China may or may not overcome the challenges of negative population growth, high youth unemployment and an aging population by radically recalibrating its economic focus on innovations and high tech.
As a result of the one-child policy, China’s fertility rate was well below 2 children per woman for more than three decades.
At the same time, according to the Beijing-based YuWa Population Research Institute, the average cost of raising a child to the age of 18 in China stood at 485,000 yuan ($76,629) for a first child in 2019, almost seven times China’s per capita GDP that year ($10,144). The financial burden has many families thinking twice before adding members to their family.
The combination of more retirees and a shrinking working-age population means fewer people have to support a larger share of the population, putting pressure on Beijing’s health care and pension programs.
I’m not sure who the “us” in “let’s” is, but I don’t think Beijing is considering any systemic changes right now. I’m all for changing away from Capitalist systems, but in the meantime most Chinese citizens are in pretty economically-precarious positions, and I’m certainly not going to vote, from my safe position in another country, for their country to collapse in hopes it would rebuild into something better. I’ll hold my ‘let it all burn down so we can rebuild into [preferably a loosely-associated series of Mutualist cooperatives]’ advocacy for my own country.
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And this doesn’t even touch on the effects an economic downturn could have when couples are already choosing not to have kids for economic reasons.
This could turn into a negative-growth spiral if Beijing doesn’t figure out how to incentivize families to have more (but not too many!) kids soon.
Even better: let’s create an economic system that doesn’t require endless population growth
I’m not sure who the “us” in “let’s” is, but I don’t think Beijing is considering any systemic changes right now. I’m all for changing away from Capitalist systems, but in the meantime most Chinese citizens are in pretty economically-precarious positions, and I’m certainly not going to vote, from my safe position in another country, for their country to collapse in hopes it would rebuild into something better. I’ll hold my ‘let it all burn down so we can rebuild into [preferably a loosely-associated series of Mutualist cooperatives]’ advocacy for my own country.