Image Recognition
A recent opinion piece in the Washington Post by American Enterprise Institute economist Nicholas Eberstadt (“China’s collapsing birth and marriage rates reflect a people’s deep pessimism”) doesn’t seem to have been mentioned here yet, but the implications of the latest demographic data released by the PRC are truly enormous. As usual with any data emanating from the PRC, these numbers probably need to be treated with a certain degree of skepticism, though it’s difficult to see what sort of hidden agenda the CCP might have in actually releasing them. This was of course the main motivation of the PRC in belatedly scrapping its notorious one-child policy in 2015, but as they quickly found out it has proved much more difficult to convince young women to start having babies again — particularly when the future appears so bleak under Xi’s dictatorial direction. This is also borne out by the plunging rates of first marriages in China, down nearly 60% since 2013 when Xi completed his ascent to power. The demographic problem here is that China’s population is rapidly aging at the same time it is now forecast to start shrinking rapidly, particularly if the fertility rate remains less than half that needed to maintain a stable population: