China’s Fertility Catastrophe, by Eugene Kusmiak

This will put a crimp in a lot of the Chinese leaderships’ schemes and dreams. From Eugene Kusmiak at unz.com:

China used to be the most populous country in the world. But because of its extremely low birthrate, deaths now outnumber births there and the country is shrinking. This essay will recount some of the alarming facts about China’s population implosion. It’s much worse than most people think.

I rely on two government statistics in this article: fertility rate and GDP per capita. Fertility rate is generally measured as the number of children per woman. This can be thought of as children per couple or children per family, but includes all women single or married. Replacement level fertility is 2 children per woman. China’s fertility is 1 child per woman – half of replacement level. That means each generation is only half the size of the previous generation.

GDP per capita measures the productive output, and thus the average income, of the country’s residents. China’s GDP per capita qualifies it as a “middle-income” country, and that is the term I will use for it. A better description might be “poor” because China is certainly poor by American standards. But it is middle-income by global standards, and I will be comparing China to the rest of the world, not just to the US.

The numbers tell the story, but they do so blandly. A personal anecdote may paint a sharper picture of what “middle-income” actually means: When my wife and I traveled to Guilin, China, we visited a tourist site called Moon Hill where you hike to the summit of a local peak to see the limestone karst formations around the Li River. The parking lot was full of old women waiting to sell things to tourists. When we got out of the car, the women ran toward us, and the ones who arrived first dogged us for the entire time we were in the park while the rest returned to the parking lot to wait for the next tourists. The women who attached themselves to us were impressive in their persistence. They followed us on the climb all the way to the top of Moon Hill, lugging ice coolers full of water bottles, hoping to sell us something if we got thirsty. Then they followed us all the way back down, always reminding us that they had cold drinks for sale. When we got back to the bottom of the hill, we bought a pack of postcards from the women for about $1. Our private guide chided us for paying full retail, something no Chinese tourist would have done. Based on the small number of tourists there and the large number of women, we guessed that they were making about $10 per day. Americans generally have no idea how poor other countries really are.

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