Chinese Demography
&gt;So China’s power will decrease a little bit due to aging. But not a huge amount. A shrinking, graying population is likely to alter the country’s domestic politics — in ways that are hard to predict — but it won’t make the country shrivel up and disappear.<p>I&#x27;ve long maintained that Chinese demographic bomb is overplayed and is actually a blessing in disguise. Some considerations:<p>Birthrate of 1.4B people is sufficient to generate more absolute replacement human capital compared to most developing countries, even factoring in immigration. For comparison China has more people than OECD countries combined. This is important in cultivating future competitiveness as long as brain drain is blunted. It&#x27;s enough to retain advantages for regional power balance.<p>There are still 600M Chinese living on less than 1000rmb per month. This represents a massive internal underclass that can be arbitraged for caretaking and other labour intensive duties for a fraction of the cost. China is both a developed and developing country, this is an advantage that is not going to change until population decline stabilizes. Or rather China cannot be uniformly well&#x2F;highly developed precisely due to there being too many people. Which leads to the next point.<p>At the height of Chinese export economy, manufacturing sector &quot;only&quot; accounted for 400M jobs. There was also less automation then. The takeaway is world demand is not sufficient to uplift even a majority of Chinese population to barely middle income status. There simply isn&#x27;t enough global demand or resources for every Chinese to live as well as the west. Manufacturing is increasingly automated, China is rapidly integrating industrial robots to retain industrial base. Even when those 600M can work wages cheaper than Vietnam or Bangladesh. Pending focus on neglected interior development, maybe they will at the expense of rest of region trying to replicate export led development.<p>A lot of issues related to food, energy and resource security would be alleviated with less people. Despite import dependencies, China is also one of the largest domestic producer for many raw resources. A relatively food and energy secure China can start pursuing more flexible foreign policy goals in the 2070s.<p>None of this is to imply it&#x27;s not a difficult problem, especially socially. But unlike many countries, long term Chinese goals is better met with less people. Demographic dividend can be a demographic curse as well. See India, who needs to (and hasn&#x27;t) maintained an 8% growth per year just to keep up with employment.  Technological paradigms and geopolitics dictates they won&#x27;t get a fraction of the 400M manufacturing jobs that China did. They&#x27;re projected to have 1.7B people. That&#x27;s a recipe for disaster.