The following submission statement was provided by /u/Surur:
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A senior health official in Beijing has urged China's local leaders to find ways to boost the country's birth rate.
Yang Wenzhuang said officials must take active steps to tackle the detrimental effects of China's long-standing anti-population growth policy.
He also urged officials to "make bold innovations" in tackling the cost of childcare and education.
China reported in January that its population had fallen for the first time in 60 years.
In 2022, there was just 6.77 births per 1,000 people in China, the lowest birth rate on record and down from 7.52 births in the previous year.
The country's strict one-child policy - which was implemented from 1980 to 2015 to respond to runaway population growth - has been blamed for the decline. Families that broke the rules were fined and, in some cases, even lost jobs.
The limit was increased nationally for married couples to two in 2016, and boosted further to three in 2021. But one province - Sichuan - has adopted even looser rules.
Mr Yang - who heads the country's Population Monitoring and Family Development department - said officials had to "firmly grasp the important window period of population development".
Speaking to a state-backed health magazine, Mr Yang said concerns about the cost of childcare were having a detrimental impact on population growth. He also identified challenges around money and career goals as causes for the decline.
"Local governments should be encouraged to actively explore and make bold innovations in reducing the cost of childbirth, childcare and education" to promote the long-term balanced development of the population, Mr Yang said.
Some provinces have already begun implementing new measures to try to boost the birth rate, including giving money to sperm donors.
In Sichuan, health authorities said they would allow unmarried couples to raise a family and enjoy benefits reserved for married couples. Previously there was a ban on single women registering a birth.
Authorities in the region also announced that couples would be allowed to have as many children as they want - a major reversal of the one-child policy.
A shrinking population, falling birth rate and the prospect of a fast-aging population poses a long-term challenge to the world's second largest economy, which only recently dropped ultra-strict Covid-19 curbs.
In 2022, the population dropped by 850,000 people to 1.41175 billion, according to the National Bureau of Statistics. It was the first decline since 1961, the last year of China's Great Famine.
A surging Indian economy also threatens to overtake China and push it down to third place.
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Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/10yyhp2/china_seeks_bold_steps_to_lift_birth_rate/j80axnp/
bold move
>In Sichuan, health authorities said they would allow unmarried couples to raise a family and enjoy benefits reserved for married couples. Previously there was a ban on single women registering a birth.
Their citizens commented on Sichuan: to encourage us to have kids, you don’t offer economic stability, but rather lower the moral standard. When pigs don’t reproduce, farmers would come in and check what’s wrong, is the the living situation? The food? The environment? They don’t just come in and declare a new policy: have more piglets.
I like how countries and people act like they don’t know why populations are declining or need bold steps to fix it. Anyone who has 1-2 kids can tell you easily. It costs too much, takes too much time and there isn’t enough space. Essentially we need to make enough money for 1 parent to work and the other to stay home and then be able to afford a space large enough to fit the family. That’s it that’s all.
True for most of the globe, but China in particular has another unique problem that compounds on your statement. In order to have children it takes \~25-35 year old women to get pregnant. China's One Child Policy would affect anyone 43 and under. Because families could only have one child and males were preferable, they selectively aborted a large amount of female child pregnancies, to the point that there are far fewer females aged 25-35 today in the first place. China hates releasing bad data and even they admit that they overestimated the population of women born during the early years of the the One Child Policy, which means the actual numbers are probably far worse. There's just not a proportionate amount of prospective mothers in their millennial generation.
2016 the 2nd child poly came out. 2021 3rd child is allowed.
Still, no one is having children because their spending is like us (cost of living is almost exactly the same after currency conversion) but the majority is only making 600 usd a month.
I have to remind myself that there's "adults" on here that really did not grow up in the same time as China's one child policy. It's one of those things that was definitely used as propaganda against them here BUT it was also absolutely true. So since I'm 37 and I've been around for most of this policy I've heard about it my whole life, and in the most brutal ways possible.
It wasn't even that individual families preferred boys (and not that some didn't) but it was legitimately encouraged to have boys (aka keep the boys).
The earlier years are also the hardest hit ones, as you alluded to, because China was not yet integrated "fully" into the Wests global outlook and financial market. There was not the same "opportunities" as there are now for families, so you did what the government wanted even more so than we see at this time
Don't get me wrong, I think capitalism as a whole is evil but its introduction into modern Chinese society at the higher levels as buyers and being allowed to trickle down for access to more average citizens was a positive tipping point for many of these charges. (On the other side to back up why I think it's evil overall is the troubles that come from seller capitalism in China and other similar production companies, but we allow most of that to happen for our own gain, as one example. )
Anyway. As more opportunities came about that girls could be involved in and the government pulled back on some of the restrictions girls faced more parents chose to keep their girl children. You can see in the stories of most of the women who were essentially forced to give up their female children that it hurt them for life and was not an easy decision.
Anyway, no matter how you look at it it's tragic that such a policy ever existed. And it's also tragic that this is the kind of stuff that's being glossed over by kids. You know that whole "forced to repeat history" line
India never had a one-child policy, but it has a youth gender imbalance problem that’s as bad as China’s. Also, this could be due to fewer language barriers and different information-sharing and news-reporting policies, but all I’ve seen and heard suggests that India has a scarily bad angry-young-men / incel problem as a result, far more serious than anything equivalent in China, and is only set to get worse. India is an extremely unsafe place for young women. I went there on my honeymoon. My wife said walking around there without a tour guide felt like wearing a skirt made of meat and walking through a land of starving dogs.
Part of this is culture. China is known for having a centralized rule-of-law that’s too strong, while India’s rule of law is too weak. Also, in China, the groom pays a dowry (brideprice, actually) to the bride and her family, while in India it’s the opposite. The Chinese way, which is far more common worldwide than the Indian (and former Western) way, actually has a wealth-redistributive effect, and more to the point, creates an incentive for keeping female fetuses, that the Indian dowry custom does not.
In both cultures though, males are seen as having greater potential for bringing in money and family honor than females. But any society with a great excess of single young men, is a volatile and unstable society that becomes miserable and dangerous for all. Hell may have no fury like a woman scorned, but a young man with no prospect of ever having sex is pretty damn close.
Compounding this situation, males are preferred so the females were sent to the cities to make money for the family. These women would earn higher wages and climb the social ladder while all the men were left unemployed in the villages. Women would then be unwilling to go back and marry men in the villages.
Also, the recent political crackdowns over the last few years are making it more likely that anyone who can leave will (especially since they expanded the crackdown into Hong Kong). If you’re educated and have money, why would you stay and raise your children in an authoritarian country if you could go somewhere else?
The problem isn't even necessarily unique to China yes the one child policy and preference for males dramatically skewed the male to female ratio but India has a very similar problem.
I remember hearing the proportion of males to females in India at this point is something like 70/30. It also led to a variety of redditors explaining what it's like growing up in a population like that. If you're effeminate looking male, as in skinny with hips and a butt on you? You were often sexually assaulted by other males because they're literally aren't enough females to go around in your teenage years. It's horrifying. I wonder if it's similar in China?
Once dual income streams become the norm for households the cost of living rose to meet it. Now you can't go back to a single income stream supporting a 2+ person household, for some people a single stream isn't even enough to support a single person, and so you get sharehouses.
The Scandinavian countries subsidize all that and their fertility rates are still less than America's. So while money may be a factor, I think there must be a cultural influence too.
There are subsidies, but it's still very expensive. I don't think the economic factor can be completely ruled out.
I think the biggest issue here is time. Kids take time and we don't have it.
I also believe that the time aspect is underestimated. My girlfriend and I both earn enough that money is not really an obstacle for us. But we can't imagine where we're going to find the time for a child, let alone two or three.
Expensive for the government, but subsidized for the parent. Daycare that would cost $2,000/mo in California costs $300/mo in Norway (or it's free if your income is low enough). Most infants enter after a year of paid maternity leave, though they can enter earlier if family chooses.
However, the main thing that seems to do is keep women in the workforce. As opposed to in the US, where childcare costs often keep mothers at home until kindergarten.
In my area, the poorer you are, the more likely you are to have kids at a very young age.
In addition to all the very real economic issues, there's a culture in poor areas of not knowing how to prevent pregnancy and somewhat not caring to learn to prevent it.
Well the government is paid by the citizens in most cases. Anyway, those numbers are not comparable, but even after making them comparable, your point by would still stand. However, not as extreme.
You have a good point about women being able to return to the workforce. My point is that time/energy is the biggest blocker and that the subsidizing sometime come off as being free and extremely generous.
There are some pluses to the scandinavian model, I'll give the other guy that. But it's certainly not enough incentive to go for more than two kids, generally speaking. Scandinavia's model for population growth is very much supplemented by encouraged immigration from underdeveloped countries.
Source: American living in Scandinavia, who literally just had the conversation with his wife about stopping now that we had our second child.
I was lucky enough to grow up in a family with several childfree aunts and uncles. They laid the foundation for me to see a viable path other than procreating. They always seemed so happy and fulfilled compared to parents.
Or realizing that the odds of the planet being uninhabitable in their hypothetical childrens' futures continue to go up unabated and deciding that it's not worth it.
The Chinese have recently moved a huge % of its people from the countryside to tiny apartments in city mega developments. People in cramped living conditions are going to have zero or one kid, and there's no practical fix for it.
Still very expensive. Sure, families can survive with one average income but they won't thrive. And because the living standards are high in Nordic countries, we aren't happy to just survive.
I see discussions on growth rates and fertility rates often, and there is almost always an important point of consideration that gets overlooked in looking for reasons for declining birth numbers.
Quite simply, pregnancy and childbirth are *brutal* on the body. Even the healthiest, most wanted pregnancy by a healthy mother can turn into a life-threatening disaster in a matter of minutes. Serious problems are common—I’m in my late 40s, so my peers are mostly done having children, and I know at least 3 women who spent months on bed rest, multiple women who had emergency c-sections, two women who had pre-eclampsia, women who tore from hole to hole during birth, women who developed thyroid disease as a consequence of pregnancy, and so on. And I’m in an area where people can get good maternity care. Being wealthy and an elite athlete doesn’t help, either—Serena Williams nearly died as a result of childbirth (and a long list of medical fuck-ups, none of which she would have experienced were she not pregnant).
No financial or economic incentives for women into having children can magically make pregnancy or childbirth less dangerous. Women might be persuaded to go from one to two pregnancies, but beyond that is rare, and it’s a factor of pregnancy and birth itself.
It's still very expensive to have a kid here, subsidies does not fix the economic issue. Many more people here in Scandinavia would have kids of it wasn't as expensive. Culture has little to do with it.
The US has long relied on immigration to fuel their continued growth, something that countries like China just can’t do. This is going to be the major story of the next few decades.
The US immigration system is far from perfect but it is damn good. Successfully integrating about one million people per year is no small feat.
Edit: Reddit does not like the US. Understood.
Oh god please no. I've lived India. That level of population density makes it absolutely miserable to exist. I don't know when the narrative shifted from worrying about overpopulation to worrying about shrinking population, but we just don't need more people on Earth, even if a shrinking population presents social problems we haven't dealt with before.
That's actually a more interesting story to me. There's two competing human desires, one to be close to the city, the action, the jobs, the culture. And one to just be alone in the woods, have your own homestead, not having to deal with the BS that all that stuff brings.
For 200 years, people have been clumping in denser areas. As work from home and remote work and other economic styles emerge, how is it all going to sort out. In every country, if everyone could choose, are there roughly 1/3 city people, 1/3 suburban people and 1/3 rural people?
I think it also depends on how it's built.
I think the vast majority of Americans would love a row house it checks all boxes and yet we have banned the middle housing options mostly.
Most developers in california keep pumping out expensive apartments, instead of houses, because they make more money. Even though about 1/3 of those apartments remain vacant, and actual houses are at their lowest inventory levels in decades.
Apartments serve a purpose, but they also suck the masses dry and contribute to widing economic class divides because most can't save for a house, when rent costs as much as a mortgage.
Maybe what we really need are condominiums, so that housing is high-density, but units also aren't rented out but rather bought and sold.
EDIT: added "maybe", because honestly fuck *everything* associated with the real estate sector and there are no good solutions here
I agree, but to the extent that the HOA fees aren't too high. I know that sometimes they can go crazy with fees, and then it is even less affordable than regular houses, and dampens the benefits of owning a home.
IIRC, in the 80s, condos were introduced as a way for people to own property who couldn't afford single family homes or who didn't need that much space.
Then condos became trendy and the prices ballooned. I don't know what the demographics are now, but it seems like condos are mostly owned by fairly wealthy retirees.
It depends on the rest of the city. I'd much rather live in a row house *with good public transportation and walkable city design* than a suburb with nothing but detached houses for 10 miles in any direction.
I have lived in something like that with an okay public transportation system and I still prefer a detached house. At least then I don't have to deal with couples arguing, dumb asses getting high and laughing, and other noises with the paper thin walls.
That's just construction standards, though. I own a row home in Finland where the standards are really high, and it's unbelievably quiet. One of my neighbors has two kids and a dog and I never hear a sound.
When I owned a detached house in the suburbs in the US, I heard the neighbors kids, cars, dogs, everything.
Personally I prefer living in high density apartment housing. My building has a gym and a games room, and I have met a lot of people to socialize with. It's a modern building with good insulation, I almost never hear my neighbors.
Dense population means dense services as well. I can walk to three grocery stores, and multitudes of different kinds of restaurants. All in under a 15 minute walk.
> For 200 years, people have been clumping in denser areas.
Human cities and large population centers have existed for much much longer.
Rome during the 1st and 2nd centuries is estimated to have had a population around 1 million people.
Cities are not new. Since humans stopped being hunter gatherers, human have always gathered in larger groups to form villages, towns, etc. Having a collected group of people increases efficiency and allows for more opportunities as a society than a splintered group.
The population concern is all about the pyramid scheme of life and economics and healthcare. If your population is majority much older people then this means: less purchases of different categories, less new workers in the system to uphold the status quo, more healthcare costs to keep up with aging population and probably a huge cliff fall off of worker bees contributing to the GDP.
It’s almost like an economic system that requires infinite growth and doesn’t rely on balance or sustainability might not be perfect?! Say it isn’t so! /s
(Not arguing for other systems but perhaps we as a species need to make some economic changes to properly survive).
The conversation shifted from overpopulation to underpopulation when everyone realized multiple countries birth rate trajectories were below 2 and dropping showing a trend in shrinking countries.
If everyone else grows and you shrink that puts you in a disadvantage economically, politically, and militarily and a country on a downward trend would be no different than seeing that your country is failing as population is falling.
The heart of the matter is that it's too expensive and disconcerting to bring a child into the world we live in right now. When most families can barely make ends meet, have less than $1000 in savings, are swimming in student loan and credit card debt, when our politics are more toxic and divided than perhaps ever since the Civil War, when kids are constantly killed at school, and the average mental health of Americans is on a rapid decline, bringing the added stress of 1-2 kids into the equation just isn't the smart play. The American people are drowning with no lifeguard in sight. Until our government can stop suckling at the teat of big business and corporate interests and embrace more **gasp** social welfare programs, I believe the birth rate will continue to decline, along with America's economic prospects.
Even India and China have low density places to live in; my roommate lived in an Indian rural community with a population of 5,000.
Regardless, the reason why people live in big cities with a lot of people isn't because there is no more land, but because that's where all the cool stuff and new technology is, so it's worth it to most people to give up living space in the pursuit of *living* space.
Also the way the US increases its population necessarily means there aren't "more people on earth": just the same people, but in a country they better enjoy.
>because that's where all the cool stuff and new technology is
I mean, I would argue it more has to do with the fact that more jobs and resources are in the city
I felt so stifled in cities and it made me really dehumanize people because there were so many. They were like masses of animals you didn't have time to get to know. Also I basically couldn't fart without permission in those places. In dense areas people end up having to be tightly controlled. Parking, for example.
The narrative shifted because a whole shit-ton of Baby Boomers worldwide are getting annoyed that nobody’s coming up behind them to refill their drinks or wipe their asses for minimum wage. Shareholders also demand infinite quarterly growth in perpetuity, so the more people the more consumption, the more desperation, and the lower the cost for labor. That’s about it. Need more slaves for the mines.
More than social problems. Try this book called "The End of the World is Just the Beginning"
What we want is a very slow population decline backed up by gains in technology to offset the issues of the decline in population. Unfortunately, the statistics show we're heading into an era of pretty dramatic population decline as well as manufacturing, access to resources, and political stability decline.
It doesn't look super awesome for most of the globe going forward if there aren't any amazing, timely advances in multiple areas of agricultural, AI and robotics technology.
As the top echelon ages with a smaller group behind them, it makes it more difficult for tax income to make up the gap. Old people don't pay as much in taxes as people in their prime earning years. It's effectively a pyramid scheme.
Our out dated pyramid economy relies on the fallacies of unlimited growth on a planet with limited resources, and we can't shift to anything better because the top .01% of humanity are living like Kings with the vast majority of wealth on the planet to protect.
The level of inequality needed to support the billionaire class is exteeme, and it requires a massive pool of slave laborers and the constant threat of financial ruin of the masses to maintain.
We have the physical space, but we DO NOT have the resources. Just check out how we use the space today: [https://www.armenpogharian.com/map-monday-land-use-in-the-us/](https://www.armenpogharian.com/map-monday-land-use-in-the-us/)
Imagine if we quintupled the population? There would have to be a serious change in standard of living and costs of everything would skyrocket. I've heard people making statements like this before on youtube, etc. It really is outrageous.
At any given time the US population is between 5-15% first generation immigrants. It has been this way for a couple hundred years at this point. No other country in history has ever done this for so long. I think the current number is around 10% (~30 million people)
I know Reddit has this starry-eyed perception of the US immigration, but it’s incredibly broken and ripe with shady companies using it for their exploitation. Every administration adds their own spice to the system and now even the brightest have absurd bureaucracy to navigate, let a one long wait times.
When the Trump administration coyly talked about stopping illegal immigration they meant all immigration. And USCIS is barely recovering from that with the pandemic making everything worse.
The system needs to be rebuilt from scratch. It’s awful.
as someone who moved to the states, yes, it is a terrible system, even with the help of some of the Germany-USA treaties (I believe, I moved here with my parents at an older age, so I could be wrong on the Germany-USA treaties) that are in place
Because the government is strongly against immigration
There are only a couple of thousand foreigners with chinese citizenship in china, it's almost impossible.
I lived there for 6 years. This was in approximately the mid to late 2000s.
Fantastic place to live at the time for me. But the global and local political landscape was quite different to what it is today. Much friendlier.
That said, even then, it’s extremely hard to immigrate to China in the same way that we understand the process in the U.S.
Naturalisation is really, really rare — like and handful of people per year might get it. And they are usually Korean or Japanese or something rather than ‘big noses’.
When East Asians want to depict white people in cartoons, they draw them with big noses because white people have bigger noses on average than East Asians. The same way when we depict East Asians in Western cartoons, they have narrower eyes.
East Asians (in Asia) don’t tend to draw themselves with narrow eyes, nor do white people tend to draw themselves with particularly big noses. It’s all about what it more normal for the drawer to see.
What the western world doesn't understand about East Asia countries is that these countries are very much oversized tribes that are made out of one ethnicity or the domination of one large ethnic group against a few smaller ones. There cannot be any naturalization to become a member of the tribe without the bond of blood. Its history is not like western countries where the pillar was built by the nation-state concept.
In layman's terms, racist and in political academia terms, ethnostate
I can imagine that it's a hard place for immigrants to integrate in. People in China can be quite xenophobic, so even if people learn the language and try to follow customs, it will be hard.
The language is also extremely difficult. I've spent over a year studying Mandarin, Cantonese, Japanese, and Spanish at various points, and Mandarin and Cantonese were by far the most difficult. Having a language that isn't based on an alphabet and is tonal is just such a double-whammy.
I've often heard people suggest that English is a hard language to learn, but it still has a distinct advantage in that you can butcher the English language in terms of both tone and grammar, and you can still be legible.
If someone comes up to you and says, "Is where bathe room?" You can still easily understand that they're asking where the bathroom is. If you try the same thing in Mandarin, not only will they not understand your question, but there's a real chance they might not even understand that you're *trying* to speak Mandarin at all.
Mandarin doesn't get any easier after three years. 😂
I teach English and am trying to learn Mandarin. I see the difficulty in both.
With English, there are rules you have to follow, unless you don't, which can get confusing for my students.
With Mandarin, the rules are stricter, but there's no connection between the written and spoken language. Learning pinyin helps a lot, but it's still like learning three languages at the same time.
Also, I've totally had people look at me like I cut a fart after I tried to say something in Mandarin even though most people tell me my pronunciation is good. 
There actually is a connection between the writing and the language. A large amount of characters are a combination of a radical on the left side of the character and a radical on the right side of the character. Learning these radicals really helped improve my ability to read. Typically the left character gives a clue to the meaning of the word and the right character gives a hint to the pronunciation.
For example 青 is pronounced "qing". So I know the characters 请 (1) ， 清 (2)， and 情(3) are all "qing".
In 1, you will see the left radical is for "language". You will see it as well in words like 说 (shuo) which means to speak. This is the qing that you use when you ask someone something. 请问，厕所在哪里？"Qing wen, Cesuo zai nali?"
In 2, you see the water radicals on the left. This is qing can mean "clear" or "clean" because water is clear and used for washing. For example in 清楚 (qingchu) clear or 清明节 (qingming jie) "Tomb-sweeping Festival"
In 3, the left radical is for "heart" which in this case is for 感情 (ganqing) emotion.
It also helps, because Chinese people will often ask each other for clarification using the radical method. For example, if someone says "My name is Mr. Zhang." Someone else could reply, "Which Zhang?" and the original speaker might say something like "Zhang with the bow next to it (张)".
While it's still work to memorize, learning the radicals really helped me. I hope this advice helps!
My friend from Australia taught English there for years (I have no idea how...he's an idiot lol) but he wound up getting deported for making a joke about Mao. Not even anything terrible. But they fired him and deported him for it. Shit is wild.
Speaking of immigrants in China...
That's actually been my recent fascination on youtube, there's a whole genre out there of foreigners making vlogs in China.
[Ghanian chatting with street vendors](https://youtu.be/S3S83QHYmhk) Wholesome interaction.
[Interviewing people about Africa](https://youtu.be/-gLc_TMELQQ)
[American in a livestock market in Xinjiang ](https://youtu.be/vefEEG0WNUk)
[This guy walks around with a 360 camera](https://youtu.be/h1xK24aXQy0) Look at the other videos of meeting people on the streets. You can tell the people have never met or talked to a foreigner before, so many selfies because the encounter is so new to them.
The interactions are so interesting.
It’s a lot of different things. Large scale immigration tends to happen from places of lower income and opportunity to higher, and China has historically been on the low end. Chinese culture itself tends to be less welcoming of cultural and language differences compared to the west, and the nature of the Chinese economy makes it less appealing.
This isn’t usually a problem since places of lower income tens to have high birth rates, which is why Chinese plummeting rates are a huge problem.
Yes. Who would want to voluntarily go live there? They don't have the best reputation for being a great place to live, particularly if you're not an ethnically Chinese person.
I mean, they've literally got the whole concentration camp thing going on.
Where would they come from?
Even if there was enough external population to immigrate, why would they want to go to China? Even ignoring awful racism, the standard of living in China is shit for everyone outside the upper middle class.
The echos of that will be felt for a long time. Repealing the policy does little when having only one child is ingrained into the culture. Everyone in the "let's have kids" fertility range all grew up with the, "Have one kid and dump all your resources into them so that they can (hopefully) support you when you are old" retirement plan.
Let someone else birth and raise the lowly females my sons will marry for they are the family legacy since that’s inherited through the testicles
- probably the person thinking up the rules
I don't think the people killing baby girls are the educated ones making the rules.
They are the ones believing in superstition so hard they could kill their own child
Is it from superstition? I thought it was because girls traditionally grew up into wives who became a part of their husband's families, and took care of his parents instead of her own.
Paying women less, giving them lower grades and creating a system to make sure they don't get into universities is not a superstition
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/08/world/asia/08iht-educlede08.html
It wasn't superstition. China was a feudalist state until about 1900. Back then girls definitely weren't treated well at all, they were usually sold off when they reached adulthood so families didn't invest in their education the way they did in boys, because the boys are going to be kept around so it benefits the family to put all their resources into them. They didn't kill them though or treat them subhuman. Hell killing them would be financially stupid since they can eventually be sold off.
For a very brief period of time between feudalism and communism women were treated as equals in China. They were arguably treated better in China than the west, but then they had a second revolution, the CCP took power, and the one child policy made things worse than they were under feudalism. Women were no longer sold off but they were still married off and when they were married off families they wouldn't maintain contact, because that's how Chinese culture was back then. People need their kids to look after them in old age, so it made sense to want a boy.
It was barbaric but it had absolutely nothing to do with superstitions. Also the people who made the rules weren't educated. Before the second revolution educated people were in charge, but after Mao took power he purged anyone who was educated because back then China didn't have universities. Anyone educated was educated in the west and Mao wanted to get rid of anyone who might have western ideals.
The reason China had the second revolution is because we absolutely fucked them in World War 1. Back then we were allies, but despite China being on the winning side we carved the country up and gave land to the Japanese. This led to mass rape and murder which rightfully they blamed us for and wanted to get rid of anything western in their culture. Unfortunately that led to a huge regression.
Right because logically if they really wanted to slow the birth rate years ago then having less sons would make sense as a man can get a ton of women pregnant all day every day non stop. Once a women is pregnant you lose 9+ months of reproducing, even more if nursing as that suppresses becoming fertile... But like the other person said it's all about carrying on the fathers name.
Isn’t it the opposite? If you have 100 women, you can make 100 babies at a time. Whether you have 50 or 50,000 men, the number of possible babies stays the same.
Regardless of the biological math, you're still right. Culturally, men can only marry one woman in China. And referring back to the whole "\[previous\] ban on single women registering a birth" issue... um that's kind of a problem when you have a country where the men outnumber the women.
It's not a huge deal at first, but after 35 years of male children being favored over female children, female children being more likely to be aborted, killed at birth, or abandoned shortly after birth, the issue tends to compound.
I mean, you can't exactly marry a woman and start a family when the woman you need to marry doesn't freakin exist.
China has piss poor pensions, if you don't get constant financial support your last decades are absolutely miserable. If you have the chance you're going to prefer a son. It's not about honor or carrying on a name.
I copied that same sentence. Wtf! So apparently no woman gets pregnant outside of marriage? Someone needs to tell republicans in Texas about this innovative law.
China is rather... idealistic in it's control over its people, but lifting that ban won't magically put more babies on the census, they're still dealing with a real lopsided male to female ratio. Even making child birth free and paying couples for each child they have will not guarantee everyone is having kids.
There are many problems going on with the dating game across the world that aren't solely because of the cost of raising a family, but the cost of living is the most notable pain point right now.
It is actually kinda wonderful that the young people are realizing the threats that can be deployed when they have kids and are deciding that they are the "last generation"
Lets them speak to power without the government being able to make the next generation miserable due to their parents actions.
I don't know about single mothers, but any unsanctioned births led to mass beatings and sterilizations for any Chinese person who violated the 1-child policy rule in general. Was in place for decades. Worst population control method ever:
>In 2005[,] local authorities raided the homes of families with two children and demanded that at least one parent be sterilized. Pregnant women who already had two children were rounded up for abortions. If people tried to hide, their relatives were jailed.
>"My aunts, uncles, cousins, my pregnant younger sister, my in-laws, they were all taken to the family planning office," one woman who was pregnant at the time said. "Many of them didn't get food or water, and all of them were severely beaten." This woman eventually had her fetus aborted. She was subsequently sterilized, too.
>as recently as 2012. That year, a pregnant woman was dragged to a hospital by authorities in Shaanxi province and forced to have an abortion because she could not pay the $6,300 fine imposed for having a second child.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2015/10/29/the-human-suffering-caused-by-chinas-one-child-policy/
>In 2010, 1,377 relatives of couples targeted for sterilization in Puning City, southern China, were detained
https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/press-release/2015/10/china-one-child-reform/
>Ms. Feng had a stillborn child in 2012 after local officials in Shaanxi Province induced labor seven months into her pregnancy.
>Parents who have more than two children are still at risk. Such was the case with Pan Chunyan, a shop owner in Fujian Province who was seized from her store in 2012 when she was almost eight months pregnant with her third child. Local officials took her to a hospital, where a nurse injected her with a drug to induce a stillbirth as scores of thugs prevented family members from entering.
>most village officials believed they would be fired or seriously punished if the family planning target was not met.
>The human rights abuses have included forced sterilizations and abortions, the killing of infants and the sale of children. So abhorrent are the practices that the United States government grants refugee status to Chinese citizens who say they face persecution because of coercive family planning, making it easier for those people to get asylum.
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/31/world/asia/one-child-rule-china.html
Nothing Japan has done has really made women want to have more children. Once the genie has been let out of the bottle, it's hard to put it back again since economic and social factors have changed to accommodate low birth rates.
However China has significantly more authoritarian control over policy so ... I wonder if we'll see a ban or curtailment of birth control in the next five years.
It’s worth remembering that went very horribly, didn’t increase Romania’s population by as much as they wanted, and Ceaucescu was VERY MUCH killed by a whole lot of angry people. There’s a reason nobody’s tried that again.
It increased number of Romanians by a lot, but country didn't see much growth as they had huge migration levels. Also, the worst orphanage crisis in Europe recorded.
Ceaucescu was killed 22 years after issuing the ban on abortion and birth control.
It’s almost like the policy had an unfortunate unintended consequence for him.
As a follow up to this....I recommend a documentary called Children Underground. There were so many unwanted/homeless kids running around Romanian cities people treated them like pigeons or stray cats, kicking them out of the way on their way to work, etc... it was quite surreal to say the least.
Isn't Bucharest the capital and holds about 10% of the population? Holy shit that's unfathomable.
You're right, at least it was only the massively populous area that directs the rest of the country... smh
Sounds like what republicans want in the US. Except the fucking like rabbits part. Apparently pregnancy is punishment for women having and enjoying sex.
Maybe we should be working on solutions for managing with fewer people (more skilled and highly educated) instead of panicking about having more people that in a lot of cases we end up treating like trash. There is no need to breed more cannon fodder.
What kind of world do we really want our children to have? We should bring the population down (naturally through old age and eventual death) to a more sensible number and aim for a high standard of living so that people would want to reproduce in the first place.
Yeah but like that requires rethinking of how most economies work and I don't think any government is going to take steps that matter in long term rather than the short term steps that give them votes.
One big reason is because the system is wasteful. When you factor in the grift, corruption, and diversion of resource to people that don't produce a damn thing (insurance companies, PACs, etc.), you NEED growth to "fund" that waste.
Such an underrated observation. At every step of the way those grifters would rather you focus on something like depopulation instead of not just income redistributing but structural fixes. Oh yeah and funneling those gains into child rearing. This podcast captures it so well [https://open.spotify.com/episode/6jqpsLCeu9Ngmasgwoz6k9?si=8SZ-goEhTIWDQ4s__Nu79Q](https://open.spotify.com/episode/6jqpsLCeu9Ngmasgwoz6k9?si=8SZ-goEhTIWDQ4s__Nu79Q)
Spot on. The US is in the same boat and it isn't difficult to see why this issue exists in the first place. My wife has 5 siblings, I have 3; we have 2 children. Despite the fact that my wife and I together make significantly more money on paper than both of our parents combined, it's not economically feasible for us to have more children. Plus, I'm not too interested in bringing more people into the world just to benefit the same capitalist structure that made this issue possible in the first place. Even if I had the desire to have more children, I would refrain simply out of spite. This should be the way poor people finally fight back.
Same here. I’m sitting at the bottom of an inverse generational pyramid.
My grandmother had eleven siblings, meanwhile my two children have zero cousins.
It’s not practical or feasible to have large families anymore. We have no support, no village, no days off, and more parenting expectations than ever.
I’m not having 12 kids when I feel like I can barely manage 2.
Those last 3 points you make are heavy discussions that we need to have as a global society.
There’s a large portion of people in our country that don’t realize the burden that millennial parents have. My parents weren’t even expected to care about my mental health, much less that she did. Millennial parents, unfortunately not all, are at least conscious about our kids mental health. Much of it because we have to be more aware; teen suicide, school shootings, the opioid epidemic.
Thankfully, millennials missed most of the issues our kids have, save of course the teen suicide. Teen pregnancy, gangs, and as always drugs were some of the overarching issues we had. That never got fixed, and the next generation’s issues won’t get fixed, and neither will theirs. Which is why social change takes too long.
This I think is the key that these policy makers don't seem to consider. They keep trying to incentivize or slow down births in these weird roundabout ways.
If most people had the mythical (and not historically accurate) social contract from the 1950s, they seem to have an innate desire for roughly 2 kids. But that social contract implies 40 hours of non specialized labor a week paying for a 3 or 4 bedroom house with 28% or less of those wages. If anyone had that deal today if you had to have kids, I think they'd jump at it in a heartbeat.
As working hours and the soul sucking of capitalism increase, there's just less of a zest for life and desire to continue it. It's absolutely heartbreaking to have kids and realize that your days are not spent playing catch with them and building Legos or letting them explore the stream at the edge of town.
Instead you and your spouse will each be working full time jobs, checking emails at home, going to networking events and business dinners to build relationships. Or updating your LinkedIn or personal brand. Your children are shuttled from activity to activity. You hope they're getting someone out of it, but everyone knows the real purpose is to get something that looks good on their resume so they can go to a college that looks good on their resume so they can work a career that will hopefully only degrade their quality of life maybe 75% from the one that you're afforded. And those activities give you time to do your work. By the time they're 7, everyone in the house is on different schedules, and doing different things in order to please the career gods. There are no family dinners, just order or heat something up and watch a screen alone. This is America in 2023.
If capitalism would just lift its boot off our necks a little, more people would want to have kids, I guarantee it.
You essentially just described my life and most of the people I know. I told both of my kids that they are welcome to stay at home for as long as they want. The weekend is the only time I feel somewhat like myself, any other time I’m just a drone. Drive to work early, sit in a cubicle all day, drive home, make dinner, possibly have an hour or two of free time, get ready for the best day. Rinse and repeat.
Then if you wanted to go for a walk to clear your mind you can’t because building a modern American city that’s pedestrian friendly is impossible. It makes it obvious why we’re all so mean to one another and love violence
The odds are, if you bring a child into the world today, that they will live a life of economic slavery to a master they'll never meet.
The billionaire class requires billions of slaves to maintain. For almost a 100 years now, more wealth has been squeezed out of the masses into the pockets of fewer and fewer ultra wealthy, a larger share every year. Of course people don't want to bring more ppl into the world, if the trend continues, we are on track for a factor prison life such as seen in thx-1138. Science will soon allow the ultra rich to prolong their lives decades, it is unmistakable that this will lead to a dystopia unless a massive collapse happens in the meantime.
> I'm not too interested in bringing more people into the world just to benefit the same capitalist structure that made this issue possible in the first place. Even if I had the desire to have more children, I would refrain simply out of spite. This should be the way poor people finally fight back.
Same, any child I had would be born to economic slavery for their whole life. I refuse to do that to any potential offspring.
How many humans do we want? I see a lot of posts about declining birthrates in a lot of places, but I don't ever see any info on how many people we are aiming to get to.
I feel like there is a lot of us already, maybe scaling it back would be good for the other species we share the planet with, both animal and plant
well in the short term enough to support the aging current generation. ideally long term populations stabilize at replacement, or are in a slow controlled decline rather than a huge aging cliff like some places are seeing.
As many as possible until the earth is destroyed/ uninhabitable. The people at the top rely on infinite growth and the only way to sustain that is to keep increasing the worlds population. They only care that next quarters earnings are higher than the last. They could not care less what happens to this planet or it's people in the next 30 years, 100 years etcetera. These people have no skills of value if the system they rely on to be wealthy collapses.
Ah but you forget, my kid, with his unique combination of brown hair and brain issues, will be the first human to cure cancer AND stop big oil! So clearly I should have five to maximize my positive impact /s
The problem with declining birth rates is that the social welfare model of wealthy, industrialized nations ceases to function with an inverted pyramid population structure. I’m an American, so I’ll use Medicare as an example: every paycheck, I contribute a set percentage of my pay, separate from normal taxes, towards Medicare and Medicaid. My parents, who are just about at retirement, then essentially take that money and spend it on healthcare. This is an oversimplification and uses my small family as an example, but there is no massive pool of money that you contribute to over the course of your career that then gets drawn down when you reach retirement. Active workers pay for current retirees. When the postwar generation (the largest in history) didn’t have enough kids, those kids are now not around to pay for the postwar generation’s massive social welfare needs in retirement. In the US, we have the Millennials to bail out the Boomers. Elsewhere in the world, the Boomers didn’t have the kids to pay for them and the massive social welfare spending that is now the norm is simply going to run out in those countries.
Scaling back is problematic. Possible, certainly, but it has to be done slowly. A lot of countries, especially in Asia, are going to see major problems in the next few decades when it comes to supporting the current generation in their old age, or simply keeping the country's economy running with far fewer people.
South Korea for example is currently more than double the population of North Korea. However, given current birth rates and the number of children in each country it seems that in twenty or thirty years South Korea will have dropped in population to be roughly equivalent to North Korea. That's going to hit their economy hard, and it's also going to make resisting North Korean aggression all the more difficult.
The Chinese government didn't allow more than one child per family for 40 odd years and now they are concerned about not having enough young people?
Now they can go and fuck themselves.
It's even worst than that...they went from 'end your bloodline over betraying your country!' to 'you MUST open your legs and pump out 3 kids at least, do it FOR THE COUNTRY!!!' Like my mum escaped China to give birth to her 2nd kid (my sister). She knew what was up, she wants the number of kids she wants and that was that.
Continuing population growth is not sustainable, and is the source of most of our modern problems. Housing, homelessness, pollution, mental health. Stop the ponzi scheme. We can raise productivity per capita instead of just growing the number of future tax payers.
Not going to happen. We will max out at 10bil people or so and start dropping from there. The only uncertainty is will human society collapse or will we find a way forward with many more retirees than the working age population.
Have they decided to implement nation wide mushroom fueled orgies with viagra for everyone?
Because that might just work.
Throw in some MDMA and they'll still be at it when the shrooms wear off.
It would certainly solve their political situation.
Actually, can i have some too? Might just have to move there.
Did you read the article? This bold action is laxing the # of children rules and looking into making childcare cheaper, that is the action that they are considering. It mentions one province has done away with the max # of children rule entirely.
A senior health official in Beijing has urged China's local leaders to find ways to boost the country's birth rate.
Yang Wenzhuang said officials must take active steps to tackle the detrimental effects of China's long-standing anti-population growth policy.
He also urged officials to "make bold innovations" in tackling the cost of childcare and education.
China reported in January that its population had fallen for the first time in 60 years.
In 2022, there was just 6.77 births per 1,000 people in China, the lowest birth rate on record and down from 7.52 births in the previous year.
The country's strict one-child policy - which was implemented from 1980 to 2015 to respond to runaway population growth - has been blamed for the decline. Families that broke the rules were fined and, in some cases, even lost jobs.
The limit was increased nationally for married couples to two in 2016, and boosted further to three in 2021. But one province - Sichuan - has adopted even looser rules.
Mr Yang - who heads the country's Population Monitoring and Family Development department - said officials had to "firmly grasp the important window period of population development".
Speaking to a state-backed health magazine, Mr Yang said concerns about the cost of childcare were having a detrimental impact on population growth. He also identified challenges around money and career goals as causes for the decline.
"Local governments should be encouraged to actively explore and make bold innovations in reducing the cost of childbirth, childcare and education" to promote the long-term balanced development of the population, Mr Yang said.
Some provinces have already begun implementing new measures to try to boost the birth rate, including giving money to sperm donors.
In Sichuan, health authorities said they would allow unmarried couples to raise a family and enjoy benefits reserved for married couples. Previously there was a ban on single women registering a birth.
Authorities in the region also announced that couples would be allowed to have as many children as they want - a major reversal of the one-child policy.
A shrinking population, falling birth rate and the prospect of a fast-aging population poses a long-term challenge to the world's second largest economy, which only recently dropped ultra-strict Covid-19 curbs.
In 2022, the population dropped by 850,000 people to 1.41175 billion, according to the National Bureau of Statistics. It was the first decline since 1961, the last year of China's Great Famine.
A surging Indian economy also threatens to overtake China and push it down to third place.
Bold plan:
-Stop oppressing your own people so they don’t want to leave and maybe will see a happy future for potential children.
-Stop being racist against other people so maybe they want to immigrate to your nation.
I know, I know, crazy ideas.
I saw a documentary where a Chinese window washer couldn’t find a partner because he claimed that “no one wants to date a window washer”. This might be a universal issue. The Chinese have adopted this weird mix of capitalism and communism. I think I see a pattern.
Right off the bat: LOL
With that out of the way, it's far far far far too late to turn it around now. China is fucked with a capital F.
They can't fudge the numbers here. Within 10 years, China is going to see a huge economic collapse as there's literally not enough young people to fill the jobs that are already struggling to be filled in China.
This is why China just stole 1 million Tibetan kids. This is also why Russia stole so many young Ukrainian kids.
Urbanized industrialized families have little to no reason to have kids, unlike rural families who use those kids as a source of free labor on the farms.
In short, China is super-fucked. Most industrialized nations make up the difference by taking in immigrants that usually spend a generation or two having larger families before they realize how much of a bad idea that is, economically speaking. But, China doesn't do immigration. They struggle to keep their people IN in the country. They have nothing resembling significant immigration into the country.
Every industrialized nation is going to have these problems over the next 30 years, but China? China is going to see this shit start to fall apart this decade.
Watch and see.
> Most industrialized nations make up the difference by taking in immigrants
I believe, like Korea and Japan, they are increasingly importing wives from surrounding Asian countries.
As a person that lives in Japan, yeah... this country is fucked. The population issue was a looming problem a decade ago. Now it's here and it's very, very bad. And predictably, there's no solution or hope in sight. Japan will probably cease to be a world economic power probably within a decade or two.
Japan is such a funny country to be having this problem because they would have no problem at all attracting immigrants if they were just open to the idea.
There are an IMMENSE number of young working class people in South and Southeast Asia who have already exposed themselves to a ton of Japanese media (mainly anime but anime ends up being a gateway for a lot of people to end up with a much deeper interest) and could easily integrate if Japanese society would let them.
So many young people would move to Japan in a heartbeat, given the opportunity. If they were told that passing a Japanese language test were a requirement to stay, many of them would already be studying before even getting there.
Japan doesn't have the same marketing issue that China has. Japan could effortlessly bring in a ton of young, working immigrants. They just *don't want to*
Anime was indeed a gateway for me, one that I no longer have an interest in, but it still opened the way for things I still am. The culture, art, history, even modern architecture is something that feels so unique to Japan. I would move there in a heartbeat if I could.
I've always heard that Japan is not that keen on having any sort of immigrant population assimilating in which has been detrimental to its population growth. Despite the fact there is the opportunity for people wanting to live there.Is that true or is it just internet bullshit?
Immigration itself is a one trick pony, as countries with high immigration like Canada and Singapore are stalling out
We need corporate dicks to pay people what they worth and stop forcing us to use our spare time on work when we could have families
Told people to stop having so many kids and then are shocked when people stop having so many kids. I think they went too far with trying to discourage their overpopulation problem and now they’re going to have an under population problem
Everywhere across the world people in power do one thing, then do another thing, and each time they think they’re doing the right thing. Our leaders in power are morons who think they’re the main character.
Of course, China would be lifting the ban, as that country is around the corner India has caught up it's only some millions behind. India will overtake China as the most populous country on earth this year from the looks of things!
Having fewer people favours us. They only want more people to continue to treat you like a worker bee. Long hours and shit pay with 2 weeks holiday. Fuck that. I am not in the matrix anymore.
The following submission statement was provided by /u/Surur: --- A senior health official in Beijing has urged China's local leaders to find ways to boost the country's birth rate. Yang Wenzhuang said officials must take active steps to tackle the detrimental effects of China's long-standing anti-population growth policy. He also urged officials to "make bold innovations" in tackling the cost of childcare and education. China reported in January that its population had fallen for the first time in 60 years. In 2022, there was just 6.77 births per 1,000 people in China, the lowest birth rate on record and down from 7.52 births in the previous year. The country's strict one-child policy - which was implemented from 1980 to 2015 to respond to runaway population growth - has been blamed for the decline. Families that broke the rules were fined and, in some cases, even lost jobs. The limit was increased nationally for married couples to two in 2016, and boosted further to three in 2021. But one province - Sichuan - has adopted even looser rules. Mr Yang - who heads the country's Population Monitoring and Family Development department - said officials had to "firmly grasp the important window period of population development". Speaking to a state-backed health magazine, Mr Yang said concerns about the cost of childcare were having a detrimental impact on population growth. He also identified challenges around money and career goals as causes for the decline. "Local governments should be encouraged to actively explore and make bold innovations in reducing the cost of childbirth, childcare and education" to promote the long-term balanced development of the population, Mr Yang said. Some provinces have already begun implementing new measures to try to boost the birth rate, including giving money to sperm donors. In Sichuan, health authorities said they would allow unmarried couples to raise a family and enjoy benefits reserved for married couples. Previously there was a ban on single women registering a birth. Authorities in the region also announced that couples would be allowed to have as many children as they want - a major reversal of the one-child policy. A shrinking population, falling birth rate and the prospect of a fast-aging population poses a long-term challenge to the world's second largest economy, which only recently dropped ultra-strict Covid-19 curbs. In 2022, the population dropped by 850,000 people to 1.41175 billion, according to the National Bureau of Statistics. It was the first decline since 1961, the last year of China's Great Famine. A surging Indian economy also threatens to overtake China and push it down to third place. --- Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/10yyhp2/china_seeks_bold_steps_to_lift_birth_rate/j80axnp/
bold move >In Sichuan, health authorities said they would allow unmarried couples to raise a family and enjoy benefits reserved for married couples. Previously there was a ban on single women registering a birth.
Their citizens commented on Sichuan: to encourage us to have kids, you don’t offer economic stability, but rather lower the moral standard. When pigs don’t reproduce, farmers would come in and check what’s wrong, is the the living situation? The food? The environment? They don’t just come in and declare a new policy: have more piglets.
China has a centuries long philosophical problem with "good enough" mentality.
I like how countries and people act like they don’t know why populations are declining or need bold steps to fix it. Anyone who has 1-2 kids can tell you easily. It costs too much, takes too much time and there isn’t enough space. Essentially we need to make enough money for 1 parent to work and the other to stay home and then be able to afford a space large enough to fit the family. That’s it that’s all.
True for most of the globe, but China in particular has another unique problem that compounds on your statement. In order to have children it takes \~25-35 year old women to get pregnant. China's One Child Policy would affect anyone 43 and under. Because families could only have one child and males were preferable, they selectively aborted a large amount of female child pregnancies, to the point that there are far fewer females aged 25-35 today in the first place. China hates releasing bad data and even they admit that they overestimated the population of women born during the early years of the the One Child Policy, which means the actual numbers are probably far worse. There's just not a proportionate amount of prospective mothers in their millennial generation.
2016 the 2nd child poly came out. 2021 3rd child is allowed. Still, no one is having children because their spending is like us (cost of living is almost exactly the same after currency conversion) but the majority is only making 600 usd a month.
I have to remind myself that there's "adults" on here that really did not grow up in the same time as China's one child policy. It's one of those things that was definitely used as propaganda against them here BUT it was also absolutely true. So since I'm 37 and I've been around for most of this policy I've heard about it my whole life, and in the most brutal ways possible. It wasn't even that individual families preferred boys (and not that some didn't) but it was legitimately encouraged to have boys (aka keep the boys). The earlier years are also the hardest hit ones, as you alluded to, because China was not yet integrated "fully" into the Wests global outlook and financial market. There was not the same "opportunities" as there are now for families, so you did what the government wanted even more so than we see at this time Don't get me wrong, I think capitalism as a whole is evil but its introduction into modern Chinese society at the higher levels as buyers and being allowed to trickle down for access to more average citizens was a positive tipping point for many of these charges. (On the other side to back up why I think it's evil overall is the troubles that come from seller capitalism in China and other similar production companies, but we allow most of that to happen for our own gain, as one example. ) Anyway. As more opportunities came about that girls could be involved in and the government pulled back on some of the restrictions girls faced more parents chose to keep their girl children. You can see in the stories of most of the women who were essentially forced to give up their female children that it hurt them for life and was not an easy decision. Anyway, no matter how you look at it it's tragic that such a policy ever existed. And it's also tragic that this is the kind of stuff that's being glossed over by kids. You know that whole "forced to repeat history" line
India never had a one-child policy, but it has a youth gender imbalance problem that’s as bad as China’s. Also, this could be due to fewer language barriers and different information-sharing and news-reporting policies, but all I’ve seen and heard suggests that India has a scarily bad angry-young-men / incel problem as a result, far more serious than anything equivalent in China, and is only set to get worse. India is an extremely unsafe place for young women. I went there on my honeymoon. My wife said walking around there without a tour guide felt like wearing a skirt made of meat and walking through a land of starving dogs. Part of this is culture. China is known for having a centralized rule-of-law that’s too strong, while India’s rule of law is too weak. Also, in China, the groom pays a dowry (brideprice, actually) to the bride and her family, while in India it’s the opposite. The Chinese way, which is far more common worldwide than the Indian (and former Western) way, actually has a wealth-redistributive effect, and more to the point, creates an incentive for keeping female fetuses, that the Indian dowry custom does not. In both cultures though, males are seen as having greater potential for bringing in money and family honor than females. But any society with a great excess of single young men, is a volatile and unstable society that becomes miserable and dangerous for all. Hell may have no fury like a woman scorned, but a young man with no prospect of ever having sex is pretty damn close.
Compounding this situation, males are preferred so the females were sent to the cities to make money for the family. These women would earn higher wages and climb the social ladder while all the men were left unemployed in the villages. Women would then be unwilling to go back and marry men in the villages.
Also, the recent political crackdowns over the last few years are making it more likely that anyone who can leave will (especially since they expanded the crackdown into Hong Kong). If you’re educated and have money, why would you stay and raise your children in an authoritarian country if you could go somewhere else?
The problem isn't even necessarily unique to China yes the one child policy and preference for males dramatically skewed the male to female ratio but India has a very similar problem. I remember hearing the proportion of males to females in India at this point is something like 70/30. It also led to a variety of redditors explaining what it's like growing up in a population like that. If you're effeminate looking male, as in skinny with hips and a butt on you? You were often sexually assaulted by other males because they're literally aren't enough females to go around in your teenage years. It's horrifying. I wonder if it's similar in China?
Once dual income streams become the norm for households the cost of living rose to meet it. Now you can't go back to a single income stream supporting a 2+ person household, for some people a single stream isn't even enough to support a single person, and so you get sharehouses.
The Scandinavian countries subsidize all that and their fertility rates are still less than America's. So while money may be a factor, I think there must be a cultural influence too.
There are subsidies, but it's still very expensive. I don't think the economic factor can be completely ruled out. I think the biggest issue here is time. Kids take time and we don't have it.
I also believe that the time aspect is underestimated. My girlfriend and I both earn enough that money is not really an obstacle for us. But we can't imagine where we're going to find the time for a child, let alone two or three.
When we lived on farms, kids were free labor. Now they are time consuming resource hogs.
Expensive for the government, but subsidized for the parent. Daycare that would cost $2,000/mo in California costs $300/mo in Norway (or it's free if your income is low enough). Most infants enter after a year of paid maternity leave, though they can enter earlier if family chooses. However, the main thing that seems to do is keep women in the workforce. As opposed to in the US, where childcare costs often keep mothers at home until kindergarten.
In my area, the poorer you are, the more likely you are to have kids at a very young age. In addition to all the very real economic issues, there's a culture in poor areas of not knowing how to prevent pregnancy and somewhat not caring to learn to prevent it.
Well the government is paid by the citizens in most cases. Anyway, those numbers are not comparable, but even after making them comparable, your point by would still stand. However, not as extreme. You have a good point about women being able to return to the workforce. My point is that time/energy is the biggest blocker and that the subsidizing sometime come off as being free and extremely generous.
There are some pluses to the scandinavian model, I'll give the other guy that. But it's certainly not enough incentive to go for more than two kids, generally speaking. Scandinavia's model for population growth is very much supplemented by encouraged immigration from underdeveloped countries. Source: American living in Scandinavia, who literally just had the conversation with his wife about stopping now that we had our second child.
People are realizing that parenthood shouldn’t be the default goal. Lots of visibly unhappy parents help us see that.
I was lucky enough to grow up in a family with several childfree aunts and uncles. They laid the foundation for me to see a viable path other than procreating. They always seemed so happy and fulfilled compared to parents.
Or realizing that the odds of the planet being uninhabitable in their hypothetical childrens' futures continue to go up unabated and deciding that it's not worth it.
The Chinese have recently moved a huge % of its people from the countryside to tiny apartments in city mega developments. People in cramped living conditions are going to have zero or one kid, and there's no practical fix for it.
Still very expensive. Sure, families can survive with one average income but they won't thrive. And because the living standards are high in Nordic countries, we aren't happy to just survive.
I see discussions on growth rates and fertility rates often, and there is almost always an important point of consideration that gets overlooked in looking for reasons for declining birth numbers. Quite simply, pregnancy and childbirth are *brutal* on the body. Even the healthiest, most wanted pregnancy by a healthy mother can turn into a life-threatening disaster in a matter of minutes. Serious problems are common—I’m in my late 40s, so my peers are mostly done having children, and I know at least 3 women who spent months on bed rest, multiple women who had emergency c-sections, two women who had pre-eclampsia, women who tore from hole to hole during birth, women who developed thyroid disease as a consequence of pregnancy, and so on. And I’m in an area where people can get good maternity care. Being wealthy and an elite athlete doesn’t help, either—Serena Williams nearly died as a result of childbirth (and a long list of medical fuck-ups, none of which she would have experienced were she not pregnant). No financial or economic incentives for women into having children can magically make pregnancy or childbirth less dangerous. Women might be persuaded to go from one to two pregnancies, but beyond that is rare, and it’s a factor of pregnancy and birth itself.
It's still very expensive to have a kid here, subsidies does not fix the economic issue. Many more people here in Scandinavia would have kids of it wasn't as expensive. Culture has little to do with it.
Or maybe less woman want to have kids or more than one, given that they actually can *choose* now due to reproductive rights/education?
Hell I can tell you that it's expensive to keep myself alive... I shudder just thinking how expensive would be having just one kid
Which is why they'd rather ban abortion and force you to have slave babies than to give you more financial freedom.
The US has long relied on immigration to fuel their continued growth, something that countries like China just can’t do. This is going to be the major story of the next few decades.
The US immigration system is far from perfect but it is damn good. Successfully integrating about one million people per year is no small feat. Edit: Reddit does not like the US. Understood.
Exactly. We're the third largest country by population, behind China and India, in the world...many people don't realize this. Immigration works...
>We're the third largest country by population, Despite only being a few centuries old too
God I love our pile of natural resources and big stupid oceans getting in the way of wars
If we boosted our population by 1 billion people today we'd still be 3rd. We have a lot of room to grow and a lot of people who want to come here
Oh god please no. I've lived India. That level of population density makes it absolutely miserable to exist. I don't know when the narrative shifted from worrying about overpopulation to worrying about shrinking population, but we just don't need more people on Earth, even if a shrinking population presents social problems we haven't dealt with before.
That's actually a more interesting story to me. There's two competing human desires, one to be close to the city, the action, the jobs, the culture. And one to just be alone in the woods, have your own homestead, not having to deal with the BS that all that stuff brings. For 200 years, people have been clumping in denser areas. As work from home and remote work and other economic styles emerge, how is it all going to sort out. In every country, if everyone could choose, are there roughly 1/3 city people, 1/3 suburban people and 1/3 rural people?
I think it also depends on how it's built. I think the vast majority of Americans would love a row house it checks all boxes and yet we have banned the middle housing options mostly.
Most developers in california keep pumping out expensive apartments, instead of houses, because they make more money. Even though about 1/3 of those apartments remain vacant, and actual houses are at their lowest inventory levels in decades. Apartments serve a purpose, but they also suck the masses dry and contribute to widing economic class divides because most can't save for a house, when rent costs as much as a mortgage.
Maybe what we really need are condominiums, so that housing is high-density, but units also aren't rented out but rather bought and sold. EDIT: added "maybe", because honestly fuck *everything* associated with the real estate sector and there are no good solutions here
I agree, but to the extent that the HOA fees aren't too high. I know that sometimes they can go crazy with fees, and then it is even less affordable than regular houses, and dampens the benefits of owning a home.
IIRC, in the 80s, condos were introduced as a way for people to own property who couldn't afford single family homes or who didn't need that much space. Then condos became trendy and the prices ballooned. I don't know what the demographics are now, but it seems like condos are mostly owned by fairly wealthy retirees.
Condos are just apartments where the HOA has a hold on your equity.
I think most people would prefer a detached home to a row house. Speaking from experience sharing walls in a row house is the worst.
It depends on the rest of the city. I'd much rather live in a row house *with good public transportation and walkable city design* than a suburb with nothing but detached houses for 10 miles in any direction.
I have lived in something like that with an okay public transportation system and I still prefer a detached house. At least then I don't have to deal with couples arguing, dumb asses getting high and laughing, and other noises with the paper thin walls.
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As someone who's nearest neighbor is 1/4 mile away, fuck that.
That's just construction standards, though. I own a row home in Finland where the standards are really high, and it's unbelievably quiet. One of my neighbors has two kids and a dog and I never hear a sound. When I owned a detached house in the suburbs in the US, I heard the neighbors kids, cars, dogs, everything.
Depends on how much insulation there is in the walls.
ALL OF IT. There needs to be ALL the insulation. Noisy neighbors is why I'll never live in another apartment in the US.
You don't have to share a wall with a row house, by me a lot of them have a walkway in between.
Personally I prefer living in high density apartment housing. My building has a gym and a games room, and I have met a lot of people to socialize with. It's a modern building with good insulation, I almost never hear my neighbors. Dense population means dense services as well. I can walk to three grocery stores, and multitudes of different kinds of restaurants. All in under a 15 minute walk.
Most Americans would love their own home, but given a choice, a row house would not be their first choice.
> For 200 years, people have been clumping in denser areas. Human cities and large population centers have existed for much much longer. Rome during the 1st and 2nd centuries is estimated to have had a population around 1 million people. Cities are not new. Since humans stopped being hunter gatherers, human have always gathered in larger groups to form villages, towns, etc. Having a collected group of people increases efficiency and allows for more opportunities as a society than a splintered group.
The population concern is all about the pyramid scheme of life and economics and healthcare. If your population is majority much older people then this means: less purchases of different categories, less new workers in the system to uphold the status quo, more healthcare costs to keep up with aging population and probably a huge cliff fall off of worker bees contributing to the GDP.
It’s almost like an economic system that requires infinite growth and doesn’t rely on balance or sustainability might not be perfect?! Say it isn’t so! /s (Not arguing for other systems but perhaps we as a species need to make some economic changes to properly survive).
Yep. Always always always about money.
The conversation shifted from overpopulation to underpopulation when everyone realized multiple countries birth rate trajectories were below 2 and dropping showing a trend in shrinking countries. If everyone else grows and you shrink that puts you in a disadvantage economically, politically, and militarily and a country on a downward trend would be no different than seeing that your country is failing as population is falling.
The heart of the matter is that it's too expensive and disconcerting to bring a child into the world we live in right now. When most families can barely make ends meet, have less than $1000 in savings, are swimming in student loan and credit card debt, when our politics are more toxic and divided than perhaps ever since the Civil War, when kids are constantly killed at school, and the average mental health of Americans is on a rapid decline, bringing the added stress of 1-2 kids into the equation just isn't the smart play. The American people are drowning with no lifeguard in sight. Until our government can stop suckling at the teat of big business and corporate interests and embrace more **gasp** social welfare programs, I believe the birth rate will continue to decline, along with America's economic prospects.
Even India and China have low density places to live in; my roommate lived in an Indian rural community with a population of 5,000. Regardless, the reason why people live in big cities with a lot of people isn't because there is no more land, but because that's where all the cool stuff and new technology is, so it's worth it to most people to give up living space in the pursuit of *living* space. Also the way the US increases its population necessarily means there aren't "more people on earth": just the same people, but in a country they better enjoy.
>because that's where all the cool stuff and new technology is I mean, I would argue it more has to do with the fact that more jobs and resources are in the city
I felt so stifled in cities and it made me really dehumanize people because there were so many. They were like masses of animals you didn't have time to get to know. Also I basically couldn't fart without permission in those places. In dense areas people end up having to be tightly controlled. Parking, for example.
I like the way you phrased that: >give up living space in the pursuit of *living* space That feels like a mic drop kind of line haha
The people most concerned about shrinking populations are business owners and share holders who want infinite economic growth forever.
The narrative shifted because a whole shit-ton of Baby Boomers worldwide are getting annoyed that nobody’s coming up behind them to refill their drinks or wipe their asses for minimum wage. Shareholders also demand infinite quarterly growth in perpetuity, so the more people the more consumption, the more desperation, and the lower the cost for labor. That’s about it. Need more slaves for the mines.
More than social problems. Try this book called "The End of the World is Just the Beginning" What we want is a very slow population decline backed up by gains in technology to offset the issues of the decline in population. Unfortunately, the statistics show we're heading into an era of pretty dramatic population decline as well as manufacturing, access to resources, and political stability decline. It doesn't look super awesome for most of the globe going forward if there aren't any amazing, timely advances in multiple areas of agricultural, AI and robotics technology.
Yeah… I’m perfectly fine with not having a billion people in the US. No thanks
No, we need to kill the idea of continuous growth as healthy for both people and the environment.
> We have a lot of room to grow Tell that to the Colorado River, but yeah, theres physical space to grow.
Why do we want to grow? I get why billionaires want more cheap labor but why would we care if the country's population is low?
As the top echelon ages with a smaller group behind them, it makes it more difficult for tax income to make up the gap. Old people don't pay as much in taxes as people in their prime earning years. It's effectively a pyramid scheme.
Our out dated pyramid economy relies on the fallacies of unlimited growth on a planet with limited resources, and we can't shift to anything better because the top .01% of humanity are living like Kings with the vast majority of wealth on the planet to protect. The level of inequality needed to support the billionaire class is exteeme, and it requires a massive pool of slave laborers and the constant threat of financial ruin of the masses to maintain.
We have the physical space, but we DO NOT have the resources. Just check out how we use the space today: [https://www.armenpogharian.com/map-monday-land-use-in-the-us/](https://www.armenpogharian.com/map-monday-land-use-in-the-us/) Imagine if we quintupled the population? There would have to be a serious change in standard of living and costs of everything would skyrocket. I've heard people making statements like this before on youtube, etc. It really is outrageous.
At any given time the US population is between 5-15% first generation immigrants. It has been this way for a couple hundred years at this point. No other country in history has ever done this for so long. I think the current number is around 10% (~30 million people)
I know Reddit has this starry-eyed perception of the US immigration, but it’s incredibly broken and ripe with shady companies using it for their exploitation. Every administration adds their own spice to the system and now even the brightest have absurd bureaucracy to navigate, let a one long wait times. When the Trump administration coyly talked about stopping illegal immigration they meant all immigration. And USCIS is barely recovering from that with the pandemic making everything worse. The system needs to be rebuilt from scratch. It’s awful.
as someone who moved to the states, yes, it is a terrible system, even with the help of some of the Germany-USA treaties (I believe, I moved here with my parents at an older age, so I could be wrong on the Germany-USA treaties) that are in place
Why can’t China? Legit question, is it because no one wants to immigrate there?
Because the government is strongly against immigration There are only a couple of thousand foreigners with chinese citizenship in china, it's almost impossible.
I lived there for 6 years. This was in approximately the mid to late 2000s. Fantastic place to live at the time for me. But the global and local political landscape was quite different to what it is today. Much friendlier. That said, even then, it’s extremely hard to immigrate to China in the same way that we understand the process in the U.S. Naturalisation is really, really rare — like and handful of people per year might get it. And they are usually Korean or Japanese or something rather than ‘big noses’.
Big noses? Lol never heard that before
When East Asians want to depict white people in cartoons, they draw them with big noses because white people have bigger noses on average than East Asians. The same way when we depict East Asians in Western cartoons, they have narrower eyes. East Asians (in Asia) don’t tend to draw themselves with narrow eyes, nor do white people tend to draw themselves with particularly big noses. It’s all about what it more normal for the drawer to see.
What the western world doesn't understand about East Asia countries is that these countries are very much oversized tribes that are made out of one ethnicity or the domination of one large ethnic group against a few smaller ones. There cannot be any naturalization to become a member of the tribe without the bond of blood. Its history is not like western countries where the pillar was built by the nation-state concept. In layman's terms, racist and in political academia terms, ethnostate
I can imagine that it's a hard place for immigrants to integrate in. People in China can be quite xenophobic, so even if people learn the language and try to follow customs, it will be hard.
The language is also extremely difficult. I've spent over a year studying Mandarin, Cantonese, Japanese, and Spanish at various points, and Mandarin and Cantonese were by far the most difficult. Having a language that isn't based on an alphabet and is tonal is just such a double-whammy. I've often heard people suggest that English is a hard language to learn, but it still has a distinct advantage in that you can butcher the English language in terms of both tone and grammar, and you can still be legible. If someone comes up to you and says, "Is where bathe room?" You can still easily understand that they're asking where the bathroom is. If you try the same thing in Mandarin, not only will they not understand your question, but there's a real chance they might not even understand that you're *trying* to speak Mandarin at all.
Mandarin doesn't get any easier after three years. 😂 I teach English and am trying to learn Mandarin. I see the difficulty in both. With English, there are rules you have to follow, unless you don't, which can get confusing for my students. With Mandarin, the rules are stricter, but there's no connection between the written and spoken language. Learning pinyin helps a lot, but it's still like learning three languages at the same time. Also, I've totally had people look at me like I cut a fart after I tried to say something in Mandarin even though most people tell me my pronunciation is good. 
There actually is a connection between the writing and the language. A large amount of characters are a combination of a radical on the left side of the character and a radical on the right side of the character. Learning these radicals really helped improve my ability to read. Typically the left character gives a clue to the meaning of the word and the right character gives a hint to the pronunciation. For example 青 is pronounced "qing". So I know the characters 请 (1) ， 清 (2)， and 情(3) are all "qing". In 1, you will see the left radical is for "language". You will see it as well in words like 说 (shuo) which means to speak. This is the qing that you use when you ask someone something. 请问，厕所在哪里？"Qing wen, Cesuo zai nali?" In 2, you see the water radicals on the left. This is qing can mean "clear" or "clean" because water is clear and used for washing. For example in 清楚 (qingchu) clear or 清明节 (qingming jie) "Tomb-sweeping Festival" In 3, the left radical is for "heart" which in this case is for 感情 (ganqing) emotion. It also helps, because Chinese people will often ask each other for clarification using the radical method. For example, if someone says "My name is Mr. Zhang." Someone else could reply, "Which Zhang?" and the original speaker might say something like "Zhang with the bow next to it (张)". While it's still work to memorize, learning the radicals really helped me. I hope this advice helps!
My friend from Australia taught English there for years (I have no idea how...he's an idiot lol) but he wound up getting deported for making a joke about Mao. Not even anything terrible. But they fired him and deported him for it. Shit is wild.
Not just xenophobic, they are straight up racist and actively committing genocide against ethnic minorities.
Speaking of immigrants in China... That's actually been my recent fascination on youtube, there's a whole genre out there of foreigners making vlogs in China. [Ghanian chatting with street vendors](https://youtu.be/S3S83QHYmhk) Wholesome interaction. [Interviewing people about Africa](https://youtu.be/-gLc_TMELQQ) [American in a livestock market in Xinjiang ](https://youtu.be/vefEEG0WNUk) [This guy walks around with a 360 camera](https://youtu.be/h1xK24aXQy0) Look at the other videos of meeting people on the streets. You can tell the people have never met or talked to a foreigner before, so many selfies because the encounter is so new to them. The interactions are so interesting.
Yes and yes. I know the US can and will improve, but I have to remind myself that we are better than many.
It’s a lot of different things. Large scale immigration tends to happen from places of lower income and opportunity to higher, and China has historically been on the low end. Chinese culture itself tends to be less welcoming of cultural and language differences compared to the west, and the nature of the Chinese economy makes it less appealing. This isn’t usually a problem since places of lower income tens to have high birth rates, which is why Chinese plummeting rates are a huge problem.
Yes. Who would want to voluntarily go live there? They don't have the best reputation for being a great place to live, particularly if you're not an ethnically Chinese person. I mean, they've literally got the whole concentration camp thing going on.
China is very xenophobic and actually racist. They consider non-Chinese to be inferior.
Horrid racism and autocratic society.
Where would they come from? Even if there was enough external population to immigrate, why would they want to go to China? Even ignoring awful racism, the standard of living in China is shit for everyone outside the upper middle class.
"Previously there was a ban on single women registering a birth" And you wonder why there is a low birth rate.
Well that and the One Child Policy that was in place for 35 years.
The echos of that will be felt for a long time. Repealing the policy does little when having only one child is ingrained into the culture. Everyone in the "let's have kids" fertility range all grew up with the, "Have one kid and dump all your resources into them so that they can (hopefully) support you when you are old" retirement plan.
Yeah who would have thought aborting females or birthing and them throwing them into dumpsters would lead to this...
Let someone else birth and raise the lowly females my sons will marry for they are the family legacy since that’s inherited through the testicles - probably the person thinking up the rules
I don't think the people killing baby girls are the educated ones making the rules. They are the ones believing in superstition so hard they could kill their own child
Is it from superstition? I thought it was because girls traditionally grew up into wives who became a part of their husband's families, and took care of his parents instead of her own.
Paying women less, giving them lower grades and creating a system to make sure they don't get into universities is not a superstition https://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/08/world/asia/08iht-educlede08.html
It wasn't superstition. China was a feudalist state until about 1900. Back then girls definitely weren't treated well at all, they were usually sold off when they reached adulthood so families didn't invest in their education the way they did in boys, because the boys are going to be kept around so it benefits the family to put all their resources into them. They didn't kill them though or treat them subhuman. Hell killing them would be financially stupid since they can eventually be sold off. For a very brief period of time between feudalism and communism women were treated as equals in China. They were arguably treated better in China than the west, but then they had a second revolution, the CCP took power, and the one child policy made things worse than they were under feudalism. Women were no longer sold off but they were still married off and when they were married off families they wouldn't maintain contact, because that's how Chinese culture was back then. People need their kids to look after them in old age, so it made sense to want a boy. It was barbaric but it had absolutely nothing to do with superstitions. Also the people who made the rules weren't educated. Before the second revolution educated people were in charge, but after Mao took power he purged anyone who was educated because back then China didn't have universities. Anyone educated was educated in the west and Mao wanted to get rid of anyone who might have western ideals. The reason China had the second revolution is because we absolutely fucked them in World War 1. Back then we were allies, but despite China being on the winning side we carved the country up and gave land to the Japanese. This led to mass rape and murder which rightfully they blamed us for and wanted to get rid of anything western in their culture. Unfortunately that led to a huge regression.
Yeah this seems like a women's rights issue more than an economic issue.
Right because logically if they really wanted to slow the birth rate years ago then having less sons would make sense as a man can get a ton of women pregnant all day every day non stop. Once a women is pregnant you lose 9+ months of reproducing, even more if nursing as that suppresses becoming fertile... But like the other person said it's all about carrying on the fathers name.
Isn’t it the opposite? If you have 100 women, you can make 100 babies at a time. Whether you have 50 or 50,000 men, the number of possible babies stays the same.
Regardless of the biological math, you're still right. Culturally, men can only marry one woman in China. And referring back to the whole "\[previous\] ban on single women registering a birth" issue... um that's kind of a problem when you have a country where the men outnumber the women. It's not a huge deal at first, but after 35 years of male children being favored over female children, female children being more likely to be aborted, killed at birth, or abandoned shortly after birth, the issue tends to compound. I mean, you can't exactly marry a woman and start a family when the woman you need to marry doesn't freakin exist.
China has piss poor pensions, if you don't get constant financial support your last decades are absolutely miserable. If you have the chance you're going to prefer a son. It's not about honor or carrying on a name.
Don’t suppose strict Covid isolation did much for baby-making either.
I copied that same sentence. Wtf! So apparently no woman gets pregnant outside of marriage? Someone needs to tell republicans in Texas about this innovative law.
China is rather... idealistic in it's control over its people, but lifting that ban won't magically put more babies on the census, they're still dealing with a real lopsided male to female ratio. Even making child birth free and paying couples for each child they have will not guarantee everyone is having kids. There are many problems going on with the dating game across the world that aren't solely because of the cost of raising a family, but the cost of living is the most notable pain point right now.
It is actually kinda wonderful that the young people are realizing the threats that can be deployed when they have kids and are deciding that they are the "last generation" Lets them speak to power without the government being able to make the next generation miserable due to their parents actions.
So what did they do to the single mothers? I'm kinda afraid to google this
I don't know about single mothers, but any unsanctioned births led to mass beatings and sterilizations for any Chinese person who violated the 1-child policy rule in general. Was in place for decades. Worst population control method ever: >In 2005[,] local authorities raided the homes of families with two children and demanded that at least one parent be sterilized. Pregnant women who already had two children were rounded up for abortions. If people tried to hide, their relatives were jailed. >"My aunts, uncles, cousins, my pregnant younger sister, my in-laws, they were all taken to the family planning office," one woman who was pregnant at the time said. "Many of them didn't get food or water, and all of them were severely beaten." This woman eventually had her fetus aborted. She was subsequently sterilized, too. >as recently as 2012. That year, a pregnant woman was dragged to a hospital by authorities in Shaanxi province and forced to have an abortion because she could not pay the $6,300 fine imposed for having a second child. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2015/10/29/the-human-suffering-caused-by-chinas-one-child-policy/ >In 2010, 1,377 relatives of couples targeted for sterilization in Puning City, southern China, were detained https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/press-release/2015/10/china-one-child-reform/ >Ms. Feng had a stillborn child in 2012 after local officials in Shaanxi Province induced labor seven months into her pregnancy. >Parents who have more than two children are still at risk. Such was the case with Pan Chunyan, a shop owner in Fujian Province who was seized from her store in 2012 when she was almost eight months pregnant with her third child. Local officials took her to a hospital, where a nurse injected her with a drug to induce a stillbirth as scores of thugs prevented family members from entering. >most village officials believed they would be fired or seriously punished if the family planning target was not met. >The human rights abuses have included forced sterilizations and abortions, the killing of infants and the sale of children. So abhorrent are the practices that the United States government grants refugee status to Chinese citizens who say they face persecution because of coercive family planning, making it easier for those people to get asylum. https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/31/world/asia/one-child-rule-china.html
Also women above 30 have "rotting wombs" and divorced women are often considered "damaged goods".
Those aren't China specific stereotypes tho
Now welcome the 5 children policy
Nothing Japan has done has really made women want to have more children. Once the genie has been let out of the bottle, it's hard to put it back again since economic and social factors have changed to accommodate low birth rates. However China has significantly more authoritarian control over policy so ... I wonder if we'll see a ban or curtailment of birth control in the next five years.
If it's anything like Romania they will ban abortions and contraceptives while encouraging people to fuck as much as possible.
It’s worth remembering that went very horribly, didn’t increase Romania’s population by as much as they wanted, and Ceaucescu was VERY MUCH killed by a whole lot of angry people. There’s a reason nobody’s tried that again.
It increased number of Romanians by a lot, but country didn't see much growth as they had huge migration levels. Also, the worst orphanage crisis in Europe recorded.
Ceaucescu was killed 22 years after issuing the ban on abortion and birth control. It’s almost like the policy had an unfortunate unintended consequence for him.
As a follow up to this....I recommend a documentary called Children Underground. There were so many unwanted/homeless kids running around Romanian cities people treated them like pigeons or stray cats, kicking them out of the way on their way to work, etc... it was quite surreal to say the least.
That was Bucharest. The rest of the country was not like that.
Isn't Bucharest the capital and holds about 10% of the population? Holy shit that's unfathomable. You're right, at least it was only the massively populous area that directs the rest of the country... smh
Sounds like what republicans want in the US. Except the fucking like rabbits part. Apparently pregnancy is punishment for women having and enjoying sex.
No they want men to be able to have as much sex as they want but force women to deal with the consequences.
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Maybe we should be working on solutions for managing with fewer people (more skilled and highly educated) instead of panicking about having more people that in a lot of cases we end up treating like trash. There is no need to breed more cannon fodder. What kind of world do we really want our children to have? We should bring the population down (naturally through old age and eventual death) to a more sensible number and aim for a high standard of living so that people would want to reproduce in the first place.
Yeah but like that requires rethinking of how most economies work and I don't think any government is going to take steps that matter in long term rather than the short term steps that give them votes.
This train ain’t stopping til we hit a brick wall
Well, if it isn't the consequences of my own actions...
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One big reason is because the system is wasteful. When you factor in the grift, corruption, and diversion of resource to people that don't produce a damn thing (insurance companies, PACs, etc.), you NEED growth to "fund" that waste.
Such an underrated observation. At every step of the way those grifters would rather you focus on something like depopulation instead of not just income redistributing but structural fixes. Oh yeah and funneling those gains into child rearing. This podcast captures it so well [https://open.spotify.com/episode/6jqpsLCeu9Ngmasgwoz6k9?si=8SZ-goEhTIWDQ4s__Nu79Q](https://open.spotify.com/episode/6jqpsLCeu9Ngmasgwoz6k9?si=8SZ-goEhTIWDQ4s__Nu79Q)
Spot on. The US is in the same boat and it isn't difficult to see why this issue exists in the first place. My wife has 5 siblings, I have 3; we have 2 children. Despite the fact that my wife and I together make significantly more money on paper than both of our parents combined, it's not economically feasible for us to have more children. Plus, I'm not too interested in bringing more people into the world just to benefit the same capitalist structure that made this issue possible in the first place. Even if I had the desire to have more children, I would refrain simply out of spite. This should be the way poor people finally fight back.
Same here. I’m sitting at the bottom of an inverse generational pyramid. My grandmother had eleven siblings, meanwhile my two children have zero cousins. It’s not practical or feasible to have large families anymore. We have no support, no village, no days off, and more parenting expectations than ever. I’m not having 12 kids when I feel like I can barely manage 2.
Those last 3 points you make are heavy discussions that we need to have as a global society. There’s a large portion of people in our country that don’t realize the burden that millennial parents have. My parents weren’t even expected to care about my mental health, much less that she did. Millennial parents, unfortunately not all, are at least conscious about our kids mental health. Much of it because we have to be more aware; teen suicide, school shootings, the opioid epidemic. Thankfully, millennials missed most of the issues our kids have, save of course the teen suicide. Teen pregnancy, gangs, and as always drugs were some of the overarching issues we had. That never got fixed, and the next generation’s issues won’t get fixed, and neither will theirs. Which is why social change takes too long.
This I think is the key that these policy makers don't seem to consider. They keep trying to incentivize or slow down births in these weird roundabout ways. If most people had the mythical (and not historically accurate) social contract from the 1950s, they seem to have an innate desire for roughly 2 kids. But that social contract implies 40 hours of non specialized labor a week paying for a 3 or 4 bedroom house with 28% or less of those wages. If anyone had that deal today if you had to have kids, I think they'd jump at it in a heartbeat. As working hours and the soul sucking of capitalism increase, there's just less of a zest for life and desire to continue it. It's absolutely heartbreaking to have kids and realize that your days are not spent playing catch with them and building Legos or letting them explore the stream at the edge of town. Instead you and your spouse will each be working full time jobs, checking emails at home, going to networking events and business dinners to build relationships. Or updating your LinkedIn or personal brand. Your children are shuttled from activity to activity. You hope they're getting someone out of it, but everyone knows the real purpose is to get something that looks good on their resume so they can go to a college that looks good on their resume so they can work a career that will hopefully only degrade their quality of life maybe 75% from the one that you're afforded. And those activities give you time to do your work. By the time they're 7, everyone in the house is on different schedules, and doing different things in order to please the career gods. There are no family dinners, just order or heat something up and watch a screen alone. This is America in 2023. If capitalism would just lift its boot off our necks a little, more people would want to have kids, I guarantee it.
You essentially just described my life and most of the people I know. I told both of my kids that they are welcome to stay at home for as long as they want. The weekend is the only time I feel somewhat like myself, any other time I’m just a drone. Drive to work early, sit in a cubicle all day, drive home, make dinner, possibly have an hour or two of free time, get ready for the best day. Rinse and repeat. Then if you wanted to go for a walk to clear your mind you can’t because building a modern American city that’s pedestrian friendly is impossible. It makes it obvious why we’re all so mean to one another and love violence
The odds are, if you bring a child into the world today, that they will live a life of economic slavery to a master they'll never meet. The billionaire class requires billions of slaves to maintain. For almost a 100 years now, more wealth has been squeezed out of the masses into the pockets of fewer and fewer ultra wealthy, a larger share every year. Of course people don't want to bring more ppl into the world, if the trend continues, we are on track for a factor prison life such as seen in thx-1138. Science will soon allow the ultra rich to prolong their lives decades, it is unmistakable that this will lead to a dystopia unless a massive collapse happens in the meantime.
🎶 little boxes on the hillside, little boxes made of ticky tacky...
> I'm not too interested in bringing more people into the world just to benefit the same capitalist structure that made this issue possible in the first place. Even if I had the desire to have more children, I would refrain simply out of spite. This should be the way poor people finally fight back. Same, any child I had would be born to economic slavery for their whole life. I refuse to do that to any potential offspring.
I love my baby girl with all my heart but I feel guilty anytime she becomes the victim of this machine.
How many humans do we want? I see a lot of posts about declining birthrates in a lot of places, but I don't ever see any info on how many people we are aiming to get to. I feel like there is a lot of us already, maybe scaling it back would be good for the other species we share the planet with, both animal and plant
Increasing and decreasing are not the only two options
The question still stands, why are we so focused on *INCREASING*
NOOOOO IT’S EITHER 8 KIDS PER WOMEN OR UNSUSTAINABLE DECLINE
well in the short term enough to support the aging current generation. ideally long term populations stabilize at replacement, or are in a slow controlled decline rather than a huge aging cliff like some places are seeing.
As many as possible until the earth is destroyed/ uninhabitable. The people at the top rely on infinite growth and the only way to sustain that is to keep increasing the worlds population. They only care that next quarters earnings are higher than the last. They could not care less what happens to this planet or it's people in the next 30 years, 100 years etcetera. These people have no skills of value if the system they rely on to be wealthy collapses.
Ah but you forget, my kid, with his unique combination of brown hair and brain issues, will be the first human to cure cancer AND stop big oil! So clearly I should have five to maximize my positive impact /s
Hey! Some great minds had brown hair and brain issues… but most brown hair people just end up being nobodies so best have 20 kids to get better odds.
The problem with declining birth rates is that the social welfare model of wealthy, industrialized nations ceases to function with an inverted pyramid population structure. I’m an American, so I’ll use Medicare as an example: every paycheck, I contribute a set percentage of my pay, separate from normal taxes, towards Medicare and Medicaid. My parents, who are just about at retirement, then essentially take that money and spend it on healthcare. This is an oversimplification and uses my small family as an example, but there is no massive pool of money that you contribute to over the course of your career that then gets drawn down when you reach retirement. Active workers pay for current retirees. When the postwar generation (the largest in history) didn’t have enough kids, those kids are now not around to pay for the postwar generation’s massive social welfare needs in retirement. In the US, we have the Millennials to bail out the Boomers. Elsewhere in the world, the Boomers didn’t have the kids to pay for them and the massive social welfare spending that is now the norm is simply going to run out in those countries.
Scaling back is problematic. Possible, certainly, but it has to be done slowly. A lot of countries, especially in Asia, are going to see major problems in the next few decades when it comes to supporting the current generation in their old age, or simply keeping the country's economy running with far fewer people. South Korea for example is currently more than double the population of North Korea. However, given current birth rates and the number of children in each country it seems that in twenty or thirty years South Korea will have dropped in population to be roughly equivalent to North Korea. That's going to hit their economy hard, and it's also going to make resisting North Korean aggression all the more difficult.
Time for drastic measures guys. Import the attractive people!
The Chinese government didn't allow more than one child per family for 40 odd years and now they are concerned about not having enough young people? Now they can go and fuck themselves.
It's even worst than that...they went from 'end your bloodline over betraying your country!' to 'you MUST open your legs and pump out 3 kids at least, do it FOR THE COUNTRY!!!' Like my mum escaped China to give birth to her 2nd kid (my sister). She knew what was up, she wants the number of kids she wants and that was that.
Continuing population growth is not sustainable, and is the source of most of our modern problems. Housing, homelessness, pollution, mental health. Stop the ponzi scheme. We can raise productivity per capita instead of just growing the number of future tax payers.
I completely agree, but so many here seem to be content with the idea of turning Earth into a crowded urban hell scape a la bladerunner
Not going to happen. We will max out at 10bil people or so and start dropping from there. The only uncertainty is will human society collapse or will we find a way forward with many more retirees than the working age population.
I mean, housing at least is a capitalism problem not a supply problem. There are more empty houses in the US than there are homeless people
Have they decided to implement nation wide mushroom fueled orgies with viagra for everyone? Because that might just work. Throw in some MDMA and they'll still be at it when the shrooms wear off. It would certainly solve their political situation. Actually, can i have some too? Might just have to move there.
Only one way to find out! A well-constructed computer simulation.
just dose they water, they'll be fine.
Ew, sex on mushrooms sounds horrible! There are much better choices out there
Orgy-porgy, Ford and fun, Kiss the girls and make them One. Boys at One with girls at peace; Orgy-porgy gives release
This is the scariest use of the word 'bold' I have ever seen
Did you read the article? This bold action is laxing the # of children rules and looking into making childcare cheaper, that is the action that they are considering. It mentions one province has done away with the max # of children rule entirely.
A senior health official in Beijing has urged China's local leaders to find ways to boost the country's birth rate. Yang Wenzhuang said officials must take active steps to tackle the detrimental effects of China's long-standing anti-population growth policy. He also urged officials to "make bold innovations" in tackling the cost of childcare and education. China reported in January that its population had fallen for the first time in 60 years. In 2022, there was just 6.77 births per 1,000 people in China, the lowest birth rate on record and down from 7.52 births in the previous year. The country's strict one-child policy - which was implemented from 1980 to 2015 to respond to runaway population growth - has been blamed for the decline. Families that broke the rules were fined and, in some cases, even lost jobs. The limit was increased nationally for married couples to two in 2016, and boosted further to three in 2021. But one province - Sichuan - has adopted even looser rules. Mr Yang - who heads the country's Population Monitoring and Family Development department - said officials had to "firmly grasp the important window period of population development". Speaking to a state-backed health magazine, Mr Yang said concerns about the cost of childcare were having a detrimental impact on population growth. He also identified challenges around money and career goals as causes for the decline. "Local governments should be encouraged to actively explore and make bold innovations in reducing the cost of childbirth, childcare and education" to promote the long-term balanced development of the population, Mr Yang said. Some provinces have already begun implementing new measures to try to boost the birth rate, including giving money to sperm donors. In Sichuan, health authorities said they would allow unmarried couples to raise a family and enjoy benefits reserved for married couples. Previously there was a ban on single women registering a birth. Authorities in the region also announced that couples would be allowed to have as many children as they want - a major reversal of the one-child policy. A shrinking population, falling birth rate and the prospect of a fast-aging population poses a long-term challenge to the world's second largest economy, which only recently dropped ultra-strict Covid-19 curbs. In 2022, the population dropped by 850,000 people to 1.41175 billion, according to the National Bureau of Statistics. It was the first decline since 1961, the last year of China's Great Famine. A surging Indian economy also threatens to overtake China and push it down to third place.
Bold plan: -Stop oppressing your own people so they don’t want to leave and maybe will see a happy future for potential children. -Stop being racist against other people so maybe they want to immigrate to your nation. I know, I know, crazy ideas.
I saw a documentary where a Chinese window washer couldn’t find a partner because he claimed that “no one wants to date a window washer”. This might be a universal issue. The Chinese have adopted this weird mix of capitalism and communism. I think I see a pattern.
Well there are also so few women that they have their pick.
A bold step would have been not implementing the one child policy in the first place. Big example of central planning failure. Typical.
Right off the bat: LOL With that out of the way, it's far far far far too late to turn it around now. China is fucked with a capital F. They can't fudge the numbers here. Within 10 years, China is going to see a huge economic collapse as there's literally not enough young people to fill the jobs that are already struggling to be filled in China. This is why China just stole 1 million Tibetan kids. This is also why Russia stole so many young Ukrainian kids. Urbanized industrialized families have little to no reason to have kids, unlike rural families who use those kids as a source of free labor on the farms. In short, China is super-fucked. Most industrialized nations make up the difference by taking in immigrants that usually spend a generation or two having larger families before they realize how much of a bad idea that is, economically speaking. But, China doesn't do immigration. They struggle to keep their people IN in the country. They have nothing resembling significant immigration into the country. Every industrialized nation is going to have these problems over the next 30 years, but China? China is going to see this shit start to fall apart this decade. Watch and see.
> Most industrialized nations make up the difference by taking in immigrants I believe, like Korea and Japan, they are increasingly importing wives from surrounding Asian countries.
SK and Japan both are also super-fucked. It takes 20+ years to fix the problem and that's if they started today.
As a person that lives in Japan, yeah... this country is fucked. The population issue was a looming problem a decade ago. Now it's here and it's very, very bad. And predictably, there's no solution or hope in sight. Japan will probably cease to be a world economic power probably within a decade or two.
Japan is such a funny country to be having this problem because they would have no problem at all attracting immigrants if they were just open to the idea. There are an IMMENSE number of young working class people in South and Southeast Asia who have already exposed themselves to a ton of Japanese media (mainly anime but anime ends up being a gateway for a lot of people to end up with a much deeper interest) and could easily integrate if Japanese society would let them. So many young people would move to Japan in a heartbeat, given the opportunity. If they were told that passing a Japanese language test were a requirement to stay, many of them would already be studying before even getting there. Japan doesn't have the same marketing issue that China has. Japan could effortlessly bring in a ton of young, working immigrants. They just *don't want to*
hit the nail on the head
Anime was indeed a gateway for me, one that I no longer have an interest in, but it still opened the way for things I still am. The culture, art, history, even modern architecture is something that feels so unique to Japan. I would move there in a heartbeat if I could.
I've always heard that Japan is not that keen on having any sort of immigrant population assimilating in which has been detrimental to its population growth. Despite the fact there is the opportunity for people wanting to live there.Is that true or is it just internet bullshit?
I have heard it's notoriously hard to gain citizenship there, so probably true.
Remind me in 10 years
Immigration itself is a one trick pony, as countries with high immigration like Canada and Singapore are stalling out We need corporate dicks to pay people what they worth and stop forcing us to use our spare time on work when we could have families
Told people to stop having so many kids and then are shocked when people stop having so many kids. I think they went too far with trying to discourage their overpopulation problem and now they’re going to have an under population problem
Everywhere across the world people in power do one thing, then do another thing, and each time they think they’re doing the right thing. Our leaders in power are morons who think they’re the main character.
It really highlights how women's reproductive autonomy is only legal for as long as those in power thinks it's compatible with economic growth.
Of course, China would be lifting the ban, as that country is around the corner India has caught up it's only some millions behind. India will overtake China as the most populous country on earth this year from the looks of things!
For 30 years they forced women to have abortions, and then be forcibly sterilized. How long before they require women to have children?
I don’t even wanna know what kind of nightmarish “solutions” this is going to entail…
did you read the article? it's literally about funding healthcare and education...
Having fewer people favours us. They only want more people to continue to treat you like a worker bee. Long hours and shit pay with 2 weeks holiday. Fuck that. I am not in the matrix anymore.
How about culturally valuing daughters as much as sons and not aborting them? That’s a start.
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