Cross-posted from: https://feddit.de/post/8051008
As a result of the one-child policy, China’s fertility rate was well below 2 children per woman for more than three decades.
At the same time, according to the Beijing-based YuWa Population Research Institute, the average cost of raising a child to the age of 18 in China stood at 485,000 yuan ($76,629) for a first child in 2019, almost seven times China’s per capita GDP that year ($10,144). The financial burden has many families thinking twice before adding members to their family.
The combination of more retirees and a shrinking working-age population means fewer people have to support a larger share of the population, putting pressure on Beijing’s health care and pension programs.
The health care and pension system are not Beijing’s, they are those of individual cities and provinces. The systems are highly localized, it’s be like as if states in the US ran Medicare and Social Security. This means it’s huge problem for poor interior provinces and probably manageable for rich costal ones.
Benefits and services from such programs are limited to legal residents of an area but most people in the most productive economic areas are migrants and are not entitled to the benefits.
Without major restructuring of these systems, hundreds of millions or retiring migrant workers are going to overwhelm their home provinces systems.
Could a decrease in population be a factor leading to China having a lower environmental impact?
Less people and lower GDP would probably mean lower energy consumption (or at least slower growth), which China produces in large part with coal. Less overall consumption in food and other products could lessen environmental impact in other ways.
This article focus on GDP. The earth isn’t shrinking because human population shrink. If the pie is earth’s carrying capacity, it means a bit more pie for each inhabitant.
And this doesn’t even touch on the effects an economic downturn could have when couples are already choosing not to have kids for economic reasons.
This could turn into a negative-growth spiral if Beijing doesn’t figure out how to incentivize families to have more (but not too many!) kids soon.
Even better: let’s create an economic system that doesn’t require endless population growth
I’m not sure who the “us” in “let’s” is, but I don’t think Beijing is considering any systemic changes right now. I’m all for changing away from Capitalist systems, but in the meantime most Chinese citizens are in pretty economically-precarious positions, and I’m certainly not going to vote, from my safe position in another country, for their country to collapse in hopes it would rebuild into something better. I’ll hold my ‘let it all burn down so we can rebuild into [preferably a loosely-associated series of Mutualist cooperatives]’ advocacy for my own country.