“China’s Population Problem” - Prof. Jiang EXPOSES Fake Population Stats
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Summary
In this episode, we talk about population decline in China and why this could be a problem for the country. We talk about the reasons why China has such a low fertility rate, why local governments lie about population statistics, and why China needs to do something about it.
Transcript
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There's this data that's going around when China went to the one-child policy
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that maybe the population isn't as big as they claim it is.
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I'm sure you've seen this, where the numbers are going around.
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Mathematically, it's impossible to be at 400 million.
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But some of the numbers could say 800, 900 million.
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What is your guesstimation of what China's population is today?
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um look i live in beijing i visited china there are a lot of people in china i mean just right
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the subway it's packed every single day just walk the streets they're packed all the time
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you know and i travel a lot there are a lot of people um in china i can't tell you what the
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exact statistics are there's probably some over counting because local governments tend to lie
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because obviously like the more you people people you say you have the more government subsidies you
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can get. So I imagine there's some population inflation, but I believe it's still overbilling
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people. The issue in China is not actually population count. The problem in China is
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twofold in that you have a rapidly aging population. You have young people who refuse to have kids.
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I think it's possible in five years' time, China has the lowest fertility rate in the world.
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Right now, it's South Korea at 0.8. China's about one. But I can easily see China overtaking South
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korea in like five years time so that's the real issue facing china um china still has a lot of
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people but the um but the demographic curve is gonna be a huge issue for china especially as
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the population ages what why would they how does it benefit them to lie about the population
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is there a benefit like if because why would who cares if you're at 800 million or if you're at 1.3
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billion? Right. The issue in China is that local governments tend to lie all the time
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because a lot of their promotions depend on the performance locally, right? So it's in their best
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interest to inflate just not population statistics, but also economic performance.
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So does Xi incentivize local governments to lie?
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Is it more, hey, we got a safe face for the world.
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The world cannot see that we're a declining country.
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What is the – who is incentivizing who to lie with the data?
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So China doesn't really care much about the world, but China is an enclosed, insular bureaucracy.
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So the local governments are lying in order to get more funding from the central government, right?
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So obviously, if you have more children, you can get more health care subsidies, more education subsidies from the federal government, especially if you're a poor province.
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And this happens, this is a very common practice in China, where if you are in Beijing, you just have to assume that all the information you're getting from local areas are just inflated information.
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Would that be an embarrassing moment for China?
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You know, there is concern in the central government.
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China is very much a metric-based society. It's very Unitarian, right? So it's very focused on
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economic growth. And what drives economic growth is population growth. So there's a real concern
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that as the population declines over time, China's economy will stagnate. But personally,
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I think that this may be in the long term a good thing for China because having over 1 billion
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people is not necessarily a good thing. What it has led to ultimately is massive exploitation
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over the people because when you have like too many people it's like free energy right so all
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you have to do is basically um exploit them and that's what runs your economy but because you're
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exploiting people that hampers innovation um that hampers political development so i think if china
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were to face a population crisis this in the long term would be good for china society and
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