I don't think Americans realize how this "demography screws China" narrative is yet another self-soothing fiction they tell themselves in a long tradition of American wishful thinking about China's inevitable downfall.
https://x.com/RnaudBertrand/status/1942837621849538816
I don't think Americans realize how this "demography screws China" narrative is yet another self-soothing fiction they tell themselves in a long tradition of American wishful thinking about China's inevitable downfall.
Just look at basic math: there are today about 11 million births a year in China (10.4m in 2022, 11.1m in 2023, 10.9m in 2024). That's the equivalent of the entire population of LA, Chicago, Houston, Phoenix and Philadelphia - combined - born each year in China.
This is compared to about 3.5 million births a year in the US, a ratio of 3.14. Which means that, already for the rest of the 21st century, you can see that any American fantasy about "waiting out" China's demographic collapse is complete nonsense: it's already baked in.
Today's 11 million babies will enter the workforce in 25 years and will be going into retirement at the very end of the century. And, given the trends, they will be far better educated and productive than the average employee in China's workforce today, many of whom didn't even go to high school.
Sure, there will be a high dependency ratio (many retired folks per working age folks) but this is also often misunderstood: we assume that retirees are entirely dependent on their working age descendants when it's not quite the case in China. Actually often the contrary is true: in Chinese culture, grandparents almost systematically live with their kids and grandkids and provide crucial unpaid labor - childcare, household management, and family business support - that actually enables more working-age adults to participate in the formal economy rather than being a "burden" on it. Also, they're typically net contributors to household wealth through property assets and savings.
So even for this, this is again a case of projecting our own fragmented, nuclear family model onto a society with fundamentally different intergenerational relationships and economic arrangements.
posted by Satish Sharma at
12:27
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