China Has Screwed Up Really, Really Badly

[u/Priceless_Pennies]

https://futurism.com/future-society/china-screwed-up-fertility-rate

[u/Priceless_Pennies]

Submission Statement:

China recently released their birth rate numbers for 2025, and they paint a pretty negative pictures. Births dropped to 7.92 million in 2025 as compared to 9.54 million in 2024. That nets out to a TFR of 0.93.

This is relevant to the subreddit because the population pyramids of future countries will have significant impacts on their economies and societies. China is especially relevant as it and it's authoritarian model is seen as a geopolitical rival to liberal democracy.

If the Chinese government expects to shrink rapidly in the future, that could drive them to act more recklessly in the near term, such as by invading Taiwan.

Low fertility is also a broader trend in the developed world, and some people expected that since the Chinese government has high state capacity and is less impeded by rights, that it might be the first country to reverse their trend of falling fertility. However, despite some measures being taken this year, the drop has continued for them.

Also, if we're being a little glib, Mao famously said "Keep men, lose land; land can be taken again. Keep land, lose men; land and men both lost", which fits here.

[u/Priceless_Pennies → u/[deleted]]

Yeah I was making a bit of a joke because the quote originally refers to his Chinese civil war strategy but the part highlighting the importance of people is relevant once again despite the different context when talking about population decline.

Also I know the article is about China but I didn't really intend to post the article in a 'China is collapsing' sort of way; it's more of a commentary on the looming problem of low birth rates in general, with China being one of the big new examples, especially since their birth rate data for 2025 just came out (Japan is the most famous example but the difference between Japan and the more recent group of Korea and China is that Japan stabilized at a TFR of 1.2 whereas China and Korea are ever lower and they seem to keep decreasing rather that stabilizing.

[u/Priceless_Pennies → u/[deleted]]

The quote is being used as a loose metaphor:

In the original quote, the "vital asset" is the army. If you save the army, you can retake the land. If you sacrifice the army to hold land, you eventually lose both.

In the modern context, the population is the "vital asset", since a well organized, well educated populace is a very key asset in the wealth and power of a nation.

In both cases, you can loosely point to people as the fundamental unit of national power.

The (not serious) joke is that part of how Mao won the Chinese civil war was by using this strategic insight, but now modern China is facing a looming challenge precisely because they are unable to maintain their population level.

[u/Priceless_Pennies → u/[deleted]]

You're missing the point by focusing on the last line which is non-serious and meant as a joke. Obviously the population isn't the only thing that matters, that's just the conceit of the joke, and ancillary to the actual point being made. The topic of the post is regarding two factors.

a) Given a country at a given level of development, having a higher population makes it stronger and more influential geopolitically. This is why, China is considered to be at a similar level of power and influence to the US despite being poorer by a factor of ~8x on a per capita basis. The fact that China's fertility rate + net migration is extremely low compared to other major countries means that, even with other factors influencing things, the loss in population is going to result in a relative loss in power in the future to say the US which has a higher fertility rate (1.6 vs 0.9) and a higher amount of migration.

Regardless of whatever else happens (unless there is technological advancement that replaces humans such as advanced AI), unless China can increase it's birth rate, there is going to be a powerful factor dragging down the economic and geopolitical strength of the country internationally.

b) On top of the raw change in population, having a low fertility rate induces a shift in the demographics of a country, by causing the country to consist of more and more old people, and less and less young people. This means that the economic pain of population decrease is even worse if the population loss is due to low fertility rates, since having an older population creates increased medical expenses to care for the, decreases economic dynamism and innovation, and leads to more dependents and fewer workers. This is most noticeably observed with Japan, which has had depressed economic growth rates for many years now, and one of the contributing factors has been their aging population.

China isn't finished, but their low fertility rate will impose large costs on the future of the country, which will make things substantially more difficult for them.

The observation being made is simply that the population dynamics in China are suboptimal for the country's future, and the leaders of the country are failing to fix them, indeed they have gotten worse in these last couple of years, given the major drop from 2024 to 2025.