How Bad Is China’s Demographic Crisis? 

As a new father living in China, I can say that, from my experience, people here generally admit that the birth rate needs to improve, but barely anyone wants more than one child. It's just so much money and hassle here

Japan and China have similar cultural pressures keeping birthrates low, like extreme work expectations and very high social pressures.

Another Chinese person here, albeit I live abroad now: the elephant in the room from a personal finance standpoint is how expensive housing is in most cities. Check any global ranking of housing prices as a multiple of median wage and you would see more than half of the top 10 being Chinese cities. Another factor is time pressure: For most decently paid careers such as tech or finance, work hours are long. Combined with the lack of childcare support (unless you really want to live with your parents/in-laws and they are willing and able to help) means that for most of my cohort of friends who are still in mainland, 1 child is already a lot. Quite a few are quite firm and proud about not having any children and saw it as some sort of break from the filial tradition

The fact that you guys chose to use the eggplant emoji to show birth is kinda funny

The Anti-Immigration sentiment is not a Ccp issue its an Asian issue even Japan has anti-immigration sentiment and resistant to immigrants.

*introduces policy to limit people having babies* *less people have babies* **surprised pikachu face**

The segues to the NordVPN ads are real jarring, especially in this one lmao

For the past decade, the news about low birthrates was all about Japan. In the coming decade, it will be about Korea and China. In 50 years, the news will be like "INDIA's POPULATION IS SHRINKING!!!"

The situation in China is actually a lot more concerning in the medium term when you take in to account the gender distribution. China has traditionally favoured boys over girls, and during the one child policy, families would preferably have boy babies, meaning they would quietly cull or abort the girls and try again without telling the government. This has lead to a huge imbalance, with men outnumbering women by a ratio of 1.11 between ages 10-40. This means there will be a large percentage of men who will go unmarried in a society that tells you thar you are a failure if you remain unmarried by the age of 40. With the economy slowing down, there is nothing for these frustrated angry men to do, and that historically has always lead to civil unrest. I suspect the easiest way for China to deal with this is to start a war to get rid if much of the excess.

Considering how China's government does math, the number may be higher.

Thumbnail is hilarious, loved the eggplant with the downward arrow, effective marketing.

I’ve seen a lot of Americans (of which I am one) specifically commenting on how this isn’t a crisis because the world needs fewer people. They seem to not understand the potential significant negative impacts this will have on the global economy if a solution isn’t determined. Not to mention, there are a lot of elderly people in China who are about to be inadequately cared for…

The Lancet did a study on this and their forecast was even more dire.

One child is still a lot of work and expense. No government is willing to fund it properly. I’d need an extra $40K annually just to break even. Another $20K for the extra stress.

The problem with immigration to China is that it would be hard for migrants to integrate because of how hard chinese language is

Its hard to say for sure, since Beijing obscures statistics (when it releases any at all). It seems pretty bad, and that's not likely to change soon. Like with most things involving China, the only way to know (with any degree of accuracy) is to watch for secondary effects and try to extrapolate answers based on that.

Chyna is doing better then RU though, you gotta give them kudos for not doing anything foolish like war, yet.

1950's: EVERYONE HAVE KIDS 1980's: NO ONE HAVE KIDS 2010's: EVERYONE HAVE KIDS

Great video!

On the immigration point, remember that China is _very_ _very_ big and still relatively poor in terms of GDP per capita, both in absolute terms and especially relative to its neighbours. China would need about 4.2 million migrants *a year* to match the rate of the US - and ideally those would be younger people with some education. Even if they wanted to encourage immigration, I'm a bit sceptical they'd manage to attract that many people.

Birth rate is the least of their worries. Over 90% of their population are infected.

06:11 "fewer workers -> higher wages" too bad old people cannot fully benefit from that ultimately if there are more old people that cannot be a plus. It still means that fraction of people who are not fully capable to produce everything needed for their lives grows.

Sad.

The wealth disparity, extreme work ethic, high cost of living, status conscious, materialistic and competitive nature of chinese society are all contributing factors, which are further amplified by social media. It's hard to fathom working 60-70 hours per week just to afford a 1 or 2 br apartment which takes 30-40 years to pay off, and still be able to afford a good upbringing for more than one child.

With chinese population already declining and Indian Fertility rate dropping below 2,1 I doubt we are ever going to hit 10 billion like UN projects

A aging/declining population does not have to be a crises. The problem is that we have built our systems around continued growth and freak out if we don't grow. Based on China's demographic trend they have maybe a 15-20 year bubble period and then it would stabilize at a lower population level. Lower population would be less of a strain on their natural resources. (same applies to U.S. but we have chosen immigration to make sure we continue growth instead)

fewer than...

They shrank from 800 mill 1978 to 600 mill now which was the meaning. Cruise missils destroying dams would reduce with hundreds of millions more.

The reason why China doesn't have immigration is that it was simply a competitive society, there weren't enough jobs, schools, and other services for everyone. They also have a hard time giving their local population residency. Also, it's not an English-speaking country (and immigrants tend to want to go to English-speaking countries or have English as their second language). Obviously, any country would provide for its native/local population first before resorting to any immigration. Japan over the recent years had to resort to getting immigrants (that won't happen for China too soon).

It’s likely been going on for some years

There are 8B ppl. We dont need high birth rates, rather than that every country should focus on increasing life expectancies and longer working lives. Automation is also going to remove a lot of jobs from the market.

Interesting times!

And that's just the decline that they ADMITTED. Chinese numbers are notoriously doctored.

Love the Eggplant in decline 😂😂😂

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't the taxation put on individual workers quite low in China, with income tax standing for 5% of the government's annual income. The ccp (from what I've read,) is quite reluctant to inforce individual taxation due to the cost of implementing it and the additional cost of managing such a system.) I believe the majority of government income derives from the taxation of major businesses. In that case, you could argue that the lack of workers mostly will have an effect on the larger firms situated in china and through them, the chinese economy. The difference is small but ultimately important. As long as the major companies can continue business through foreign workers or other means, the chinese economy or governmental income will not be hit as hard as for example other european countries in relation to a lack of workers. I'm not an expert by any means, but it's just a thought.

Wonderful. The less the better❤

CCP: "Well, well, well, if it isn't the consequences of my own actions."

Well the one child policy was a major factor in China’s demographic crisis their is another factor and that is China’s rapid urbanization and industrialization done by the CCP after the China civil war which moved millions of people out of rural countryside and into the cities which had two long term effects one it turn China into the economy powerhouse it is today and two it caused their birth rate to decline because living in the city encourages people to have less kids and one child policy only made that worse remember 2 full generations worth of children weren’t born which doesn’t help that fact the China is deal with a aging population with no young people to replace them

I wonder if there was such a huge gap between those incharge and those who actually do that the CCP actually believed its own lies and acted accordingly

1:44 from this point on you're completely off. Most evidence currently suggests that fertility rate decline would have dropped the same degree without the One Child Policy. The OCP was not the biggest cause, as earlier policies like the Later, Longer, Fewer policy started over a decade before the OCP had already started crushing China's fertility rate. The scholars measuring demographic rates in China currently have no consensus, but most of them accept that China's fertility rate decline would have fallen like this anyway. Like Korea, Singapore, Taiwan, and Japan's all did. The OCP is not the root of the problem. It's just one contributing factor. Source: I'm a demographer and just did a research paper/ lit review on the OCP and its impact on Chinese demography. While it had no evidence of correlation between the decline in birth rates, the OCP did contribute to one big problem. That is the gender imbalance. The OCP encouraged more sex-selective abortions, thus why there were 4 decades of killing baby girls (since most rural areas didn't have the great healthcare to kill them pre-birth). Massive underreporting, as well as cultural tendencies that already favored men before the OCP, all added to this problem. So if you want to say that the Chinese demographic problem has its roots in the OCP, you shouldn't reduce the complex issue by claiming that it's what caused birth rate decline when that's just not true. It's okay not to have a complex understanding, but it's not okay to mis-inform people by claiming a reality that isn't true. The studies I looked at showed that the researchers could get no significant results from regression analyses to show that the OCP had an impact on fertility rates. -Anyway! Just felt the need to correct you if you're going to claim something untrue and present it as fact. Edit: And now that I finish the video I have to dislike it because you didn't even bring up the gender imbalance, and that is the definitive problem with Chinese demography and what makes their demographic problem so much worse than the other East Asian nations around them. Those countries also have problems attracting immigrants (or just doesn't like accepting them). Those countries also have aging populations and shrinking workforces, stagnating economies, etc. But China has the biggest problem and the worst risk of a rapid decline because there are 30 million plus more men than women in the country. This gender disparity is what makes the Chinese demographic issue complex and so important, and it's why the OCP is a clear example of how government birth-control measures can be catastrophic. You ignored the actual problems of Chinese demography and pretty much just recycled a video format for Japanese population decline but for China. They have very different demographic situations. Many of the same issues, yes, but very different contexts. Actually frustrating to see a topic I'm very invested in get reduced so poorly to the point that you ignored the main issues and pretty much just got the whole idea of it wrong. Titling your video: How Bad is China's Demographic Crisis, then leaving out the thing that makes their crisis so much worse than everyone else's is just about the silliest thing you could do as a news channel, and it's disappointing to see.

Welcome to Earth youngster with global warming, wars, famine, a cost of living which is insane and a world that cannot get along. Lets be honest who would want kids in this climate?

Let's hope really, really bad!

One Child Policy was a ChenYun policy. The guy is nuts, I also blame Jiang and Hu for not doing anything about it.

You should talk to Peter Ziehan.

Lol the thumbnail

The figures are so much worse than it appears. China has a severe gender imbalance (as does India), there will be 15+ million more men than woman in the next 15 to 20 years. Added to this is the fact that the figures are massaged. Directives are sent from central government to all the regions to increase the number of children being born. It's in the interest of the regions to lie. The regional bureaucrats will not get promoted if they fail to hit the targets. Also, they get more money from central government for their schools and hospitals. The man ethnic group in China are the Han which make up about 92% of the population. The non-ethnic Chinese were allowed to have as many children as they wished. Taking this into account I suggest that the birthrate is below 1 and possibly substantially below 1.

6:06 not really its economy but more it's people

Does come give some sort of pension to their elderly? Could you explain that before using the term "pensioners"? For instance, you couldn't use that term for American elderly.

I think Americans don’t really realize the importance of this because of immigration Something like china practically needs people to keep it going

alternatively to the taxation model described in the video, you can tax the rich instead of the workers

The problem is 1.3 billion people getting old and nobody of working age to take their place. Their next bio attack better have a higher casualty rate.

Perfect thumbnail 👌

This is a really well-informed video. It's true that there will be consequences to population decline, but instead of freaking out about it and assuming the only way forward is encouraging people to have more children, there are ways to mitigate the problems, e.g. investing more in a welfare state for the elderly, or immigration (which China has almost none of), while staving off the negative effects of runaway population growth (e.g. climate change, biodiversity loss, the increasing strain it puts on nearly every governmental and industrial system, etc.)

Those fuzzy moving backgrounds on your infographics are terrible, please take them away!

Didn't you do a video last year about the crisis from the world population reaching 8 billion?...

Also Chinese like korean and japanese is very hard to learn for lot of people, and on the other hand not a lot of people there (China) understand English, so immigration (from countries out of south east asia) is not going to replace the aging work force any time soon

The biggest issue is that the older generation (aka boomers) was too large worldwide. This has forced the population to skyrocket to an unsustainable level. Now the current generation are more limited in terms of resources (due to the increase of care resources needed by the older generation who has largely stopped being economically productive) are having less children as a consequence. It is an issue effecting many nations with Japan being in a particularly difficult situation as a result. There is no easy solution, quite simply we all just have to bare with it and do the best we can until the excess population levels decline and the population in general normalises. Sorry if I sound harsh, it's just the reality of things that the world has too large a human population for it to support in a realistic long term sense.

Lucky them. I wish my country (Australia) was shrinking in population.

Artificial Intellegence: Allow us to introduce ourselves

The problem is a lot heftier and faster than you think. Yes demographic problems are usually slow, in China though, because of the 1-child policy, the demographic piramid is a lot more tilted. We are looking about 1% less working population every year for the next 20 years. This means, -1% gdp just from this factor. Alone, this wouldn't be a huge problem, but coupled that China is also transitioning into a developed country, the "easy economic fruits" are already picked. Therefore it will not be a 8%-1%, but rather a 3%-1%. Making it much more relevant. Additionally, like TLDR said, it does not only mean less working people, thus income. But also more people requiring money, thus more social payments. This again, adds a huge amount of money outflow. All the while, the annual additional debt China builts is 3-4%. China really NEEDS to grow, to keep the debt on a acceptable level. But they CAN'T, because of the demographics and the "economic catchup" mechanics. And making the local economy stronger, doesn't really help with the debt problem. All this together means one thing: China already missed it's chance to become THE global superpower.

No one mentioned that lowered birth rates also signify a rapidly developing country. More education, equal rights for women, etc...

finally!!! China needs fewer people!!!

That's why centralized leadership without checks and balances.

China still has hundreds of millions of very poor citizens that haven't connected to the modern economy yet. Most of the amazing development of recent decades has been in the far east, and western China has been slower to develop. Also about immigration, there has been a huge amount of migration inside the country, so eternal immigration to the US probably isn't a good analogy. A better comparison might be the US to the east coast of China.

One thing people seem to forget is that automation and AI will improve the productivity per individual by the largest margin since the industrialization in Europe. If current 2.2+ children being born, it would lead to mass unemployment in the future. While we can't bank the entire economy on the hopes automation and AI will be as revolutionary as some analysts claim. It's clear it will have a great impact on the number of jobs available. As such, low birth figures aren't necessarily bad, unless you're a imperialistic country hoping to win WW3.

A seamless transition into a scaremongering Nord VPN sales pitch, tone it down maybe.

Not the Eggplant!!

No big problem Even if they drop to 1 billion still more than enough and don't forget robots workforce in the future so np at all

Isn't that a good thing for how we don't want a higher population knowing how much harm humanity does to ecosystems?

They're running out of eggplants???

Which is better for you, to watch you on here or nebula?

Well, one child policy was introduced in 1980 and it means that the biggest amount of Chinese people are aged around 45 years old. Chinese are retiring at 50/55 for women (depending on type of job) and 60 for men. It means that China will grow for around 10 more years and after that, their economy will collapse, and suprisingly, that's no exagerration.

The question isn't how bad is it, the question is how bad is it for everyone else. This places a lot of pressure on Xi to do whatever military action he wants to do sooner.

FEWER!!!!

Why did they not take the pension money, invest it and pay it back out? Also invest some taxes into a sovereign wealth fund so that can be used later?

China needs to accept immigrants from Myanmar, Burmese is a related language to Chinese and people from there follow Buddhism like many Chinese, so they have quite a lot of similarities

Immigration is usually not a great solution to population shrinkage anyways, since after a while their births just match the people already there. Plus, in nation states like France or Germany cases of immigrants not feeling at home and getting violent aren’t rare. And China’s basically a han-nation state so it could certainly be an issue as well

Hopefully it will solve problems of having too many ppl.

In Germany a big part of the population is about 40ish years old. This will lead to big problems once those people retire and is a big political topic here so I'm not surprised that this is going on in other places of the world as well

Whilst China's population decline is very bad, the problem is the lack of productivity growth in China. The US's biggest strength isn't strong demographics, it's strong worker productivity. If China's workforce shrinks, but labour productivity does not increase, China's economy will collapse within 5 years. If productivity actually increases per worker, China's economy will manage the decline in population.

Correction: Fewer workers means higher profits, not higher wages. Even in China.

The west survived loosing its population throughout ww2 and other countries with relatively advanced economies did the same. I am sure that China can reorient itself. The thing that worries me is that CCP starts to look a lot like United Russia, and thats not good.

No war 1,4 Billion in China. In you add the cities it is more likely 900 Million.

Longer lifespans for seniors have been a disaster, in any nation. They hardly contribute anything and I doubt young workers like the idea of supporting the retirement of older citizens who vote against the young people's interests anyway. Why should I have to support people who keep voting against my generations best interests? I know it sounds cruel but they quickly become a burden on society. So many people living longer lives really isn't a good thing in the long run, that just means more people taking up resources while not contributing anything in return.

All the world should enter into a one child policy. We will have better productovity, better wages and less enviromental pressures

Blame it on the tofu

It is a good thing that there are less people. You don't need many workers when you can automate, and less people is good for the environment.

as if there were not enough humans on this planet :)

Re: immigration - Chinese Hans, and specifically the CCP are horribly xenophobic, much worse than the Japanese. It's kind of understandable due to the multiple invasions into China throughout history, but it still isn't a good look and unlike the Japanese - that are doing much better, thank you - they have no intention of shaking that habit.

Low birthrate? Too many old people? Hello COVID.

Cool

Automation and Immigration are two key solutions here. Also, the housing market needs to be deflated, and the Welfare State leveled up imo In all Developed Countries it shouldnt be this hard to start a family. And it shouldnt be a crisis that our elderly are retiring from work 🤔 We have the means to still prosper

Most Racist Countries in the World (UN World Population Review 2022)*: 1.India 2.Lebanon 3.Bahrain 4.Libya 5.Egypt 6.Philippines 7.Kuwait 8.Palestine 9.South Africa 10.South Korea *Full survey results below India ranks as the most racist of the countries included in the study. Located in southern Asia, India is the second-most-populous country on Earth, with roughly 1.3 billion people. According to the surveys, the country's residents display considerable intolerance for people with darker skin, whether they are of foreign descent (particularly African) or simply darker-skinned Indians. India has little immigration and few international residents. As a result, most of its people are of Indian descent themselves. This detail is considered to be a major contributing factor to racism in India. When one is unaccustomed to seeing or interacting with people of different races, it is often more difficult to integrate with someone of a different nationality or ethnicity. This notion is borne out in the survey results. Approximately 43.6% of all Indians who took the survey said that they would not be comfortable with neighbors who were of a different culture, ethnicity, or race. 64.3% of Indian participants also reported that they were either discriminated against or had witnessed discrimination unfold in their home country.

Robots are replacing people.

Less people = more sustainable. Why do you have to look at it as a crisis?

Its India's time now to replace China. India has got everything that China has, from a large work force to a politically stable government that has the people's mandate unlike China's communist rule. Infrstructure has improved drastically in the last few years. Large investors are already investing huge into India's economy and its only gonna benefit the whole world to be India's friend and move on from China's hegemony.

One benefit China has with its aging population vs the US is that older Chinese folks grew up with lower living standards, so expect fewer resources given to them per capita. Meanwhile older Americans grew up with *higher* living standards than younger Americans, so even if the ratio of workers to seniors is better the resource demands per worker might well be higher.

China’s sex imbalance is 1.3, not 1.11. This is why China’s fertility rate needs to be adjusted accordingly since fertility rate assumes a balance of 1:1 ration between sexes. Taking a 30% imbalance favoring males in China, their real fertility rate should be 0.8.

funny how Joe Rogan has Peter Zeihan on his podcast and how everyone is talking about China demographic problem lol!

It will be hard for them to weather the storm. Unlike Japan, China seeks political, Financial and Military world dominance. This means serious confrontation with western countries that China is dependent on. Japan is willing to base industrial operations outside of Japan with a largely non Japanese workforce. They had to do this for demographic reasons. China’s culture will not alllow them to do this. Soon they will not have enough young people to operate their industry.