China's population drops for the first time since 1961

 

A woman with a child in China. BBC/Getty.

China's population has dropped for the first time since 1961. BBC. China still has 1.4 billion people, but that number dropped by 850,000 since 2022. China for a long time had a once child policy that reduced the birth rate. But the rate is still declining in spite of that policy being removed in 2015. China's lack of young people could have major effects on China's economy. The one child policy also damaged the countries demographics with boys being favored over girls. Efforts to raise the birth rate in China have failed so far. 

My Comment:

China is reaping what they had sewn with their idiotic one child policy. To be fair, China was and is drastically overpopulated, but not having children has huge problems that greatly damage the country. And China has not done well at reversing the trend. 

Why is this a problem? In most societies the young pay for the elderly and help them in their old age. When there aren't enough young people you end up with cashflow problems. It's a great way to bankrupt the country.

To be fair, China is far from the only country that has this exact problem. Birthrates have been falling across the world and nobody seems to understand why. What the BBC article fails to mention is that in America and Europe population is only growing due to third world immigration, legal and otherwise. Otherwise we would be in the same situation of China, though I would prefer their problem here than all the horrible problems that these immigrants are causing. 

China made things a lot worse with their one child policy. The policy itself was bad enough but it utterly destroyed China's demographics. In the younger generations they have 120 men for every 100 women, which means they have a huge number of men that simply can't get married or have children. And having huge numbers of unmarried childless men has historically been a recipe for disaster. 

This makes me think that this problem is going to get much worse before it gets better. There won't be any way to fix the gender imbalance and whatever is reducing birth rates globally will be added on top of it. China just doesn't seem to have a way out of their demographics. 

There is one thing that will likely change things up for China, if you believe the media. Supposedly the Coronavirus pandemic is going to kill a lot of people. I don't know if that is very likely though. I do think that China's vaccine probably doesn't work but given the weakened state of the virus, I don't think that many people will actually die. Much like the earlier stages of the pandemic most of the people that will die are ones that will die anyways, so it won't change China's aging problem. It might slow population growth even more though.