China’s baby bust is happening faster than many expected, raising fears of a demographic collapse. And coping with the fallout may now be complicated by miscalculations made more than 40 years ago.
It will be interesting to see how East Asia addresses the issue, especially since the problem isn’t just a Chinese one.
Aren’t we already seeing this farther along in Japan? Smaller towns are closing their schools because there aren’t any children to teach. The development of robots to do things like wash someone’s hair occurred 14 years ago because they anticipate a lack of young adults needed to take care of a geriatric populace.
Yes, but Japan actually has a much HIGHER fertility rate than China
Yep.
And China is running into major issues involving controlling internal migrations combined with a reliance of real estate development to fund local governments.