Also on the Nature website:
When will China’s population, the world’s largest, peak? It’s a point that demographers say is fast approaching. The country’s health department announced this month that the population will peak and then begin to shrink in the next three years. Others think it could happen much sooner.
“The turning point is right around the corner,” says Yong Cai, a demographer at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. “I won’t be surprised if population decline is reported at the end of this year.”
After years of falling birth rates, the National Health Commission wrote in an article published online in early August that China’s population growth has slowed significantly and will start to decline between 2023 and 2025. According to an estimate published last month in a peer-reviewed Chinese journal, Social Science Journal1, Wei Chen, a demographer at Renmin University in Beijing, concluded that, on the basis of national census data released in 2020, China’s population might have already peaked in 2021 (see ‘Projected peak’).
Here's the graph:
This is what I'm been saying for awhile. We just have to hold out, be strong, avoid them capturing surrounding islands, and then we get to see an amazing China.
ReplyDeleteSuccess breeds success. But success also breeds failure; In that China, by creating this awesome system of terraced hills, allowed for perpetual over-population. A China of 400 million people will be a really good country. It will be a kinder gentler country. We don't want to be weak in the face of their current power. But at the same time we don't want the deep state, or crazy Americans, running amok and starting wars with these guys.
If four families create a single grandchild and he gets killed fighting the Indians, thats now a really big deal. Thats like the extinction of four family lines. Already we see this logic in play with our pushback against the Chinese bullying actually leading to results. Thats a massive turnaround from Mao's time where human life has actually become valuable to the leadership. Well maybe not when it comes to some of their minorities. But certainly with the Han mainstream.
Plus ethnic Chinese are becoming a vehicle for pushing forward the human project insofar as extending some of the achievements of the West. You go to the Juilliard you are likely to see a lot of Chinese kids mastering classical music. The leader himself is a Goethe fanatic. Just so important not to do to these people what we did to the Germans. Make feeble excuses to lure them into a war so as to destroy them, creating perpetual excuses and lies that stay with us for decades and centuries into the future.
A China that bottoms out at 400 million, with all that rail and port wealth in place, and still with those terraced hills and desert reclamation; thats a brilliant high wage country. We don't want either idiot pacifists, or neocon loony toons, getting in the way of that future. We want to be strong and we want to be friends. We want to be strong friends. If not with the commies themselves, at least with their people.