[zadkey]

I don't trust China's population numbers at all. Officially before the one child policy they were at 800 million. After 30 years of 1 child policy somehow they were at 1.2 billion. The math isn't mathing. How do you have explosive population growth when birth control is brutally enforced?

The official fertility rates for that period was 1.3. For reference: 2.1 is the replacement rate.

If anything their total population went down during one child policy.

[sapiogram]

> Officially before the one child policy they were at 800 million. After 30 years of 1 child policy somehow they were at 1.2 billion. The math isn't mathing.

Even if I take your numbers at face value, it is absolutely possible for this math to math. To simplify massively, if the average person dies at 80 years old, the population growth today depends on the number of births 80 years ago, compared to today. Not 30 years ago. The population may have grown massively between 30 and 80 years ago, so that the absolute number of births remains high, despite a low birth rate.

[pixl97]

Yep, people don't understand moving averages with a wide range. The old population getting older massively changes demographics. You start looking like Japan where a huge portion of the population is above retirement age.

And this fits for China where the standard of living has massively increased. What would throw off most Americans is that in 1962 the average life expectancy in China was only 50 years old, and has increased to roughly 78 today. 28 additional years of life is huge and it was so rapid that it would create a massive increase in population.

This also reverses causality on the one child population rule. They didn't add the rule because their population was huge at the time, it was added because increased life expectancy with nothing else would have increased their population now to something like 1.7 to 2 billion.

[snowwrestler]

And inverse is also true, so that China’s population is currently shrinking and aging, despite the “1 child” policy being abandoned a decade ago.

[3rodents]

The one child policy only really mattered in the cities, rural China had different rules. There is also no incentive for China to lie, quite the opposite, underreporting their population would be a boon for their success on the global stage: imagine if they are achieving what they achieve, with half as many people?

[IcyWindows]

Many companies setup branches and sent IP to China in exchange for access to those billion consumers. Fewer consumers means a company might target India, etc. instead of China first.

[empressplay]

Yes, except that China also uses its population as a military threat. It going down would take away some of the impact of that. So it always needs to go up, to reinforce it.

[jjk166]

> The math isn't mathing. How do you have explosive population growth when birth control is brutally enforced?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_momentum

[sct202]

Just to put some numbers into perspective. China and Europe have roughly the same amount of land, and Europe has a population of 744m (vs your est of <800m for China). So like idk how that would make sense for them to be the same range of population when China seems way more overcrowded.

[wasabi991011]

> So like idk how that would make sense for them to be the same range of population when China seems way more overcrowded.

Different population distributions. In particular, the population of China is concentrated in the eastern half of the country, with very few people living in the western half. Contrast to Europe, which from what I understand is more evenly spread out.

[throw5t4346]

When I went to China for work, over half the people I met there had siblings. So I really wonder how effective the one child policy was. And these are people in their 30-40s.