How China Miscalculated Its Way to a Baby Bust: A missile scientist used mathematical models to push the nation’s one-child policy. Its legacy is proving hard to shake.
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.
The rapid shift under way today wasn’t projected by the architects of China’s one-child policy—one of the biggest social experiments in history, instituted in 1980. At the time, governments around the world feared overpopulation would hold back economic growth. A Moscow-trained missile scientist led the push for China’s policy, based on tables of calculations that applied mathematical models used to calculate rocket trajectories to population growth.
Four decades later, China is aging much earlier in its development than other major economies did. The shift to fewer births and more elderly citizens threatens to hold back economic growth. In a generation that grew up without siblings, young women are increasingly reluctant to have children—and there are fewer of them every year. Beijing is at a loss to change the mindset brought about by the policy.
Births in China fell by more than 500,000 last year, according to recent government data, accelerating a population drop that started in 2022. Officials cited a quickly shrinking number of women of childbearing age—more than three million fewer than a year earlier—and acknowledged “changes in people’s thinking about births, postponement of marriage and childbirth.”
Some researchers argue the government underestimates the problem, and the population began to shrink even earlier.
Fewer births is good news - a solution rather than a problem. There needs to be fewer humans if we're to avoid cooking ourselves and sending other species into extinction. We should all be so lucky as China to have this 'problem'.
Good news everyone! We all DO have this problem... It's just most obvious in China because they industrialized and urbanized more rapidly than anyone else AND had this stupid legal policy.
Industrialization, urbanization and improving healthcare also significantly drops births, to below the replacement rate of 2.1. The whole world is on this path, with China, Japan, South Korea, Germany and Russia leading the way.
And before anyone thinks different, the US is on this path too. Our population is still growing because of immigration, but birth rate is well below replacement value and dropping
Instead of dying at an appropriate age, they just keep aging. We need to stop spending so much on living longer. Maybe put more into making dying more comfortable so it's not as frightening. For instance COVID has killed off a lot of old people but it's a horrible way to go. Alzheimer's also, we can't cure it, so do we really want to prolong the agony?
As a nation industrializes and gains access better medicine, the survival rate infants and mothers go up. This leads to a birthrate increase.
That better medicine also includes effective birth control. As birth control becomes accepted, the birth rate naturally falls off.
The next thing that causes a birthrate fall off is the mood of the potential parents. If they think their children will have as good a life or better then they had, then those people will have children. If they think their children will have a worse life, they will not.
India is still in the process of industrialization. Birth control is not widely accepted, and parental optimism is high.
In China birth control is more accepted, and currently parental optimism is low.
Trade Russia 100k Uighur men for a tract of land containing women after you already sent all their husband's and young men to Ukraine. You get women and more territory. Russia gets men and more men to fight.