Comment by zadkey

Comment by zadkey 3 days ago

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I don't trust China's population numbers at all. Officially before the one child policy they were at 800 million. After 30 years of 1 child policy somehow they were at 1.2 billion. The math isn't mathing. How do you have explosive population growth when birth control is brutally enforced?

The official fertility rates for that period was 1.3. For reference: 2.1 is the replacement rate.

If anything their total population went down during one child policy.

sapiogram 3 days ago

> Officially before the one child policy they were at 800 million. After 30 years of 1 child policy somehow they were at 1.2 billion. The math isn't mathing.

Even if I take your numbers at face value, it is absolutely possible for this math to math. To simplify massively, if the average person dies at 80 years old, the population growth today depends on the number of births 80 years ago, compared to today. Not 30 years ago. The population may have grown massively between 30 and 80 years ago, so that the absolute number of births remains high, despite a low birth rate.

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  • pixl97 3 days ago

    Yep, people don't understand moving averages with a wide range. The old population getting older massively changes demographics. You start looking like Japan where a huge portion of the population is above retirement age.

    And this fits for China where the standard of living has massively increased. What would throw off most Americans is that in 1962 the average life expectancy in China was only 50 years old, and has increased to roughly 78 today. 28 additional years of life is huge and it was so rapid that it would create a massive increase in population.

    This also reverses causality on the one child population rule. They didn't add the rule because their population was huge at the time, it was added because increased life expectancy with nothing else would have increased their population now to something like 1.7 to 2 billion.

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  • snowwrestler 3 days ago

    And inverse is also true, so that China’s population is currently shrinking and aging, despite the “1 child” policy being abandoned a decade ago.

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3rodents 3 days ago

The one child policy only really mattered in the cities, rural China had different rules. There is also no incentive for China to lie, quite the opposite, underreporting their population would be a boon for their success on the global stage: imagine if they are achieving what they achieve, with half as many people?

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  • IcyWindows 3 days ago

    Many companies setup branches and sent IP to China in exchange for access to those billion consumers. Fewer consumers means a company might target India, etc. instead of China first.

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  • empressplay 3 days ago

    Yes, except that China also uses its population as a military threat. It going down would take away some of the impact of that. So it always needs to go up, to reinforce it.

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    • 3rodents 3 days ago

      Does it? Russia has 1/10th the purported population of China, lost most of their military aged men in a conflict that has exposed Russia's supposed military might as a work of fiction and yet the west remains scared senseless of Russia because of the nuclear threat. China has nuclear weapons, whether they have 10 million or 100 million men they can send to the frontlines to absorb bullets is irrelevant to their national security.

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      • cyberax 3 days ago

        Europe is right to panic. It exposed that Europe was relying only on the US and the general world order. And the US turned out to be unreliable.

        Imagine this scenario: tomorrow the Ukrainian front collapses, and Russia rapidly captures a significant part of Ukraine. Then the Ukrainian government gets Venezuellaed by Putin (maybe with Trump's help), and the new government becomes loyal to Moscow.

        Then a new charismatic military leader deposes Putin and forms an alliance with the Ukrainian army against Europe. With rhetoric like: "Look, Europe just used you. They never gave you enough weapons to win against Russia but just enough for a stalemate. They were giving Putin hundreds of billions for gas and oil, too afraid of cold weather while you were dying on the front lines. They hoped to kill both of our countries. Now let's join together and show them how the war should be fought properly". And then a battle-hardened 500000-strong army marches towards Kaliningrad, locking Poland and the Baltics behind the front lines.

        It's an exceedingly unlikely scenario. But not impossible. And it's not the _only_ similar scenario anymore. There's also Turkey with a dictator dreaming about writing his name in history books. Serbia is getting more anti-EU.

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    • pixl97 3 days ago

      Mostly in the past before they were well industrialized. When you had India with over a billion people as a threat, it was a good measure. Now most of the surrounding countries have fallen below population replacement rate excess population can cause issues with economic growth in places resources and space are constrained.

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sct202 3 days ago

Just to put some numbers into perspective. China and Europe have roughly the same amount of land, and Europe has a population of 744m (vs your est of <800m for China). So like idk how that would make sense for them to be the same range of population when China seems way more overcrowded.

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  • wasabi991011 3 days ago

    > So like idk how that would make sense for them to be the same range of population when China seems way more overcrowded.

    Different population distributions. In particular, the population of China is concentrated in the eastern half of the country, with very few people living in the western half. Contrast to Europe, which from what I understand is more evenly spread out.

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throw5t4346 3 days ago

When I went to China for work, over half the people I met there had siblings. So I really wonder how effective the one child policy was. And these are people in their 30-40s.

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