People aren't having more babies if the economy is bad... Which it is in China
this post was submitted on 04 Nov 2024
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Gonna leave this here from a reply I made to a similar thread weeks ago. China's demographics are in very bad shape.
This was mostly created by the one child policy that ran from 1979-2016, coupled with male child preference. In China, a male child is responsible for taking care of his own parents, while females are responsible for caring for their in-laws.
In large part yes, but younger generations are also not especially motivated to have kids when they already have to deal with a soul-crushing workplace (much worse than in the west).
The famous 996, they have this work culture from 9 AM to 9 PM, 6 days a week. Good luck having any power left after such a week.
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Oh God really? My work is already pretty soul crushing, I couldn't imagine
Yeah, it's bad. There are fewer worker protections and unions are illegal.
Unions are illegal in a Communist state? That's hilariously ironic and sad.
There is one mega-union (the only permitted one) with officials appointed by the CCP. It's essentially a sham, like the non-CCP parties in Congress that are nominally a type of opposition but can never hold any real power.
And yes, it is ironic and sad. Nordic countries are more communist than China is. China doesn't even have truly free healthcare like Canada etc.
Chinese Unions are a joke, it is common practice that union preventatives would trying to convince you to be more understanding of your boss.
It's a well known joke that the only reason Chinese Union exists is to prevent real unions to form (you want a worker union? but we already have one, go talk to them).
You see, it's not communism, but communism with Chinese ideals (therefore whatever the heck the CCP wants it to be)
It's not communist, it's just a nazi state with a different name.
All the rest applies, the racial bits, the cruelty and genocide, all of it.
No, I lie, the nazis didn't execute nearly as many of their own people, nor did they restrict reproduction in the same way.
10x worse, you work 12 hours min and you work Saturdays, plus the boss is a lot more... Personally cruel than they are here.
If it was just that, surely there'd be a rebound visible on the chart after 2016 (8-year-olds and younger)? Instead it falls off even harder
At this point the culture had shifted to not value large families and so few even think it is possible while not having kids seems like a valid option. It takes years to shift this even with an effort to encourage kids.
Not making your society a dystopian hellscape might help.
They can't get married till they have a house, and there are problems there...
They also have a level of youth unemployment above 20%. Between a fifth and a quarter of those Zoomers are unemployed.
Its' so bad that they stopped publishing unemployment rate few years back, there are many talks of university students where they have to fill form about their future plans and whether they already received job offers, the teachers would encourage them to open a online store and fill the form as store owner/self employed.
It's so bad they revised how they were measuring it to make it look better.
And then it continued to go up anyway
They invented a new term "negative growth" so they won't have to use "decline".
Makes me wonder whether they're expecting to lose a significant number of young men for some reason over the next few years as well. Gotta start planning for replacements early.
Honestly I don't think that is necessary to explain this. China is seeing the same issue as western countries with birth rates way below replacement, but it hardly has any of the immigration that mitigates it for (most of) Europe and North America. It's not easy for an economy to support an ever-increasing proportion of its population being retirees
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Government: Hello there Ji-Mun we have found 12 perfect bachelors for you to choose from. You must complete copulation by December. Here are their bios for your review we'll call you in 3 hours for your final engagement letter. Don't worry, marriage is not necessary.
They are practicing this in India if I am not wrong, but it is done by the parents. They are collecting CVs of prospective partners and sharing them with their kids. So it is like Tinder for parents kind of.
I also have a Pakistani colleague and he told me that they have a dating app, but for marriages. You see the profile of the girl/boy, where they share how many kids they want to have, etc.
Yep and it never ends well but they end up staying together because divorce is looked down upon in all but the most liberal communities.
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I wish I was kidding, but what are the chances that China will become the first country to mass produce their new population via in vitro?
That still requires a surrogate at least, no in vitro can support all the way to viability yet. There would also need to be post-birth support for the kids to be useful to soxiety. Also essentially admitting the existing men aren't capable of having children. Expensive af too, so seems improbable.
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Have they tried letting Chinese citizens be free from totalitarianism the first time in their entire history?
I completely seriously, put forth that it's the soul-crushing, rampant late-stage capitalism, with poor worker protections, much more than the lack of political freedom, is what is driving the low birth rates. (Now, obviously different story during one child policy).
I just think people are way to quick to overlook the economics, which is currently happening almost everywhere (the stupid house prices, real wages not keeping up with price inflation, the wealth gap between the richest and poorest of a nation getting larger, etc)
If China became a mutli-party representative democracy overnight, you can bet your ass no one is going to be having any more children than they are right now.
If you were to ask the average Chinese person if they support their government, the answer would be yes, despite what some people outside China would like to believe. (On average, of course there are still a notable number who aren't happy at all with the government).
Best I can do is more restrictions on travel.
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Same energy
Well, we will know things will have gotten real bad when they start approaching sex offenders for fertility studies in an Operation Paperclip type arrangement
What's the opposite of forced abortions? Because given the history of the CCP that could be where this is heading.
Rape. Don't let anyone sugar coat it with any other word.
Which is why they're calling girls as young as 15.
What’s the opposite of forced abortions? Because given the history of the CCP that could be where this is heading.
"Decree 770 was a decree of the communist government of Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu, signed in 1967. It restricted abortion and contraception, and was intended to create a new and large Romanian population."
"To enforce the decree, society was strictly controlled. Contraceptives were removed from sale and all women were required to be monitored monthly by a gynecologist.[3]: 6 Any detected pregnancies were followed until birth. The secret police kept a close eye on hospital procedures. "
A consequence of Ceaușescu's natalist policy is that large numbers of children ended up living in orphanages, because their parents could not cope with looking after them. The vast majority of children who lived in the state-run orphanages were not actually orphans, like the name implies, but simply children whose parents could not afford or did not want to look after them.
So it often comes back to the economics of the situation. Kids used to make money, helping on the farm and stuff. Now kids cost a lot of money and paying women a substantial amount (and not the pizza party amounts) to have children is deemed economically nonviable.
Decree 770 [...] signed in 1967
Gen X in Romania is actually replaced by "decreței" - loosely translated as children of the decree. About 20 years later, they'd be just old enough to take part in the revolution that brought about Ceaușescu's execution and fast replacement with a former chief of the communist party's propaganda department, who had strong ties to Moscow.
That's an interesting bit of info I never knew. Thank you for sharing that.
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