China’s Population Continues to Collapse

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The size of China’s baby population in China is expected to fluctuate but will remain at around 10 million for the foreseeable future according to He Dan, director of the China Population And Development Research Centre, a think tank affiliated with the National Health Commission.

Births in China could drop below 8 million this year, setting a record low and further clouding the country’s gloomy demographic outlook, according to a leading medical academic Qiao Jie. The Peking University medical dean says more must be done to boost female fertility, with greater investments needed to increase research into disease prevention for women and children.

He Dan is quoted in the South China Morning Post is deluded into thinking that China would be able to sustain a population of over 1 billion by 2100. If the number of babies per year is 10 million per year for 80 years this would be 800 million. If the number of babies per year is 8 million per year for 80 years this would be 640 million. However, holding the number of babies stable would be difficult when the number of fertile women collapses.

There are currently 160 million potentially fertile women in the age range of 16-34. This will drop to 130 million potentially fertile women in 20 years. These are the girls 0-15 and the added 4 million female babies if there are 8 million babies per year. In 15 years after that, there would only be 70-80 million fertile women. The babies per year could drop to 3-4 million per year if those fertile women were having babies as the same rate as the women today. the number of female babies would drop to less than 2 million per year before 2058. If life expectancy was still 85 years then the population would be less than 400 million in 2100. If life expectancy was 20 years longer than there could be 200 million more people.

The 7-8 million per year would be one-third the number of babies born around 1990. The Chinese people born 30-34 years ago average about 22-23 million per year.

Nextbigfuture believes the population issues are urgent to sustain stable levels of fertile women. The urgent plan is to rapidly increase incentives every month until there are replacement level babies in a month. In Japan, this is about 120,000 per month and in China it is 1.5 million per month instead of 700,000 per month. The incentives need to stay at that level to sustain the replacement level of babies every month. The incentives can be reduced or modified after the data indicates adjustments can be made to be more efficient while sustaining the mathematically correct level.

Robin Hanson has come up with a plan to use the massive national debt of most countries to fund the large enough payments to make $300,000 to $700,000 payments to encourage couples to have enough babies to stop population decline.

35 thoughts on “China’s Population Continues to Collapse”

  1. Well, historically, any species that overpopulates eventually comes up against something that takes care of that in a hurry. Usually it’s disease or food shortages, so we kind of came up with the idea that since we could use our brains to keep these somewhat at bay, that this couldn’t apply to us. As it is, a little depopulation might be manageable with automation and other tools. I don’t really imagine we are in any threat of going extinct if we can survive climate change and economic turmoil, even if our numbers fall to one tenth (or even a bit less) of what they are at our peak.

  2. Basically every element of this problem reduces to a consequence of refusing to cure aging. Likewise every suggested solution is worse than curing aging, in practice and ethically.

    • You say “refuse to cure aging” as though we had a cure for aging on hand, and just weren’t using it. Curing aging is speculative, we don’t yet know how to do it, and for all that we’d like to do it, we might not crack that problem for decades yet, or even centuries.

      There was a time when you could honestly have said we were “refusing” to cure aging, by the way. That time ended not so long ago, we’re genuinely working on the problem now. But we have no idea how long it’s going to take to accomplish it.

      Even if we cracked it 20 years from now, by then we wouldn’t just need to STOP aging, we’d need to be able to reverse it, (Including menopause.) because so much of the population would be old by then.

      The analogy I use is a plane most of whose engines have quit, and it’s flying over water, or a mountain range. It’s going to crash!

      Does the fact that we could theoretically build a parachute spare us the need to dump every ounce of unneeded weight and mount a crash effort to get some of those engines running again? No, it does not, because you’re probably going to crash before you get that thing sewn up. You at least need the plane in a shallow glide to give time for sewing!

      • The actual non philosophical reason is people like you all around the world treating it as a catch 22

        You are the equivalent of people who dismissed the possibilities that are almost realized today with SpaceX Spaceship payload dimensions and prices.

        Except worse because while spaceship is a big deal, it is not arguably the single most important thing that humans need to turn the page on thousands of years of atrocious and unnecessary self destruction.

        People refuse to entertain the idea. And that refusal is the stopper. Not its actual feasibility.

        • You’re actually saying this to a guy who joined a cryonics outfit in the 80’s, knew Ettinger personally, and whose copy of The Immortalist by Alan Harrington is old and well read. Oh, and helped found a chapter of the L-5 society.

          I really wish Alan had lived to see death hunted down like a dog. Took long enough before people with money took his advice. But, it’s not going to come in time to solve the birth dearth! I’ve watched one approach after another to slowing aging fail to do much, and if we’ve finally got the bio sciences chops to start making progress, it’s not going to happen overnight, and the birth dearth is NOW.

  3. [ “proportion of the population who bother reproducing drops”

    Is it related to deminishing returns on energy sources efficiency (EROEI)?
    ‘https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_energy_gain#/media/File:Net_energy_cliff.gif’
    Only (known usable) technologies like nuclear power supply, storage options like compressed air storage, pumped water storage, (almost) lithium (or the like) batteries or future wind power (with optimized production methods) are above or nearly coequal to ~1900-1960’s fossil oil extraction efficiencies (~40 on EOREI, and e.g. era of space exploration started, because of cheap ‘excess’ energy available(?) ). Photovoltaic’s would need more efficient production methods for getting into that numbers (even with being cheap for power supply while weather conditions are suitable)?

    We need more resources (material and work force human/robotic and therefore bigger share of GDP for energy provision (?) ) for getting same amount of energy provided turning into electricity, heating and eventually latent heat (increasing entropy), so reproduction is on a lower priority therefore (meant towards a statistical perspective/summary, not on individual levels or depending organizational precautions)? ]

  5. Sadly, I don’t think there’s much prospect of the democracies doing anything effective until we’re in an utter crisis situation.

    Encouraging births is an investment in the future, and the thing about investments in the future is that they reduce your standard of living today, they require the capacity to defer rewards.

    Individuals can defer rewards. Democratic governments can’t, because the politician who attempts it ends up replaced. That’s why we’re caught in this debt cycle to begin with: Once buying votes with borrowed money was on the table, anybody who wouldn’t do it ended up on the outside looking in.

    Worse, as the proportion of the population who bother reproducing drops, anything you might do to encourage reproduction becomes more politically disadvantageous, because a larger percentage of the voters see no immediate gain from it.

    And the section of the population most responsive to financial incentives are the people you’d least want birthing and raising the next generation. So getting a quality next generation is extra expensive, but doing anything about this issue is very politically fraught because it will offend those deemed undesirable procreators. It stinks of eugenics because, honestly, it IS eugenics.

    So, do NOT expect democratic governments to solve this. They’re going to focus on fighting over the shrinking supply of immigrants from the few countries still reproducing over replacement. The immediate cost is lower, and they see political benefits to be had from ‘electing a new people’.

    What we need is a private sector response, because only the private sector can defer costs effectively. And better figure on it being needed when things get really bad.

    Maybe start investing in androids with social AI and uterine replicators to cut the opportunity cost of birthing and raising children. I sometimes think that’s what Japan is ultimately counting on to save them.

    • [ “That’s why we’re caught in this debt cycle to begin with: Once buying votes with borrowed money”

      ~comparable to (told, average) stagnating IQ levels (or lower advancing rates, depends on point of view, society’s classes and priorities/resources) (?)

      Do we identify hidden (racist and/or) segregating journalism, what counteracts democratic necessity for variety and diversity (means, elections always need humane (mathematically a standard or normal distribution) alternatives to choose from). Do we counteract identified inhumane journalism through expanding resources for masses (discussed priorities and how (to be re)presented?), therefore this kind of inhumane regressions (dictatorship) is not attractive to most?
      Do we identify companies (and their excessive financial/goods profiteers) creating law to their advantage only?
      Do we identify (hidden) abuse of (political) authority/intelligence service? ]

    • What we need is a private sector response, because only the private sector can defer costs effectively. And better figure on it being needed when things get really bad.
      ->
      The private sector cares about money today. Not healthy and free population nor longevity, but planned obsolescence and market capture. Nevermind helping flip the tables on all of history by ending involuntary morbidity and death.

      • Do you actually work in industry? Of course industry is capable of deferring benefits in return for them being larger tomorrow; That’s practically the dictionary definition of capitalism! Our whole private sector economy rests on it.

        A number of governmentally imposed incentives have, I’ll admit, reduced the time horizon for this. But it’s still a a factor in the private sector that’s largely absent from government, which does the opposite: Moves benefits forward, trading it for higher costs later.

        To expand on my suggestion: Robotics is approaching the point where android nannies are going to be feasible. An android with the capabilities necessary to serve as a nannie would also be capable of doing cooking and cleaning, and the social AI and expressive face necessary for raising children who don’t end up pathological is 95% of the way to a sex-bot.

        So, if you had a package that included a nannie/cook/maid/sex-bot, a uterine replicator, (Or time share on such.) and a gamete subscription, you’d have everything necessary for a single person to have children without suffering much in the way of opportunity costs, while securing valuable ancillary benefits. Basically a store bought live at home spouse, without the risk of divorce!

        How many single people would be happy to reproduce if they had somebody to do it with, and it didn’t get in the way of their lives? I dare say plenty. And when you factor in the single guys being rendered as capable of reproduction as the single women, it would double the pool.

        Now, can industry produce such a product, and price it low enough that it would sell in the necessary numbers? I think that’s what we have to aim at. Given the numerous benefits, we’re talking something that could probably sell even if it cost as much as a modest house.

        The only role for government here is getting out of the way, and maybe providing a tax benefit similar to the mortgage interest deduction. It’s not going to be easy, though: Getting out of the way is NOT something government likes doing.

        • It is true that private enterprise (some of it, at least) can plan ahead. There are many with the foresight to get involved in K-12 education in order to create/find potential employees even before they go to college. Dropping it back to birth is going to require some really big companies though, and governments don’t like things that get so big they might challenge their authority.

          At some point, not soon, obviously, I believe it will be possible to create a perfect duplicate of a person (whether human, AI, or some combination). At which point a company in need of, say, a petroleum engineer, might approach one and offer to pay a large sum for the right to create a copy of them, in exchange for an employment contract for the copy (who might or might not be getting some of the initial payment for permitting it to be created).

          In this way, I would expect most people throughout whatever volume of the galaxy we come to occupy might eventually be copies of people (or copies of copies) who existed just prior to this practice beginning.

          It would certainly help explain continued human existence in spite of the more disquieting implications of Gott’s Copernican Hypothesis.

  6. Does anyone find it odd that for China Brian recommends increasing reproductive rates of the native population but for white countries he recommends importing large numbers of foreigners?

    • I also recommend increasing the birth rates of white population countries and all countries. It just happens that the Asian countries are having population collapse first. Japan is already over 30 years into it. I dilute the messages if I have to copy and paste 2-5 pages of the nuanced plans for each country into every 1 page blog post. I have fundamentally said all countries need to look at their monthly birthrates and increase funding or other pro-baby policies to reach at least breakeven for sustainment. the US is at 1.6 TFR for the natives, so this means increasing the monthly rate by 30%+. I have had various articles talking about the entire world and all humanity heading to extinction if this is not solved. We need to look at his city by city as cities are the most anti-baby and anti-family places.

      • More effective and humane would be to get better results from the population we have.
        To be brutally frank: ~1/4 of human beings are a net negative for society. They’re either criminals, drug or alcohol addicted to the point of being unable to provide for themselves, physically/mentally impaired – whether through their own doing or not – to the point they can’t provide for themselves, too old or too young (this will/has happen/happened to all of us).
        Most of the rest of us are somehow or other not living up to their potential, simply because the rich see no use in providing the environment to enable that; i.e. most people are surplus labor to them, not worth diluting their wealth to bring to a higher level of productivity or social interaction (e.g. the PTB can safely ignore them and do).
        A good historical example of how this can be reversed is the Black Plague that killed off 1/3 of Europe in the middle ages. That led to higher wages and valuing of laborers, more innovation and even the renaissance. Today, automation can replace a lot of humans, but if there’s a block on AI replacing some critical core function of humans, which there probably is, then when humans decrease enough, they’ll be more valued and treated better to reach their full potential in the future.

  7. “Robin Hanson has come up with a plan to use the massive national debt of most countries to fund the large enough payments to make $300,000 to $700,000 payments to encourage couples to have enough babies to stop population decline.”

    You can’t “use” national debts this way. It won’t work.

    Say you’ve got an existing (Present value) debt of $500K per person. You pay people $500K to have 1 kid each, who is expected to pay $500K or more in taxes. The debt and the taxes cancel out, right?

    No, they do not.

    1) They don’t cancel out because a lot of that present value debt is actually future spending which scales with population, so those kids arrive bringing with them an addition to that debt.

    2) They don’t cancel out because if you had the fiscal discipline for this to work you wouldn’t HAVE the debt in the first place!

    This is not to say that you couldn’t encourage births with massive subsidies. You probably could. But the debt connection here just can’t work.

  8. This all reminds me of the fears surrounding Y2K. That was a non-event because we saw the issue beforehand and made the adjustments. Up till now ,economies seem to have relied on the ignorance of rank-in file populations. Ignorant spenders, workers, and child producers. The internet means you won’t be able to rely on that. Science and technology put us into this position and they will be used to make the adjustments to new economic models.

    • Japan is already 30 years into this issue. 1995 they had $5.5 trillion economy. today they are at $4.4 trillion. From 1995 to today the US, Canada and other GDP had tripled. Japan’s population peaked in 2008 at 128 million and now at 122 million. But median age was 38 in 1995 and now it is 49. China median age will go from 38 to 50-52 in 2050. Important world economies China, Japan, South Korea, Spain, Italy, Taiwan, all hit with the rapid aging and depopulation. They have about one third of the world’s most important banks. It has already happened and is continuing to happen. China will lose 20-30% of its working age population and even if they force them not to retire they will not be very productive and they will not be good consumers. Consumption and production collapse as already seen in Japan and will continue in Japan. The world lost over 10% of the economy that we should have had if Japan was not imploding. We will lose 20-30% with what will happen from now to 2050. China’s property developers are already weak from mismanagement.

  10. I’m confused about why population collapse is a bad thing. The big problem right now seems to be too many people using the planet’s limited natural carbon storage systems. Fewer folks would tax those overburdened carbon sinks less. That’s good right? I get that everybody wants their nations’ government pension systems to keep writing checks like they do today, but when they can’t, do you not think we will figure out a work around? How about Robots for Grandma? Everyone can be given a Teslabot at birth and well throw in some soft cushy ones for the world’s seniors. By the end of this decade, they will all have better than human intelligence. Surely, they can be helpful to humanity in easing our so-called birth rate dilemma. A giant population of super capable robot slaves programmed to love us like a permanently happy Labradoodle would let us start building stuff that would shame the pyramids of Egypt. They may be clunky right now, but they will become the most graceful creatures you have ever seen move years before the world reaches peak population in 2060 or so. That is with the ridiculous assumption that no future chatbots for the next 35 years figure out how to use Yamanaka factors right. They will and humans will live forever. What’s with all the doom?

    • If Aging reversal and aging damage repair is clearly created and women can be 90 and have babies and choose to do so, then I will stop worrying about population collapse.

      The good stuff might not happen and then all we are left with is collapse.

      The other level is even after we fix aging and population, we have to get max tech (molecular nanotechnology, near light speed space travel, nuclear fusion, quantum computers with trillions of qubits) and we have to explore the galaxy and beyond, then we will need a 1000 quintillion people and 1000x times that many future bots to colonize galaxies.

      • Age reversal is available now. Unfortunately teaching the method is pointless. You can tell people to brush and floss their teeth, eat fresh vegetables, exercise, control weight, and not to smoke, eat cholesterol, hang glide, bungee jump, drive drunk, et.al. They do not obey and could not possibly abide by the simple rules to maintain their youth. Most people believe their God intended them to die. Attempting otherwise would be sacrilege.

        • Because most people have negligible prospects of lifespan free of imminent death. By the time the bulk of people reach enough emotional intellectual and financial maturity to actually enjoy being alive, theyre basically well into the second half if not last quarter of their time alive.

          So long as this continues the death trance and all related morbidities will continue.

          Thats why the age trance is a thing.

      • Or the line between human, cyborg, uploaded human, and AI just blurs until it really doesn’t matter anymore. After all, none of the most important things about your children is that they share your DNA. The concept and practice of adopting children long precedes the discovery of DNA. Come to that, there is no requirement that they even have DNA. Alternatively, it could exist only as a recording, or even as a hypothetical, for those conceived in VR, and never instantiated as an actual biological organism–unless they later needed to be or perhaps merely wanted to be.

      • We don’t need new birth technologies to reproduce at a higher rate. We just need the proper incentives and absence of disincentives. E.g. fertility rates would likely increase if people no longer had to work to afford a good living, but social convention still pushed people to form families. AI and robots COULD get us that, though it’ll require economic systems to change at least as much as will be needed to adapt to low fertility rates.

        Unfortunately, I suspect rich elites would prefer declining births over letting the masses live well without labor, off the production of fully automated capital owned and managed by the rich. We might get a system of ‘universal basic work’, including payment for raising children (with weekly status reports and quarterly reviews to assure adherence to best known parenting methods) as well as employment for government make-work (administering parental work practices).

        High fertility rates here on Earth would actually be an impediment to populating the galaxy. We need to get to and through the ‘rugged low-G frontier’ phase of space colonization to ‘luxury space’ where people on Earth may be jealous of those living on the orbitals. That’s a far bigger challenge than figuring out how to grow the population once we’re out of Earth’s deep gravity well.

    • Agreed. And add to that new incubation methods in 10-20 years that won’t require women at all. Then, if all you need are sperm and egg donors, and maybe not even that if pluripotent stem cells can be made into sperm and eggs, along with enhanced human features, governments that can afford it won’t need women at all. China, with its collapsing population is already a lot less squeamish about these kinds of things and America will be too once immigrants stop coming here because they are more needed at home countries with declining birth rates.
      The wrong kinds of people – dumb, poorly educated, under-employed (too much time on their hands?), even violent or in the case of women, the frequent victims of violence in violent patriarchies, are having too many babies.
      There is nothing particularly helpful about the high fertility in places like Niger, Pakistan, or most recently Gaza where 75% of the population is under 15: https://worldpopulationreview.com/world-cities/gaza-population. Such a population of young people without job prospects is bound to cause the kinds of unrest we are seeing today. It would be almost as bad no matter what conditions they were living in.
      A much better set of conditions will be like after the Black Plague, when after 1/3 of Europe died off, laborers were able to command higher wages, better conditions, and this was so upsetting to the elites who were paying them that inventions and even the renaissance was brought about to reduce reliance on manual labor.
      A similar revolution today will be the explosion of AI and robots to do all kinds of jobs we need.
      Right now, a tremendous amount of human potential just goes to waste because the rich countries and wealthy within them simply don’t care to educate or employ them. That won’t be the case when the population becomes top-heavy with seniors.
      The merging of man and machine is somewhat inevitable, but countered by reprogramming the genetics and phenotype of humans already here so we live healthy, happy lives in great abundance into our 100s.
      Earth will then get a break from the over-consumption and over-exploitation of everything. It is much better for everyone if humans voluntarily refrain from having so many children, then if mass famines and wars cull the excess.

      • I think advanced incubation methods pose their own dangers. For instance, if a totalitarian state like China acquires the ability to create new citizens in a factory, what sorts of citizens do you think they’ll produce? I can imagine that, instead of breeding for good health and high intelligence, a great many might be genetically engineered to be highly submissive and only moderately intelligent — a perfect new caste of “worker ants.” Or, to take things to the horrific extreme, why make them conscious at all?

        • This is silly. Xi jin ping already has total population control in china. He does not have to make people dumber. All the smart guys like Jack Ma, CEO of Alibaba were made to disappear for a few weeks or months and then come back out behaving as Xi wants. Dumb, smart everyone is under control. Genetically engineered for smart can mean more productive and useful but still coerced by power from the barrel of a gun. Try not to have illusions that being academically smart means that you are free.

      • China wanted 17-20 million births per year 7-8 years ago. This is why they changed the one child policy. Now it has dropped to less than 10 million last year and will be about 8 million this year. Where is this great control of what people do?

        China has super-high youth unemployment now. Japan has had mostly inferior jobs when their system went into decline. A lost generation without jobs with retirement and other benefits.

        The post-WW2 period had an economic and innovation boom along with a baby boom. Why not cite and analyze those periods for positive lessons instead of trying to rationalize some imagined benefits after the Black Plague.

        Which countries were more peaceful when they had lower populations or famines? China had a war with India right after the great famine. Russia is having de-population now but is having a war with Ukraine. Did the Soviets get more peaceful after losing tens of millions in WW2 and with its own famine?

        Japan, Canada and various countries in Europe after WW2 got far richer and started consuming more but did not initiate wars.

        This sloppy and incorrect analysis leads to very bad choices. If you go onto a cruise ship today and then incorrectly believe you see an iceburg during a cruise around Alaska. You could then choose to commit suicide because you believe it is inevitable that the ship will crash and then sink. However, if the judgement of speed and angles was wrong then there is no collision, then planning the future with terrible data/analysis led to very bad choices.

        • In virtually every country with a declining population, the quality of life is higher than those with a rapidly expanding population.
          China and Russia, which you cite, can’t figure out what to do with their young people now, even with declining population. Why would that be any better with an expanding pool of young people? It’s much worse in places like the Gaza strip, some Arab countries and other places where women effectively can’t choose to have fewer children. Countries with high ratios of young people tend to be revolutionary, which is not all bad, but often violently so, which almost always is bad, at least in the short run (successful revolutions like America’s are the rare exception).
          China has become more capitalist than America, which does not require democracy to function. They have a huge land bubble (a land value tax would fix that, but economist Michael Hudson told me repeatedly that his efforts to get Pols, universities and think tanks to listen, failed in the aughts and teens). China chooses to let people speculate on land and unregulated markets, creating zero social benefit, but making a few people very rich, instead of channeling that energy into productive things. That’s not to say that they don’t do both, but they have a FIRE sector too, which, like ours, is too big to be socially useful or efficient. And it wrecks their economy much more than a slowing birth rate.
          Japan, even with a shrinking birth rate, is still the #3 economy in the world, and on a per capita basis, has a higher QoL than America for MOST people. Peter Zeihan compares Japan, which prepared for its demographic collapse and were mostly successful, to Germany, which he says will not be: https://youtu.be/xmEhTFjQB1g

    • Friend, problem is a shrinking popullation affects directly the capitalist system. Less workforce to be exploited.

        • Not proposing anything. It´s just the way capitalism works. And the term “exploited” may not be interpreted as as bad thing. It´s just a term.

          Just think women should be free to choose have or not have children. No mather wath happens to humanity.

          If I was a woman, I´ll choose NOT to have children nowadays.

          Well, on the other hand, we always must watch and seek the Taliban… lots of children!!

    • And not even unusual when the population has 3X-4X in the time of a single aged generation of individuals, like our species.

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