That said, nobody is seriously claiming Chinese youth unemployment at 50% unless you are looking at something like labor force participation rate, which is then a similar number for the US as well.

China already tried its hardest to suppress youth unemployment rates. Student councillors in China are given strict KPIs to ensure their students graduate with a job. So obviously they co-operate with shady companies that give out sham employment contracts, and then pressure the student to sign, all to give out an impression of 'graduate employment'

China faces a severe crisis of over-education. China educated many university graduates, but has no industry to actually absorb them (Many such industries were crushed by the government, such as gaming, tech, or education).

China's factories desperately need cheap labour (and are starting to lose competitiveness because of this), but the over-educated grads are absolutely unwilling to go back to the factory floor like their parents. So you have millions of grads all dreaming of sitting in a prestigious office job, where none exists, so instead they all compete for government jobs, where there's 1 role for 100 applicants.

The Chinese government is already enforcing a streaming system in middle school, with at most 50% of students going to high school, rest going into technical education, but its too little too late.

How can there be a surplus of educated people who are unable to organize something profitable?

https://archive.ph/L6ZfU

read your own article, you also just made up the thing about the definition in the US

Smaller rich countries can solve this problem by importing young workers from poor countries. But on China's scale of 1.5B people that's not really feasible. (China also isn't really that rich on average, isn't attractive for immigrants and isn't culturally welcoming to immigrants)

China has done fantastically well economically, and in terms of health care, education etc. There are other countries which have had strict population control and have done well economically - such as Singapore, South Korea. I see nothing wrong with poorer countries keeping restrictions on population growth - so that they can increase the standard of living and make sure everyone gets education and healthcare.

Of course you can also over build this capital that will never be used, but will need to be paid back (for example a local government pays to build a town that there are no people to fill it with) and the maintenance is too much, but you still have to look after the people who did the building.

That's is in no way sustainable on an individual level and worse on a societal level when you have a small working population and a large number of people that require care.

    strict population control

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Fertility Rate of 2 (average age = 40): 100 80-year-olds, 100 60-year-olds, 100 40-year-olds, 100 20-year-olds, 100 newborns.

Fertility Rate of 1 (average age = 65): 100 80-year-olds, 40 60-year-olds, 20 40-year-olds, 10 20-year-olds, 5 newborns

Fertility rate of 0.5 (average age = 74): 100 80-year-olds, 25 60-year-olds, 6 40-year-olds, 1 20-year-olds, 0 newborns

----

You can also estimate the ongoing population rate of change for each fertility group by removing the elderly generation, adding a newborn generation, and contrasting the new population sizes:

----

Fertility Rate of 2: 500->500 = 0% population change per 20 years

Fertility Rate of 1: 175->77.5 = 56% population decline per 20 years

Fertility Rate of 0.5: 132->32 = 76% population decline per 20 years

----

In the developed world most fertility rates plummeted around 1970. So, assuming nothing radically changes, we should start hitting our 'equilibrium point' about one life expectancy away, so sometime around 2050.

The more likely explanation is Xi’s authoritarianism and crackdown on the private sector. Anyone with a brain in China is trying to get their money and themselves out of the country.

The fertility rate was 6 in 1970, it dropped to a half within a decade and then kept dropping rapidly.

That's not to say there isnt a big crackdown on just about everything right now. There is. Bankers forced to read xi jinping thought and write essays on it monthly etc.

It's so odd to me that of the many issues people freak out about, this one ranks relatively low. We're looking at a non-speculative and entirely real demographic collapse of the entire developed world, in quite rapid order. For those who may not appreciate the impact, a total fertility rate of "N" means you will trend towards a system where the population of one older generation will be "2/N" times larger than the next younger generation.

So if you have a fertility rate of 2, each generation will be exactly the same. If you have a fertility rate of 1 then each older generation will be exactly twice as large as the next younger generation. So, for a simple model, imagine we all gave birth at 20. You'd trend towards a population distribution of 16 80-year-olds, 8 60-year-olds, 4 40-year-olds, 2 20-year-olds, 1 newborn. Systems of social security, healthcare, and the general economy will just collapse under that sort of pressure.

[1] - https://www.statista.com/statistics/241530/birth-rate-by-fam...

Go to https://ourworldindata.org/fertility-rate and select some regions, see for yourself. Africa as a whole has declining fertility rates. Even if you look a high-growth countries such as Niger or Democratic Republic of Congo, the fertility rate has been declining in the last 20-30 years, and you'll be hard-pressed to find a country where it has gone up.

Maybe we could buttress them by all the 4x to 10x productivity gains that automation has brought us. [1] Maybe we could cut back on all the useless, extraneous, low-to-negative ROI shit we're doing. We have options, here, that don't require a population ponzi scheme.

(Also, you can't be blaming this situation in China on demographic collapse, when it allegedly has massive youth unemployment.)

[1] Remember, just a few decades, when somehow, a single working adult could comfortably provide for a whole family? Why can't he, anymore? What has changed? We are more productive per worker, we have more workers participating in the economy, but somehow, you think we can't provide for everyone.

If the expectation for quality of life for the vast majority is living off of 1 income household, then that is an acceptable quality of life. If that expectation for the vast majority changes to quality of life by living off of 2 income households, then a quality of life from a 1 income household is no longer sufficient.

Also, expectations of work itself change. It could be possible that a sufficiently large portion of the population is simply unwilling to change bedpans for a price close to what old people themselves can afford (even if the cost is implicit from getting services from a family member). In this case, it becomes a political issue of how to allocate labor, i.e. who to tax, how much to tax them, and who gets the benefits of government spending.

[1] - https://www.advisorperspectives.com/dshort/updates/2021/10/2...

In Thomas Piketty's Capital in the 21st Century, he argues that the period you're talking about is an anomaly historically due to the postwar boom of an unscathed US, that many people take as the historical norm due to recency bias; no one alive today was alive in the 1800s or earlier to see just how unequal life among the poor and rich was. He argues that this inequality is the norm rather than the exception for what is happening today.

I find the consumer price index 1775-2012 quite interesting. It's really easy to see how nearly everything listed there could be directly, and very likely causally, linked to giving the US government the power to start printing tens of trillions of dollars. Because that money invariably makes it to the most well off in society, even on the rare instance when it starts somewhat lower. If not one has to come up with an alternative explanation for what happened at that time, because it's like in 1971 that were just a button pressed saying, "start destroying socioeconomic stability."

[1] - https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/

[1] - https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/A091RC1Q027SBEA

https://www.prb.org/resources/did-south-koreas-population-po...

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_planning_in_Iran

https://www.cfr.org/article/china-increasingly-relies-import...

Japan still got to being a first world country, but then busted. China won’t get there.

It would be interesting to see the blast radius, specifically in terms of countries like Russia, which is becoming increasingly dependent on the yuan as it is exiting its relations with the West , huffing and puffing: https://carnegieendowment.org/politika/88926

Global economy is the blast radius. China is the biggest economy by trade so it’ll ripple through everything

The covid induced shortages like stock shortages, chip shortages, container shortage etc have already been dealt with and lots of companies have reduced their dependencies on china, etc…

Wow, at this rate, they might just overtake South Korea for lowest birth and marriage rates within the decade.

They also forcibly 'immigrate' SEA women since 2010[0], forming a combo with the Gulf countries : the Gulf enslave the men under false promises, then cartels raid villages, capture and sell the women (Vietnam is the only country where the state is strong enough to limit that). Sadly is hard to investigate the issue correctly, given China's lack of transparency, but it is possible that despite relatively closed borders, China now lead the world in sex trafficking, overtaking the Magreb (morroco to lybia).

[0] https://www.hrw.org/news/2019/10/31/chinas-bride-trafficking...

Talk about nominative determinism...

youth unemployment data is just another toxic data that rarely used before in China and others just like "Total Debt" metrics that only used against China for some reason.

> China's economy slipped into deflation

Mainly caused by normalizing pork price, last year it went wild due to swine flu.

Seriously? One food can cause the entire economy to slip into deflation?

https://www.cnbc.com/2023/08/09/china-reports-smaller-than-e...

"A 26% year-on-year drop in pork prices, a staple food in China, contributed to the overall decline in the CPI in July"

The youth unemployment numbers are hard to judge, could be right but it is hard to tell on the outside.

The fertility figures are a long term issue, China is not alone in that but something to keep an eye on.

Those import/export figures... now that is the the most telling of how the economy is fairing nowadays. For all the speculation I have heard for decades, that is the most alarming stat I have seen. That is where the rubber meets the road for an economy that is so depended on those things to keep society function vaguely well. Stay tuned...