Thread by @zhao_dashuai

Enrolment rates in primary(elementary) schools in China have risen to its highest levels in decades.

Some year 1 classes reportedly has 60 students PER class, with only ~10 students from only child families.

A thread on the demographics, labor force and birthrates of China
1/🧵

If you look at any of China's issues, be it stretched social resources, causing intense and often meaningless competition, to employers not respecting their employees.

It all stems from our large population, when you have an abundance of something, that thing is treasured less

24% of Chinese work in agriculture, actual figure of permeant farmers is around 250 million.

In the US, that number is only 1.6% of their population.

These 250 million Chinese are doing the amount of work that could be done by ~30 million with proper mechanization/automation

That's inefficiency in labor force usage.

These farmers do not consume much, so they add very little to the economic activity of China outside of growing food, which can be done much more efficiently.

They are also mostly made up of the aging group of population of 50+ year old

Which means a sizable chunk of the drop in labor force in the coming years, are concentrated in the farming population.

This will have very little impact to the overall productivity of China, since they don't work in high end manufacturing or services.

Nor do they consume much.

What about the cost to the healthcare system?

Having a large population of elderly boosts the medical sector, from high end medical machines to medicine research to age care.

A large portion of any country's GDP stems from government investment , it's just a matter of how many

...layers of private sector it circulated through before reaching you.

With China moving up the economic value chain, manufacturing will be the tasks of robots and automation

Hence the expansion of the service sector and consumption are the key.

Wage in services should rise with increased productivity through automation, since you're not competing with cheaper countries on cost.

This is why I LOVE, some young Chinese who decides not to have children, and express it as some form of rebellion (especially in the comment section on Weibo)

Think about it, these people are looking at the prospect of having no descendants to leave their wealth

So, they'll spend and live in the moment, these type of childless people will become the best spenders, when they realize everything they earn will be left for the banks.

They are the type of human resources that China needs right now.

So no matter which way you look at it, be it the rise in retired population, to some young people deciding not to have children.

They all contribute to the positive trend of more consumption and more resources for fewer people.

700 million to 1 billion Chinese is just right.

As social resources becomes more plentiful, then people will naturally have more children.

Once population growth has plateaued, logically speaking it should rise and dip cyclically.

Humanity just haven't lived long enough in the industrial age to see the full cycle.

The next sustainable explosion of human population, can only be supported as humanity becomes a spacefaring species.

Millions of Space habitats like O'Neill cylinders, when placed around the orbit of the Sun can provided multiple times the living space we have on Earth