped dramatically. In 2021 they raised it to three. It hasn’t helped. Like millennials everywhere parents think the costs of living are way too high to have more children. As a result, China’s population is already shrinking.
One other indirect consequence of the one-child policy is that the breeding age population is heavy in males and light in females. How did that happen? Selective abortions and infanticides of females by parents who viewed a male child as an asset and a female child as a liability. Which under traditional Chinese cultural arrangements they often were. The government was able to enforce one-child pretty effectively. They were not able (willing?) to enforce a balanced birth / survival rate.
Which sex imbalance can be an obstacle when you’re trying to grow the population rapidly. Doubly so when those few women are being educated in historically unprecedented percentages and don’t really see baby-making as a good use of their college educated minds & earning potentials.
Yes. Plus, the leading edge plants are only leading edge for a few years. The next generation plant is dependent on Taiwanese staff who will be unwilling to make engineering advances for their new overlords and/or be desperate to emigrate.
One hopeful part is that of the three greatest powers (U.S., Russia, China), China has been the least warlike for several generations.
I doubt a conventional invasion could work; could it be done as a huge special op, smuggling in covert agents and special forces teams in a Trojan Horse strategy?
Semiconductors aren’t like oil; they are heavily dependent on expertise, supply chains, a lot of international cooperation and human willingness to work and innovate. If China invaded Taiwan, Taiwan’s semiconductor industry would instantly go poof - not literally physically poof, but gone in the sense that the human capital and innovation instantly ceases.
One area where the U.S. Is ahead of China is employment. Young people in the PRC can’t get jobs:
The jobless rate for 16 to 24 year olds in urban areas hit 21.3% last month, a record high.
Paul Krugman recently discussed this in an article comparing economic challenges in Japan and China (spoiler: China’s are bigger):
Note that China already has much higher youth unemployment than Japan ever did.
Having a large cadre of unemployed young men who can’t find wives is never good for social stability.
And as a related and partly overlapping phenomenon, to account for the uneven sex ratio at birth, which is something like 105 boys for every 100 girls. The male excess mostly dies out before they reach reproductive age. But it means that you need at least a 2.05 birth rate per woman, even if the men live, because it’s the women that determine the overall birth rate. And in practice, it has to be a bit higher yet, because some of the women die as well.
Ok, I confess that I haven’t read the linked article and every post in detail.
First, you have to take my word for this (I could prove it but don’t want to out myself), but I have been living and/or visiting Mainland China for 20+ years starting in 1985. I spent a few years in the countryside and more than a decade living in Shanghai. China’s modernization and raising up the caloric and income levels of the entire population is unparalled in world history. Something as a new minted economics major didn’t believe was possible when spending time in the “so poor it made you cry” countryside.
Second, China’s one child policy started in 1980 and ended in 2016. (Depending on the time and place, the one child policy was not absolute with many a peasant allowed to have a second if the first was a girl.) Absolutely there is a greying population issue where during the Mao era families were encouraged to have lots of children, and anecdotally I know of several that were pressured into having more kids because they were being “unpatriotic” with only 3. So, you have a big population burst from 1949 and then a dramatic drop-off in 1980. Post 2016 the cost of having a child limited any great resumption of having more than one child.
Third, while there are “ghost cities”, these are basically shit high rise housing in the outskirts that have not been completed. These are uninhabitable and were real estate scams. It is true that there is a “lot” of housing in big cities that are vacant with absentee landlords. There’s an economic cost for this empty housing, but if you looked at the average living space in a Chinese city, the majority of the population are squeezed into small spaces. It’s not like the empty city flats would sit there empty if they were up for grabs or more affordable. Remember that these empty flats have been paid for. And china basically does not have property tax.
Fourth, whilst there is a greying population, there is a huge problem with unemployment. Sure, there are plenty of dangerous and dirty factory jobs available for all the rice you can eat, but not even the peasants from deep in the impoverished countryside want those. And if the countryside evolved from peasants working small plots of land, to modern agriculture, then you would need so many peasants. Furthermore, a lot of those with white collar jobs are way overworked with a standard 12 hour day, 6 day work week. So, I’m not convinced that there is going to be an explosion of work not being done because of a lack of people. The economy will adjust.
Finally, China is playing the dangerous nationalism card over Taiwan. That said, it is pure lunacy that China can take over taiwan and take the semi-conductor foundries in a working state. Semi-conductor manufacturing, especially the most recent 5 generations, depends on an incredibly complex global supply chain. Including, as a doper mentioned above thread, the Dutch machines required. Furthermore, Taiwan has been preparing for a Mainland invasion since 1949. Does any sane person think that a) China can successfully invade, b) be welcome, c) not be met with smoking rubble where TSMC foundries used to be, d) make all the people that built and sustained production of the foundry work for them, e) persuade S Korea, Japan, US, Netherlands and every other country in the supply chain to keep supporting the Semicon foundry production post an invasion???
All that said, I think China had a unparalled 30+ year run, and at best it’s going to be a tough slog for the next 30 years.
Those are people who have 0 children. You account for them by including a 0 in your data set. Whether you count women of childbearing age who have children who reach childbearing age, or all children born to all females, either way you get 2, no matter whether that’s everyone having exactly 2, half dying in childhood and the other half having 4, or whatever.
Thanks for coming into the thread and giving an educated perspective. As an outsider, I agree completely with your analysis.
Every expert organization on population disagrees with you. The matter is more complicated than your appraisal. Here’s the most condensed explanation I found.
Replacement rate is the number of children that a couple would have to have over the course of their reproductive years in order to replace themselves.[1] The UN states that this replacement rate worldwide is 2.1 children per couple;[2] however, some regions have higher or lower rates depending on whether or not the country is developed, with less developed countries needing 2.3 children born per couple to replace the population.[3] This additional 0.1 or 0.3 is due to the fact that replacement cannot occur if a child does not live to the end of their reproductive years and have their own children; thus, this extra is added per couple to account for death or infertility as adults.[3] Therefore, less stable countries require higher numbers of children to be born per couple on average since more people don’t make it to the end of their reproductive years.
[1] Population Reference Bureau. (2015, Mar. 5). Glossary of Demographic Terms [Online]. Available: http://www.prb.org/Publications/Lesson-Plans/Glossary.aspx
[2] UN Population Division. (2015, Mar. 5). World Urbanization Prospects (2014 Revision) [Online]. Available: World Urbanization Prospects - Population Division - United Nations.
[3] Matt Rosenburg. (2015, Mar. 5). Total Fertility Rate [Online]. Available: Fertility Rate and Population Growth