Big picture: China's births might hit a record low this year, deepening its demographic crisis. Academics admit births could fall to 7 million, with profound implications for the world's second-largest economy.
By the numbers:
* Estimated births in 2023: 6 million to 8 million.
* Drop in births over the past five
7 million new humans in a single country per year is A LOT of goddamn people.
Imagine a major city’s worth of people suddenly appearing every single year. It’s completely unsustainable.
It’s not so weird when that country has about 1 out of every 6 humans on earth, and when 10.56 million people died in China in 2022. They’re experiencing decline not growth.
I didn’t say it was weird. The numbers are still incredible.
And with nearly 1.5 BILLION people, it’s not like they’ll run out of people.
This isn’t a Children of Men situation.
The number of people is irrelevant in the context, only the birth vs death rate. For context, there were about 10.5 million deaths in China last year. For social stability, you’d want the population to at most have a slight decline. A 50% higher death rate than birth rate is NOT slight.
Again, adding over 7 million people is what’s important, and it’s a huge number.
We’re talking about a loss of 3 million once you factor in deaths. If it was a country like Canada, with a population of less than 50 million people, that would be problematic.
But with a population pool of 1.5 billion, what’s the actual concern? What social instability does this cause that a population of 1.5 billion already doesn’t?
There will never be too few people in China, and a slow population decline from 1.5 billion allows for a more sustainable future.
It is not. When dealing with statistics, percentages are the only thing that matter.
Losing 15% of your population on a yearly basis isn’t problematic, it’s species-ending catastrophic.
To put it in perspective, that’s the same population loss ratio that japan is currently experiencing. Japan, the country that’s teetering on the brink of cultural and societal collapse from an aging population.
Yeah this sums up the problem fairly well. You’re so stuck in your personal opinion of china’s population that you can’t imagine for a moment the situation changing, regardless of what the data might be saying. You’re no better than the people who refused to believe climate change was occurring. Fuck your gut instinct, pay attention to the actual numbers.
Bro, the actual numbers (3 mil loss a year) is insignificant when your population has 1.5 billion people in it. What demographic will catastrophically collapse?
You’re getting 7 million babies (i.e. young people) to replace 10 million old people… this is actually quite good and the way it’s supposed to be.
And is this coming from a country that had a one child policy for decades, then increased it to two and then three kids. *They literally don’t want more people! *
Well, they also could be having 90% of a major city’s worth of people dying every year, but I haven’t looked up the exact number.
Someone said around 10 million die per year. But old people die. Everywhere.
But they are “replaced” by 7 million+ babies.
Let’s not forget that China STILL limits the number of children you can have, and limited families to one child for decades before the limit was raised to two, then three. They don’t really want more people.
Scale matters.