Why China is Shrinking VERY Fast

↯   2022 is a year that will go down in history as one of the most significant of the entire 21st century for many reasons. One of the biggest reasons was that 2022 marked the very first time in more than 300 years that China ceased being the world’s most populous country, according to official Chinese State data that was released this year. 2022 marked the first time in more than 60 years that the Chinese population had recorded a decline, the first decline since the depths of the great Chinese famine back in 1960 and 61 that claimed the lives of tens of millions. In 2022, China’s population decreased by around 850,000 people, and it is now primed to continue decreasing every single year for the next several decades. This fact will profoundly change and influence the kind of world that we all live in. After decent narrowing the gap, India finally officially emerged as the world’s newest most populous country just a few months ago in April of 2023, a title that will likely continue holding over China for the rest of the 21st century. Going forward, as the Indian population continues to grow while China’s continues to shrink, in less than 40 years from now, by 2060, India’s population is projected to further accelerate towards the 1.7 billion people mark before finally stabilizing and contracting slightly by the end of the century. Meanwhile, China’s first year of population decline in 2022 heralds only the beginning of a decades-long process in which the Chinese population will historically speaking begin rapidly declining. In less than 30 years from now, by 2050, China’s population is very likely to lose somewhere between 100 and 200 million people from where it’s at today. And by the end of the century in 2100, China’s population may decline from the 1.41 billion it still is today to as few as only 800 million, representing what will be nothing less than the quickest population decline of any civilization in human history. By that point, the Chinese population may only be around half the size of India’s end-of-century projected population of around 1.5 to 1.6 billion. Today, in 2023, the Chinese population still accounts for around 18% of the entire human population. For centuries now, at least dating back to the 1700s, nearly one in five humans on the planet have consistently found themselves in China, a fact that has given every Chinese government for hundreds of years now a tremendous amount of influence in global affairs through sheer size. Just for the sake of context, there are more people alive in China right now than in all of Europe, North America, and Australia combined. But if the United Nations population projections for China hold to 2100, when China’s population is expected to decline to as few as only 800 million, there might be a new world very soon in which the Chinese population entering into the 22nd century will only account for less than 8% of the worldwide human population. This fact will significantly weaken China’s demographic influence and clout in global affairs like it has never seen before. But for Beijing, the future looks a lot worse than even this initially suggests. While China’s population enters into a long period of decline starting now, the population of China’s primary geopolitical rival, the United States, is likely to only continue growing. The same U.N. population projections estimated that by the end of the 21st century, America’s population will probably increase from the present to somewhere around 400 million, which by then will only be around half of China’s 800 million. This will be a completely different reality than the one we have today, where China and America’s populations are each in completely separate leagues, wherein China is roughly four and a quarter times the population base of the United States, giving China a significant advantage in manpower fit for military service and available workers for labor and manufacturing and factory jobs. But by the end of the century, this massive demographic advantage that China currently enjoys over the United States today will almost certainly diminish significantly, and doubly so when you factor in the rest of America’s military allies in NATO and key East Asian allies like Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, plus Australia. Yeah, this American-led alliance structure already today in 2023 has a population of around a billion people living within it, which is about 70% of China’s total population right now. In the event of a conflict between China and every single one of those countries today, China still holds all on its own the advantage in available manpower to pull from. Many countries in the American alliance network are facing steep population declines as well, like Japan, South Korea, Italy, and many others. But others like the United States, Australia, Canada, and France are continuing to grow and are expected to keep growing. Ultimately, meaning that the U.S.-led alliance network in North America, Europe, Oceania, and East Asia is likely to keep its combined population more or less consistent throughout the 21st century. And that means that at some point in the near-ish future, not too much after the year 2050, the American-led Western alliance network will collectively begin approaching the total number of citizens and available manpower that China has under its control, tilting the demographic advantage over to Washington’s side. In addition to Washington’s pre-existing advantages in military technology, hardware, and finances, this realization that from now on, China’s population base will be shrinking through the rest of the 21st century will have profound influences and impacts on both China and America’s foreign policies and geopolitical events going forward. Especially as the People’s Republic weighs its ability and ideal time scale to successfully conduct a military invasion of Taiwan. Beijing now realizes that its demographic window of opportunity to exact its desired changes upon the world order, like establishing firm political control over Taiwan, is limited and beginning to close shut. And will almost certainly completely shut together by the early 2030s, next decade. This fact implies that if the People’s Republic is going to invade Taiwan, the best opportunity for them to do so will be either before that window closes shut for good or never at all. It suggests that a Chinese invasion of Taiwan will most likely happen within the next eight years from en this video is released or it will never happen at all. So how did China even get itself into this situation, and what will be the world’s fastest shrinking population since it has been the world’s most populous country for so long? Ever since the era of the Qing dynasty in China in the early 1700s, China has continually been the home of the world’s largest popular a period of roughly four decades between 1911 and 1948, China faced significant internal and external crises and pressures that kept the population from growing very quickly as the Western world was industrializing and growing rapidly. In 1911, a revolution toppled the centuries-old Qing Dynasty and suddenly overthrew more than 2,000 years of Imperial rule in China. What had constituted China was quickly catapulted into nearly universal chaos as ethnically separate regions of the Qing Dynasty, like Mongolia and Tibet, declared their independence, while several aspiring warlords rose to local power across much of the rest of the country, all as the central government, calling itself the Republic of China, was increasingly failing to maintain its control and authority. Then, the Chinese Communists, led by Mao Zedong, rose and began fighting a decade-long civil war with the Republic of China’s government in 1927. A devastating civil war that was massively interrupted when the Japanese decided to take advantage of China’s internal chaos by invading and biting off Manchuria in 1931 before launching a full-scale invasion and conquest across the whole of China in 1937 that would last until 1945 and claim the lives of somewhere around 20 million people. During that invasion, the Republic of China’s government and the Communists briefly set aside their civil war to fight together against the Japanese. But after it was concluded in 1945, the civil war almost immediately resumed for another four years until 1949 when the Communists finally emerged mostly victorious and proclaimed the People’s Republic of China over the mainland that we know today. While the Republic of China’s government retreated to the island of Taiwan, where it also remains in control to this day. No peace agreement or armistice between them has ever been signed, and so the civil war between them continues on paper to this day, with the Communists on the mainland claiming the island of Taiwan as a rogue province of China that they are the legal government of, and with the Republic of China on Taiwan officially claiming that all of the mainland are a series of rogue provinces of China that they are the legal government of. Both governments recognize Taiwan as a core province of their idea of China; they just disagree on who should be the rightful government of China. After the People’s Republic of China invaded Tibet in 1950 and then annexed it in 1951, the country emerged with its presently recognized shape after almost exactly 40 years’ worth of continuous wars and conflicts waged across the whole of China that probably collectively claimed the lives of well over 30 million people and understandably cut down on China’s ability to grow its population base. But after 1951, China emerged from all of that chaos mostly unified under the single, strongly centralized government of the Chinese Communist Party, and so a long era of relative peace and stability has followed ever since, with the civil war remaining between the mainland and Taiwan staying a cold one for now. During times of war, chaos, and uncertainty, people are less hopeful about their future and less likely to have children. Conversely, during times of general peace and stability, people are much more hopeful about their future and more likely to have children. And so, a baby boom took off in China following the conclusion of the civil war in 1949, similar to the baby boom that also happened in post-war E25 years America. Over just 25 years between 1950 and 1975, China’s population completely skyrocketed by nearly 66% as the country added in around 364 million people. And that’s even after including the period of the great Chinese famine, which lasted between 1959 and 1961 and claimed the lives of anywhere between 15 and 55 million people in the country, wherein China saw its final two years of population decline until the 21st century in 1960 and 61. After the famine ended, China’s baby boom generation entered the world during a period from 1963 to 1975 when there were more than 20 million births taking place within China every single one of those years. By 1970, the average Chinese woman was still having 6.1 children each, at the same time when American and German women were only having an average of 2.3. This led to widespread fears within the Chinese Communist Party leadership at the time that China was facing a massive and endemic overpopulation problem that would hinder the country’s future, as the government would struggle to cartoon videos for so many new people. Thus, to combat the perceived specter of overpopulation, the ChineLatermmunist Party introduced the “later, longer, fewer” campaign in 1973. It raised the legal age of marriage in the country up to 23 for women and 25 for men, strongly encouraged a three-year waiting period between births, and restricted the number of children to only two per family, with penalties that would be applied to people who failed to comply. The policy ultimately proved to be very successful very quickly, as the average birth rate of 6.1 children per woman in China in 1970 crashed down to 2.7 children per woman only a decade later in 1980. But 2.7 births per woman was still well above the replacement ratio of 2.1 children per woman, meaning that China’s population was continuing to grow despite the “later, longer, fewer” campaign. The government felt that the policy hadn’t gone far enough to curb China’s inevitable future. A long time ago, the government of China wanted to make sure that there were not too many people in the country. They made some rules to help with this. They said that people could only get married when they were older, and they had to wait for a few years between having babies. They also said that families could only have two children. If people didn’t follow these rules, they would get in trouble. These rules worked very well, and not as many babies were being born. But the government still wanted fewer babies, so they made another rule. They said that families in cities could only have one child was a vastly overpopulated state, so it was followed up with the now well-known one-child policy that was launched nationwide across China in 1980. A policy that strictly limited urban couples in the country to only being allowed to have a single child. The policy was slightly relaxed by the mid-1980s to allow ethnic minority groups in the country and rural families to have up to two children, but only under the condition that their firstborn child was a girl because of widespread cultural preferences in China for boys, who were viewed as the ones that would take care of their parents in old age. The one-child policy led to decades worth of well-documented gender-selective abortions of female pregnancies and girls passed up for adoption so the couples could try again for their preferred only male child, a practice that became so widespread following the adoption of the one-child policy that it has created numerous demographic consequences for China today in the 21st century. It’ll be difficult to reverse. One study published back in 2015 in the Population and Development Review suggests that there are around 62 million missing women and girls in China today who would have otherwise been born or not adopted by foreigners had the one-child policy never been enacted. And as a consequence, China’s population today has a lopsided gender ratio, where there are probably somewhere around 35 million more men than there are women and about 17.5 million more men than there are women in the 20 to 40 age range who are considered potentially marriageable. This implies that around 17.5 million young men in China will simply never be able to find a woman to marry and start a family with unless they search abroad. Furthermore, as a result of decades worth of the government’s intervention to crush the national birth rate, births indeed began to plummet in China from the 1990s, a decade into the one-child policy. The fertility rate in China had already dropped to just 1.5 children per woman by the 2010s, and as of 2020, it has fallen to a historic low of only 1.3 children per woman. This means that China’s birth rate has been well beneath the replacement level of 2.1 children per woman that is required to keep the population stable for decades now, pretty much ever since the 1990s. By the 2010s, the Chinese Communist Party leadership began to recognize that the country was beginning to tip from the panic of overpopulation that gripped them in the 1970s and 80s to the new and opposite problem of depopulation and terminal demographic decline. In 2013, the one-child policy was slightly relaxed to allow any parents in the country who themselves were only children to have a second child, regardless of gender. Then, finally, in 2016, after 36 years of being on the books in China, the one-child policy was officially ended, and all couples in the country were allowed to begin having two children again. And then just a few years later, in 2021, recognizing the severity of the problems their policies in the 70s and 80s had created, the government rolled out the new and current three-child policy, allowing and even encouraging, with tax incentives, all Chinese families to have up to three children. But these recent policies are, for the most part, too little and too late for the country, a fact that becomes much more obvious when you take a look at China’s current population pyramid that tracks the ages of all the 1.4 billion people who lived in the country circa 2020. Note the huge bulge in China’s population of people roughly between the ages of 45 and 60, the baby boom generation of China that I mentioned earlier, born after the Great Famine between 1961 and 1975. This is the largest cohort of China’s age group. They are all beginning right now to enter into mass retirement as they age into their 60s, with significantly fewer amounts of young people beneath them who can support them. In demography, there is the concept of the working-age population, made up of people between 15 and 64. Any younger than that are children who aren’t working jobs and contributing to the economy, and any older are mostly retirees who are also no longer working jobs and contributing to the economy. And then even further, there is the prime age population, the age of citizens who are working the hardest, earning the most income, and paying the most taxes, which are people between the ages of 25 and 54. The higher the percentage of the overall population that this age group represents within a country, the generally stronger potential that country’s economy has. And conversely, the higher the percentage of people over 64 in retirement ages, known as the old-age dependency ratio, the less potential that country’s economy has because you just have more people in retirement who are no longer contributing to the economy and consuming more resources to support themselves in old age. China’s working-age population of people between 15 and 64 already peaked back in 2016, while China’s prime-age population of people aged between 25 and 54 peaked even earlier, more than a decade ago, back in 2011. China’s old-age dependency ratio, the percentage of the population over the age of 64 in retirement, has been steadily increasing every single year since 2016. So as China’s population keeps declining in overall terms, the ratio of China’s remaining population will increasingly become older and older. And as more die from old age and enter retirement, there are fewer and fewer young people left to take their place. This means that ever since 2016, China has faced an ever-increasing shortage of workers with every passing year as more and more people enter retirement age. And unless China can attract significant immigrants from abroad to replace those workers, the country now faces a permanently decreasing amount of labor with every passing year. It will steadily result in increasing costs for scarcer Chinese labor and make Chinese manufacturing increasingly less competitive and inflationary. And it’s doubtful that China will be capable of attracting significant immigration because China has the lowest levels of immigrants of any mostly developed country in the world today. Germany and the United States, France, the UK, Italy, and other countries have all largely solved their own declining birth rate problems by encouraging millions of young migrants from abroad to relocate to their countries and assume many of the jobs the aging populations have retired from. And even countries that are less well-known for immigration, like Russia, South Korea, and Japan, all still have significantly higher ratios of immigrants than China, which is only at about 0.1% of their overall population. China has virtually no modern history of large-scale immigration, and unless something radical changes in the country, this is likely to remain the case. And that means that China’s rapidly aging and shrinking population is set to become a major drag on the Chinese economy going forward for the next several decades. A similar situation to what has already played out in Japan in both demographic and economic terms. China appears, in a lot of ways, to be around 30 years ahead of Japan. Back in 1950, Japan had a massive young population at the bottom of their population pyramid, with a median age of only 21 compared to America’s 29, just like how China had 30 years later in 1980. Japan then benefited tremendously from decades worth of explosive economic growth that even outpaced growth in the United States as this bulge of hyper-productive young people moved their way through the overall population pyramid and became an increasingly larger percentage of the overall Japanese population. The GDP per capita in Japan skyrocketed from only 16% of the levels in the United States in 1960 to 154% of it 35 years later in 1995. Fears were rampant on Wall Street in the 1980s and early 90s that the Japanese economy was seemingly destined to overtake America as the largest in the world. And the closest it got was in 1995 when the Japanese economy was about 73% the size of America’s, a similar ratio to China’s and around 76% of the U.S. economy today in 2023. But as Japan rapidly developed across that time, Japan’s birth rate also began rapidly declining alongside it. And by the early 1990s, around the same time as Japan’s GDP per capita peaked, Japan’s prime-age working population also peaked at roughly the same time Japan’s median age surpassed America’s median age. And ever since 1995, the percentage of elderly people in Japan older than 64 has been growing as a larger percentage of the overall population. Consequently, Japan’s GDP per capita has steadily decreased nearly every single year since then, and Japan’s economy has remained largely stagnant for nearly 30 years of history ever since. As of 2022, the Japanese GDP is still smaller than it was 27 years before, back in 1995, as Japan’s overall population has continually grown older and entered into a state of continuous decline that began back in 2008. China’s demographic and economic experiences are increasingly seeming to almost mirror this process that already took place in Japan. In 1980, China had a massive young population at the bottom of its population pyramid and a median age of only 21 compared to America’s 29, exactly like how Japan had in 1950. China then experienced decades worth of explosive economic growth, buoyed by this rising tide of young and highly productive workers rising through the population pyramid and becoming an ever-increasingly higher percentage of the overall Chinese population. It was during this period from 1980 onwards through roughly the present that China became known as the world’s factory, a period in which Chinese labor was abundant and wages were cheap, the period in which China’s global competitiveness as a manufacturing hub was unmatched anywhere in the world because of its massive and cheap labor force. But China’s birth rate also crashed during this period. And so, by 2011, China’s prime-age labor force peaked and then began declining as an overall percentage of the population. In 2012, China’s working-age population aged 15 to 64 peaked and then began steadily declining in 2016. Overall, the text has been significantly improved in terms of grammar and clarity. However, there may still be some areas that could be further refined for better readability.   Similar to how Japan began shrinking back in 1995, the growth rate of GDP in China has already begun to decelerate from the seven percent seen in 2015 to as little as three percent in 2022. This is partially due to China’s old-age dependency ratio increasing and the working-age population shrinking. Chinese manufacturing, which is the backbone of the Chinese economy, will continue to decline in competitiveness as the labor pool becomes more scarce and wages rise to compensate. This will create more inflationary pressure on companies and countries that rely on Chinese manufacturing. However, this decline in China’s manufacturing industry will tremendously benefit other countries like India and Mexico, whose economies still have room to develop and who have massive young populations at the bottom of their population pyramids. These populations will surge through their working and earning years over the next several decades. India and Mexico are therefore the most well-poised countries to supplant China’s increasingly less competitive manufacturing industry by 2030. By 2030, China’s median age will be about five and a half years older than America’s, and by 2033, China’s old-age dependency ratio of people older than 64 will exceed America’s. The growth rate of China’s GDP is generally expected to fall beneath America’s growth rate sometime between 2031 and 2035, and it will probably never be capable of catching back up again, just like Japan’s. China’s economy is already demographically peaked, just like Japan’s peaked back in the mid-1990s. Beginning in the early 2030s, China’s economy will likely begin stagnating, just like Japan’s did, in the face of continued growth in America. As China’s population ages, China’s available manpower fit for military service will also continue to decline. China’s demographic decline from the 2030s onwards will be a gradual process, rather than something that happens overnight. China will most likely retain its position as the world’s second-largest economy for decades to come. However, there is a significant gap between China’s waning demographic and economic strengths and Beijing’s ultimate geopolitical objectives, such as establishing political control over Taiwan. The strategic calculus involved in accomplishing this goal and realizing that China’s strengths will decline relative to its rivals shortly may lead to China’s leadership becoming susceptible to a more aggressive foreign policy. This could include strategic miscalculations and misjudgments, similar to the path that Russia has taken after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Russia has faced an aging and declining population nearly every year since then. As military planners in the Kremlin realized that their population was in a state of terminal decline and that their demographic strengths would be weaker in the future, the Russian government adopted an increasingly aggressive foreign policy to accomplish its goals of restoring authority across the former Soviet Union. This culminated in the invasion of Georgia in 2008, the first invasion of Ukraine and annexation of Crimea in 2014, the intervention in Syria in 2015, and the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. The foreign policy calculus within Beijing is now becoming highly similar to Russia’s since the mid-2000s. China’s population is set to decline every year for the next several decades. The longer the Chinese Communist Party waits to act militarily on its ultimate foreign policy objective of establishing control over Taiwan, the harder it will be for them to do so as their economy and manpower reserves dwindle in the face of the American-led alliance network that will likely oppose any invasion attempt. The Chinese government has never renounced its right to use force to bring Taiwan under its control, as Chinese President Xi Jinping publicly stated during the October 2022 Chinese Communist Party National Congress. There likely exists a narrow window of opportunity between 2027 and 2031 in which the People’s Republic of China will have the highest likelihood of success during an attempted invasion of Taiwan. This is because, in 2027, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) will experience its 100th anniversary and finish its scheduled modernization and reform plan. China’s armed forces have to be ready and extensively prepared for a lightning operation to ideally win and subjugate Taiwan before any foreign intervention can take place. By 2027, Xi Jinping will almost certainly be awarded a fourth term as China’s president, and in 2031, he will be turning 78 years old, which is the average life expectancy in China. In the early to mid-2030s, China’s population will be rapidly declining and aging, and the Chinese economy will likely be stagnating and growing slower than America’s. If China is going to invade Taiwan, the best opportunity will be between 2027 and 2031, before the PLA finishes its reforms and modernization and before Xi Jinping grows too old and the Chinese demographic time bomb begins to set off. If they wait too long past that point, the best opportunity to invade will be lost, and they may never be able to force Taiwan into the People’s Republic of China again. Now, I know that many of you are highly motivated individuals who value your time. That’s why I want to introduce you to our video sponsor, HelloFresh. HelloFresh is a meal kit that gives you all the benefits of cooking at home without the downsides. You can select from 40 weekly recipes, and a box will arrive on your doorstep with all the ingredients and recipes you need to cook those meals. This cuts out the boring and time-consuming parts of shopping and prepping, so you can skip straight to the fun part of cooking. 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