Be careful extrapolating based on China's current population and demographics. Too much of our armchair assessments of China's velocity is based on their meteoric rise on the backs of a historically large working-age population—a population that is now rapidly aging out of the workforce with nothing to replace it thanks to the one child policy. The US's demographics aren't stellar, but they're a lot better off than most of the developed world.
It remains to be seen how different 2010's China—with 90% of the population being under 60—is from 2050's China—with only 69% of the population being under 60.
India has a bigger population but they haven't risen anywhere near the way China has.
China's rise was due to smart planning and investment in their people and infrastructure. The country went from peasant farmers to the manufacturing hub of the world in a generation. Now they're in the process of becoming a major hub of knowledge workers while keeping a strong manufacturing backbone.
And one thing I rarely see mentioned is that the Chinese government keeps its currency artificially devalued in order to sell their products cheaply and undercut competition. Looking at their economy purely on a GDP basis really underestimates how big their economy is. GDP by PPP is more accurate. If China ever decides to stop loosely pegging its currency and let the value naturally rise, their GDP will very likely swell, since GDP is measured in US dollars.
You completely disregarded the central thesis of the comment you responded to.
The one child policy means there are no people to do the manufacturing in China in the future. The population pyramid is inverted. You can't do manufacturing without lots and lots of people. Or at least you'll get out competed by your neighbours who have lots of labor.
India's birth rate is also massively dropping. In a few decades, India will reach their peak population.
China invested heavily in machinery and automation many decades ago. They'll be fairly fine.
I visited India a few months ago. Loved it. But I saw construction being done with donkeys hauling dirt and people shoveling the loads onto the donkey's cart with tiny hand shovels. Scaling up from that to the degree of manufacturing powerhouses like China have is not going to be easy.
China investing in machinery and automation means they are moving up the production chain into more expensive and more profitable manufacturing.
It also means they no longer do the cheap high volume manufacturing, which will go elsewhere where the cheap labor is.
This is how it goes. Manufacturing keeps migrating to cheap labor. China is running out of cheap labor and volume manufacturing will find it in East Asia and India and Africa instead, because these places will still have lots and lots of young people while those in China have aged out.
'India imports most of its energy'. So what's happened to the extremely abundant 'free energy' available from the sum in India. They have the expertise, they could make the funding available. What is missing in their thought processes or is there something wrong with the premise?
I am genuinely curious about what would happen if China allowed their currency (RMB/CNY) to float. The most obvious thing I can see that would put tremendous downward pressure on the currency would be capital flight from China to more politically predictable/safe places. Currently, normies are limited to 50K USD per year. (Of course, there is a large grey market to move more money.)
India's population pyramid is about where China's was in 2000. Their bulge of working age people is just barely hitting the workforce, so it's way too early to say what the outcome will be by 2045 when they've ridden the wave the way China did.
The one-child policy didn't play as large a role as people in the West think. Chinese fertility rates had already fallen drastically before that policy.
(It was also not as absolute as people in the West think. There were exceptions for rural China and minorities.)
It’s a little more nuanced than that. Western demographics are largely propped up by immigration, which brings with it its own sociopolitical challenges. What you gain in demographics, you might lose in social cohesion and political stability.
It's a lot more nuanced than that. China's internal diversity is much higher than Westerners typically understand, and their social cohesion and political stability are less well maintained than their external-facing image would lead you to believe.
No, they're not. The Chinese have never been especially unified until very recently and they're internally quite diverse on all the key measures of ethnicity: their languages are mutually unintelligible, their religious belief systems span the entire breadth of world religions plus a wide spectrum of home grown ones, and their value systems are very different.
One China is a convenient fiction invented by an authoritarian regime, not a day to day reality on the ground.
Westerners buy into it through some combination of propaganda (coming from the Chinese state and our own, both of which benefit from an exaggerated sense of Chinese unity) and our inability to distinguish the various ethnic groups because we're overly fixated on skin color as the primary physical marker of ethnicity.
I can't help but feel that this can be said for any country anywhere. Compare New Englanders to Southerners in the US. They are totally different, but they are still wayyy more similar than Southerners are to Cantonese.
It's easy to track differences between people around you, in your country, and very hard to track difference between people in other countries. This creates an illusion of "We are very different, and they are all the same".
ser, do I need to pull up a map of Europe or India at any time in history? "One country" is a recent historical phenomenon.
by the standard of most large landmasses, China was, in fact, far more cohesive and united - compared to the hundreds of local lords and kings with their tiny little fiefs in, say, India
You're shifting the goalposts from "they're ethnically the same people with a shared culture" to "by the standards of large landmasses China was more cohesive and united than India".
Comparing Chinese unity favorably to India is damning with faint praise, and doesn't do anything at all to help your original argument that China has better "social cohesion and political stability" than Western countries by virtue of having less immigration.
We're not comparing the social cohesion of landmasses, we're comparing the social cohesion of states, and India is a particularly disjointed example to use.
China is over 90% ethnically Han Chinese. Compared to the US it is practically a homogeneous country. The language diversity is greater in China, but the racial/ethnic diversity is lesser. China is more comparable to Europe than the US.
You're conflating racial and ethnic diversity in ways that are distinctly western or even really US-centric. Europe is extremely ethnically diverse, as is China, they just don't use skin color as the primary ethnic marker the way that is commonly (and still incorrectly) done in the US.
The 90% Han Chinese number isn't especially useful because it's comparable to the way that most of Europe has historically identified itself as the successor of Rome. That they all identify as Han doesn't make Han a truly useful grouping for judging diversity when they all have different ideas of what "Han" means.
>You're conflating racial and ethnic diversity in ways that are distinctly western or even really US-centric.
Not at all, these are pretty universally agreed upon by global sociologist.
>Europe is extremely ethnically diverse, as is China
Indeed, Europe is extremely diverse, much more so than China.
>they just don't use skin color as the primary ethnic marker the way that is commonly (and still incorrectly) done in the US.
Neither does the US. Skin color is not a primary ethnic marker. No one versed in sociology in the US considers a Black American ethnically similar to an Eritrean. Nor do they consider a Ukrainian ethnically similar to a White American.
>The 90% Han Chinese number isn't especially useful because it's comparable to the way that most of Europe has historically identified itself as the successor of Rome.
It is extremely useful because the subgroups specifically make these claims: "Modern Han Chinese subgroups, such as the Cantonese, the Hakka, the Henghua, the Hainanese, the Hoklo peoples, the Gan, the Xiang, the Wu-speaking peoples, all claim Han Chinese ancestry pointing to official histories and their own genealogical records to support such claims."
Germanic people do not make the claim to be of Roman or Mediterranean ethnicity nor origin. The languages are vastly more varied in Europe versus China, where 70%+ speak Mandarin.
Additionally, Han Chinese are much closer genetically than Europeans. Italians, Brits, and Estonians have much more varied genetics compared to Han Chinese.
It remains to be seen how different 2010's China—with 90% of the population being under 60—is from 2050's China—with only 69% of the population being under 60.
https://www.populationpyramid.net/china/2050/