Sunday 22 January 2023

“The cost of China’s zero-child policy” | Unherd

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I noted the other day the decline in China’s population. The first time since the disastrous Great Leap Forward in 1961. World-shaking consequences. 

You can have too many people. You can also have too few.

As Paul Moreland says:

China is the world’s great population behemoth: what happens to the nation’s demography has significant ramifications for the rest of the world. As Charles Goodhart and Manoj Pradhan pointed out in their book, The Great Demographic Reversal, the tremendous flow of subsistence peasants into the factories of China’s coastal plain not only fuelled the country’s stratospheric economic growth but also provided the developed world with a vast pool of cheap labour. Manufacturing transitioned out of Europe and North America to the PRC, where there was an endless supply of cheap labour. Now this era has ended. As this vast labour reservoir dries up, expect to pay more for everything from toys to tablets.