alt Hacker NewsFertility really 20/30+ year away problem.
PRC growth now based on educated population, which exploded, not total population. Reality is every tertiary median to upper middle class wage is more productive than 10 undereducated peasants... the ones first to age out. There's like 200-400m+ bluntly useless mouths dragging down productivity/per capital metrics, the only saving grace they did NOT get rich before old, i.e. poor old so it's cheap(ish) in terms of resources (but not labour) to support them. Put it this way, PRC is generating OECD combined in tertiary, disproportionately STEM, they have backlog of 200m births from last 20+ years that still haven't got their masters/phds... at 60% and increasing tertiary we're going 100m+ high end talent, aka the greatest high end human dividend in recorded history who will be in workforce for until 2060s, i.e. so far out its hard to project based on present realities, only they have no shortage of advanced economy growth potential. Like if you throw all projected US newborns + immigration into STEM... PRC would still come out FAR ahead. There is no contest, unless AGI displaces everyone.
TFR real issue probably 30 year out. There will be some rebound, current crashing TFR because so many entering tertiary last few years = delay family formation. Women going to turn 35-40 and realize they want kids... and have them, especially considering 1:4 dependency ratio also = 4:1 wealth transfer + property going other way when previous generation (with high savings rate) dies. But won't get to replacement level. Then it's matter of what bad levers PRC willing to pull - pro natal fertility policies does not incentivize 2.1 TFR... and no one has tried punitive policies, i.e. limit wealth/property transfers to families with 2 kids... all sorts of inducements liberal societies haven't... or politically can't try. Or immigration, test tube babies, who knows. But IMO they try punitive policies first. That's really the only thing that no one has tried, and we know from wealthy Muslim countries with oil money, religious incentive, domestic help... aka every support imaginable, TFR is below 2 or trending towards it.
Fertility is a right now problem for China - it's population has started dropping - its largest cohort is just a few years from being out of child-bearing age, and its fertility rate is one of the lowest in the world, and it will take decades to reverse that even if we knew today how to do it.
This isn't just a question of dropping labour, but also a question of the consequent reduction in economic demand.
Which is why China started reacting to the low fertility rate already in 2013 by abolishing the agency responsible for enforcing the one child policy, followed by ending the policy in 2015, replacing it with a 2 child policy, which failed to have the desired effect, followed by a 3 child policy in 2021, followed a month later by removing all penalties for having even more children.
China's workforce also is at most years from starting to contract excluding any immigration - the cohorts retiring are close to the size of those entering the workforce and the cohorts retiring will be increasing for another 20-30 years, while the ones entering the workforce will be decreasing for the same period even if they somehow figured out how to reverse it today.