Big picture: China's births might hit a record low this year, deepening its demographic crisis. Academics admit births could fall to 7 million, with profound implications for the world's second-largest economy.
By the numbers:
* Estimated births in 2023: 6 million to 8 million.
* Drop in births over the past five
7 million new humans in a single country per year is A LOT of goddamn people.
Imagine a major city’s worth of people suddenly appearing every single year. It’s completely unsustainable.
It’s not so weird when that country has about 1 out of every 6 humans on earth, and when 10.56 million people died in China in 2022. They’re experiencing decline not growth.
I didn’t say it was weird. The numbers are still incredible.
And with nearly 1.5 BILLION people, it’s not like they’ll run out of people.
This isn’t a Children of Men situation.
The number of people is irrelevant in the context, only the birth vs death rate. For context, there were about 10.5 million deaths in China last year. For social stability, you’d want the population to at most have a slight decline. A 50% higher death rate than birth rate is NOT slight.
It’s not unsustainable, it’s below the replacement rate. Even if it were slightly above, China has proven to be more than capable of increasing everyone’s quality of life while managing a rising population.
That’s about 0.5% growth of the national population, or 5 births per thousand people. Less than a third of the global average of 18 births per thousand. Put into that perspective, it’s really quite small.
Replacement rate for people or resources? Because people are extracting resources at way higher rates than they’re being replaced.
Replacement rate for people.
Unsustainable resource extraction rates is another problem that nations like China are working hard to mitigate. In general, unsustainable consumption is a problem inherent to capitalism and the ways it distributes resources and rewards waste.
It must also be said that Malthusianism was never meant to be an accurate theory of the relationship between population and resource use, and has never made an accurate prediction of reality.
Scale matters.