The Population Collapse of East Asia, By Mrs Vera West
While we think of East Asia, especially China as highly populated, that will change. At present, East Asia has entered a phase of rapid depopulation. China's population will fall by eight percent by 2050, South Korea's by 12 percent, and Japan, the worst of the lot, by 18 percent. In the past, radical crashes of population did occur, by war and invasions. However, the demographic changes today are voluntary, as people are simply not wanting to have replacement level number families. Demographers therefore see the changes as being long term, and there have been no examples of societies bouncing back demographically from such voluntary reductions. This means that numbers will fall, and populations will decline. Immigration is not generally accepted as a solution, although South Korea is dabbling in it now, but expect a backlash.
This is likely to have geo-political consequences, insofar as the Asian century may not occur, as the globalist elites were hoping: "People—human numbers and the potential they embody—are essential to state power. All else being equal, countries with more people have more workers, bigger economies, and a larger pool of potential soldiers. As a result, growing countries find it much easier to augment power and extend influence abroad. Shrinking ones, by contrast, struggle to maintain their sway.
East Asian countries will be no exception: the realm of the possible for its states will be radically constricted by the coming population drop. They will find it harder to generate economic growth, accumulate investments, and build wealth; to fund their social safety nets; and to mobilize their armed forces. They will face mounting pressure to cope with domestic or internal challenges. Accordingly, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan will be prone to look inward. China, meanwhile, will face a growing—and likely unbridgeable—gap between its ambitions and capabilities."
There has been speculation, such as by globalist Larry Fink, that AI will save the day for East Asia, which is possible depending upon whether the advances actually meet the hype. Otherwise, there could be other possibilities, such as these East Asian countries becoming destabilised. Leaders such as Xi, who has global conquest ambitions, are likely to movemore aggressively with programs such as the invasion of Taiwan, and other territorial battles, while they still have the numbers on their side.
Demography is not destiny it is said, but it does come mighty close to being so.
"In the decades immediately ahead, East Asia will experience perhaps the modern world's most dramatic demographic shift. All of the region's main states—China, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan—are about to enter into an era of depopulation, in which they will age dramatically and lose millions of people. According to projections from the Population Division of the UN Department of Economic Social Affairs, China's and Japan's populations are set to fall by eight percent and 18 percent, respectively, between 2020 and 2050. South Korea's population is poised to shrink by 12 percent. And Taiwan's will go down by an estimated eight percent. The U.S. population, by contrast, is on track to increase by 12 percent.
People—human numbers and the potential they embody—are essential to state power. All else being equal, countries with more people have more workers, bigger economies, and a larger pool of potential soldiers. As a result, growing countries find it much easier to augment power and extend influence abroad. Shrinking ones, by contrast, struggle to maintain their sway.
East Asian countries will be no exception: the realm of the possible for its states will be radically constricted by the coming population drop. They will find it harder to generate economic growth, accumulate investments, and build wealth; to fund their social safety nets; and to mobilize their armed forces. They will face mounting pressure to cope with domestic or internal challenges. Accordingly, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan will be prone to look inward. China, meanwhile, will face a growing—and likely unbridgeable—gap between its ambitions and capabilities.
Because of the effects on China, East Asia's loss promises to be Washington's geopolitical gain. But the drag on East Asia's democracies will create problems for Washington. These states will become less attractive partners for the United States, just as their need for partnership with the United States grows. The U.S. government might then come under pressure to invest less in these countries' security, generating friction that American officials will have to manage carefully to protect Washington's alliances.
There is more to national power than head counts, of course. But depopulation will disadvantage East Asia's states in ways that will become increasingly difficult to overcome. Demography is not destiny, but the power of demography means the long-heralded "Asian century" may never truly arrive.
INFLECTION POINT
In the decades after World War II, East Asia's population boomed. Between 1950 and 1980, it increased by almost 80 percent. By 2020, the region had almost 2.5 times as many inhabitants as in 1950, growing from under 700 million to almost 1.7 billion. This population leap far exceeded the United States' own total growth over those three generations, and it occurred faster. It was integral to East Asia's extraordinary economic takeoff.
But even as East Asia's population rose, the underlying trend lines presaged a coming decline. In Japan in the early 1970s, fertility fell below the replacement level, which is generally defined as 2.1 births per woman. In the 1980s, the same thing happened in South Korea and Taiwan. China—the giant that accounts for five-sixths of East Asia's total population—followed suit in the early 1990s. Since then, the region's fertility has fallen even farther below replacement. As of 2023, Japan is East Asia's most fertile country, even though its childbearing levels are over 40 percent below the replacement rate. China's childbearing levels are almost 50 percent below the replacement rate; if that trend continues, each rising Chinese generation will be barely half as large as the one before it. Much the same is true for Taiwan. South Korea's 2023 birth level was an amazing 65 percent below the replacement rate—the lowest ever for a national population in peacetime. If it does not change, in two generations South Korea will have just 12 women of childbearing age for every 100 in the country today.
East Asia, in other words, is set on a course of decline that extends as far as the demographer's eye can see. The region is set to shrink by two percent between 2020 and 2035. Between 2035 and 2050, it will contract by another six percent—and thereafter by another seven percent for each successive decade (if current trends hold). The depopulation extends beyond East Asia's four main countries to their northern neighbor—Russia—where population is projected to decline by about nine percent between now and 2050. (Populations will change fractionally in Mongolia and North Korea, too, but those two countries today account for less than two percent of East Asia's population.)
This is not the first time East Asia has lost inhabitants. According to historical records, China has undergone at least four long-term depopulations over the past two millennia. Some of these bouts lasted for centuries. After AD 1200, for example, China's population shrank by more than half. It took the country almost 350 years to recover. Japan and Korea also endured long-term depopulations before they began modernizing.
But the impending depopulation is different from all the ones before it. In the past, East Asia's (and every region's) prolonged contractions were a consequence of dreadful calamity—such as war, famine, pestilence, or upheaval. Today, the decline is taking place under conditions of orderly progress, improvements in health conditions, and spreading prosperity. The coming depopulation, in other words, is voluntary. It is happening not because people are dying en masse but because they are choosing to have fewer children. China provides perhaps the starkest illustration of this fact. The country suspended its coercive one-child policy in 2015, yet in the years since, annual births have fallen by more than half.
Current East Asian fertility patterns could change; demographers have no reliable tools for predicting long-term fertility trends. But there has never yet been an instance of a country where birthrates fell 25 percent below replacement and then rebounded to replacement levels, even temporarily. It will, therefore, not resemble past depopulations, where high birthrates restored population once famine, war, or other disasters subsided. After decades of sub-replacement fertility, East Asia's trajectory of population loss has been largely baked into the cake for decades to come.
East Asian demographic patterns stand in sharp contrast to those in the United States. Unlike that of East Asia, the U.S. population is still enjoying growth in both total numbers and its 15‒64 cohort. It is still tallying more births than deaths, despite high rates of illness compared with other rich Western societies. Death totals in the United States have been rising steadily over the postwar era, but death rates are not projected to outpace birthrates until the early to mid-2040s. The country's birthrates are below replacement levels, but U.S. fertility is nonetheless over 40 percent higher than East Asia's. The United States also attracts high numbers of immigrants, bolstering its population, whereas immigration is negligible in East Asia. It is impossible to forecast whether large-scale international migration into the United States will continue, but if it does, the country will continue to grow for decades."
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