It's Later Than Xi Thought!

Bribing people should work.

Just increase the tax deduction to $10,000 per child, and we might have another baby boom.

 

Why bother? Migration solves the problem.

 

No, probably not. The Chinese government is offering cash grants without much success.

 

Maybe a century later China could be a country of immigrants, who knows.

 

That’s where the Qing Dynasty came from.

 

Yes, the single-child policy was meant to curb population growth, even cause it to decline. But they made a huge cultural miscalculation.

In China, boy babies are much more valued than are girl babies. Thus, when a couple had a boy, they followed the policy and stopped there. But if they had a girl, they often violated the policy by having a second child. Again, when it was a boy, they stopped. Also, newly expecting parents would often abort fetuses destined to become girls.

The result of this is a huge imbalance between men and women, estimated by some to be as large as 1.2 - 0.8. Quite simply, there are huge numbers of men who will never be able to find a wife. For them, lifting the 1-child policy is, obviously, irrelevant.

Then there's the women's movement. Chinese women are afforded more opportunities for careers and, as we've seen in the West, this has a downward impact on birth rates.

What about migration? Well, you're asking a highly insulated, xenophobic society to become welcoming to outsiders becoming Chinese. As we see in Japan, that's a big ask.

If a growing population is good for China, then things are not good for China.

 

I recommend to all China watchers that you read the online propaganda sheet the Global Times. I don't find the piece still posted (itself an interesting phenomenon) but a few days ago they were saying "it's no big deal" but "the Party is doing" all these wonderful things to counteract the population decline. My conclusion is that they're admitting that it IS a big deal and the CCP knows it.

 

I used to recommend the South China Morning Post as well but since the Crackdown, that paper is not so useful anymore. They mostly repeat the Global Times' official Party line though often in better English.

 

If they don't admit they have a problem, they do.

If they DO admit they have a problem, then they don't have a solution.