alt Hacker NewsI don't trust China's population numbers at all. Officially before the one child policy they were at 800 million. After 30 years of 1 child policy somehow they were at 1.2 billion. The math isn't mathing. How do you have explosive population growth when birth control is brutally enforced?
The official fertility rates for that period was 1.3. For reference: 2.1 is the replacement rate.
If anything their total population went down during one child policy.
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The one child policy only really mattered in the cities, rural China had different rules. There is also no incentive for China to lie, quite the opposite, underreporting their population would be a boon for their success on the global stage: imagine if they are achieving what they achieve, with half as many people?
> The math isn't mathing. How do you have explosive population growth when birth control is brutally enforced?
Just to put some numbers into perspective. China and Europe have roughly the same amount of land, and Europe has a population of 744m (vs your est of <800m for China). So like idk how that would make sense for them to be the same range of population when China seems way more overcrowded.
When I went to China for work, over half the people I met there had siblings. So I really wonder how effective the one child policy was. And these are people in their 30-40s.
> Officially before the one child policy they were at 800 million. After 30 years of 1 child policy somehow they were at 1.2 billion. The math isn't mathing.
Even if I take your numbers at face value, it is absolutely possible for this math to math. To simplify massively, if the average person dies at 80 years old, the population growth today depends on the number of births 80 years ago, compared to today. Not 30 years ago. The population may have grown massively between 30 and 80 years ago, so that the absolute number of births remains high, despite a low birth rate.