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Pakistan as a solution to the Chinese demographic problem

nahtanbob

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Demographic changes in China offer Pakistan opportunities that would need well-informed and thought-out public policy
Shahid Javed Burki

Pakistan borders two of the world’s most populous countries – India and China. Until a few weeks ago, China had more people than India but then the latter, with a higher rate of population growth, went past China and became the world’s largest country. Does it matter that Pakistan borders these two mega-population countries? I will argue in this article that the demographic changes in China offer Pakistan opportunities it could and should exploit but that would need well-informed and well-thought-out public policy. At this point to would be appropriate to a go a bit into history.

Mao Zedong, the founding father of modern China and the country’s supreme leader for 27 years, was apprehensive that at the rate at which the country’s population was growing, China would not be able to feed itself. He had a strong belief in self-reliance. He did not want the country’s population to reach the point at which it will have to depend on imported food to provide enough nourishment to a growing population. In the last few years of Mao’s rule of China, the country’s population was growing at more than 20 million a year.

Under Mao’s stewardship, the country had been through two famines; the first in the late 1950s, a decade after the Communist Party of China had taken full control of the country. Mao was in a hurry to make China an important country on the global scene. He wanted to industrialise the country while remaining self-sufficient in food. The Mao approach resulted in the adoption of the policy the history knows as the ‘Great Leap Forward’. The idea was that the principle of self-reliance would apply not only to the entire country but to individual households as well. Families would produce within the confines of their homes and the small bits of land that had been left with them after collectivisation. The result of the policy was a plunge in food production that had the Chinese go through first of the two famines during the Mao era. Millions of people died of starvation.

Mao reacted to the crisis by adopting what came to be called the ‘one child policy’. No Chinese couple could have more than one child. Second pregnancies were aborted. Abortion became common and with the strong preference for male children, the Chinese aborted girls leaving the country with a highly skewed gender imbalance. In 2022, China had a sex ratio of 104.69 men to every 100 women. It reached a point where it began to import girls from neighbouring countries the Chinese men could marry.

The one child policy produced results Mao would have appreciated. On February 17, 2023, China’s Bureau of Statistics announced a decline of 850,000 people, bringing the total population to 1.4118 billion – the first such decline in 60 years. The birth rate reached its lowest level on record, 6.77 per 1,000 people down from 7.52 in 2021. The last time China’s population declined was in 1961, after three years of Mao’s disastrous ‘Great Leap Forward’ industrial policy. Although long predicted, the decline in population arrived sooner than expected. Leading Chinese scholars and the United Nations estimated as recently as 2019 that the downward trend would not begin until early in the 2030s. The decline in the rate of growth of population results in its ageing. This has serious economic consequences as experienced by Japan over the last couple of decades. Japan is now the oldest society in the world with 29% of the country’s population over 65. With a comparably contracting work force, China too could fall short of the ambition to become a global leader.

Even though experience has shown that state policies directed at changing population growth rates seldom produces the intended results, the Chinese cities are attempting to increase the rate of population growth. For instance, Shanghai last year gave mothers an additional 60 days of maternity leave on top of state-mandated time off; paternity leave was extended to 10 days. Shenzhen on January 17 became the latest Chinese city to give out almost $1,500 for couples who had a third child. Beijing, in other words, has come a long distance when Mao, the Supreme Leader, attempted to drastically reduce the birth rate.

There is now an urgency being attached to bringing change in demographic trends as President Xi Jinping’s policy of ‘national rejuvenation’ depends on a large, growing and well-educated population. He has sought to tackle the long-term economic and social pressures from a shrinking, ageing society by lifting the limits on family size imposed by some of the country’s earlier leaders. He has taken steps to build a strong social safety network and announced a new phase of high-quality growth less dependent on legions of cheap, abundant migrant workers from the countryside. “The population issue is the most important issue for the future but is the one that is most easily neglected,” Ren Zeping, a former chief economist for the Evergrande Group, a massive housing developer, who has studied the looming demographic crunch, wrote in widely circulated comment after the population numbers were released on February 17.

One of the options available to China to address the worker-shortages it has begun to experience is to import people from the neighbouring countries, from a country such as Pakistan which has one of the youngest populations in the world. As is well known, China built its economy initially by exporting labour-intensive products to the West. However, rapid development has resulted in higher wages. Several Chinese enterprises have moved their operations to labour-surplus countries such as Laos, Cambodia, Thailand and Indonesia. Chinese enterprises have not come to Pakistan as they consider the general public is not welcoming. Some of the anti-China sentiment that has been created is the result of Indian endeavours where articles are written and sold to Pakistani authors who are prepared to publish them under their names.

However, the country is experiencing another kind of worker shortage. With its technological sector rapidly developing, China needs large number of well-educated and trained workers. With a concerted effort that is made by the government working with the private sector, Pakistan could produce the well-trained and educated work force the Chinese need. Japan with worker-shortages that are also the result of demographic change has begun to import Indian workers who have graduated from the well-known science and technology institutions the country has established over the last six decades. Pakistan could follow the Indian example.
 
You are going to piss off the racist to suggest immigration as a mechanism to address workforce shortages, but funny enough thats one of the reasons as to why the US is as prosperous as it is, and there is never an issue really with regards to workforce shortages as there has always been a vibrant history of migrants coming to the US and becoming part of the country's fabric.
 
Short answer: No way
Previously, I do not support your nonsense analysis regarding the no-covid policy or China will win if they and the west split.

But this time, I fully support your point.

You are going to piss off the racist to suggest immigration as a mechanism to address workforce shortages, but funny enough thats one of the reasons as to why the US is as prosperous as it is, and there is never an issue really with regards to workforce shortages as there has always been a vibrant history of migrants coming to the US and becoming part of the country's fabric.

Don't worry.

There are many Chinese people who support importing men from abroad.

The simplest example is member Beijingwalker. He keeps posting threads about mixed-race singers, mixed-race athletes, Pakistani men marrying Chinese wives, Indian husbands and Chinese wives, Western men and Chinese wives...

Beijingwalker is very happy when foreign men **** Chinese women and constantly creates propaganda threads, encouraging it. I'm not sure what the real profession of beijingwalker is? But if he is a Chinese propagandist, it means that the Chinese government is encouraging foreign men to come to China, marry Chinese women, and have many mixed-race children.

The final decision rests with the Chinese government and china leader.
 
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You are going to piss off the racist to suggest immigration as a mechanism to address workforce shortages, but funny enough thats one of the reasons as to why the US is as prosperous as it is, and there is never an issue really with regards to workforce shortages as there has always been a vibrant history of migrants coming to the US and becoming part of the country's fabric.
Yesterday I watched sci-fi movie "Wandering Earth 2" . It shows in the future when Sun is about to turn into red giant, people's different attitudes toward the doom day. Some people want to make efforts to save the Earth by escaping Solar system. Some people want to become data creatures and live in data world. I believe Chinese would choose the first one. And Muslims would choose the second. We are totally different in the way of thinking.

By the way, in the movie, human beings choose the first plan. And data lives are forbiddened because people will lose their motivation to work in the real world once they enter the data world.
 

Demographic changes in China offer Pakistan opportunities that would need well-informed and thought-out public policy
Shahid Javed Burki

Pakistan borders two of the world’s most populous countries – India and China. Until a few weeks ago, China had more people than India but then the latter, with a higher rate of population growth, went past China and became the world’s largest country. Does it matter that Pakistan borders these two mega-population countries? I will argue in this article that the demographic changes in China offer Pakistan opportunities it could and should exploit but that would need well-informed and well-thought-out public policy. At this point to would be appropriate to a go a bit into history.

Mao Zedong, the founding father of modern China and the country’s supreme leader for 27 years, was apprehensive that at the rate at which the country’s population was growing, China would not be able to feed itself. He had a strong belief in self-reliance. He did not want the country’s population to reach the point at which it will have to depend on imported food to provide enough nourishment to a growing population. In the last few years of Mao’s rule of China, the country’s population was growing at more than 20 million a year.

Under Mao’s stewardship, the country had been through two famines; the first in the late 1950s, a decade after the Communist Party of China had taken full control of the country. Mao was in a hurry to make China an important country on the global scene. He wanted to industrialise the country while remaining self-sufficient in food. The Mao approach resulted in the adoption of the policy the history knows as the ‘Great Leap Forward’. The idea was that the principle of self-reliance would apply not only to the entire country but to individual households as well. Families would produce within the confines of their homes and the small bits of land that had been left with them after collectivisation. The result of the policy was a plunge in food production that had the Chinese go through first of the two famines during the Mao era. Millions of people died of starvation.

Mao reacted to the crisis by adopting what came to be called the ‘one child policy’. No Chinese couple could have more than one child. Second pregnancies were aborted. Abortion became common and with the strong preference for male children, the Chinese aborted girls leaving the country with a highly skewed gender imbalance. In 2022, China had a sex ratio of 104.69 men to every 100 women. It reached a point where it began to import girls from neighbouring countries the Chinese men could marry.

The one child policy produced results Mao would have appreciated. On February 17, 2023, China’s Bureau of Statistics announced a decline of 850,000 people, bringing the total population to 1.4118 billion – the first such decline in 60 years. The birth rate reached its lowest level on record, 6.77 per 1,000 people down from 7.52 in 2021. The last time China’s population declined was in 1961, after three years of Mao’s disastrous ‘Great Leap Forward’ industrial policy. Although long predicted, the decline in population arrived sooner than expected. Leading Chinese scholars and the United Nations estimated as recently as 2019 that the downward trend would not begin until early in the 2030s. The decline in the rate of growth of population results in its ageing. This has serious economic consequences as experienced by Japan over the last couple of decades. Japan is now the oldest society in the world with 29% of the country’s population over 65. With a comparably contracting work force, China too could fall short of the ambition to become a global leader.

Even though experience has shown that state policies directed at changing population growth rates seldom produces the intended results, the Chinese cities are attempting to increase the rate of population growth. For instance, Shanghai last year gave mothers an additional 60 days of maternity leave on top of state-mandated time off; paternity leave was extended to 10 days. Shenzhen on January 17 became the latest Chinese city to give out almost $1,500 for couples who had a third child. Beijing, in other words, has come a long distance when Mao, the Supreme Leader, attempted to drastically reduce the birth rate.

There is now an urgency being attached to bringing change in demographic trends as President Xi Jinping’s policy of ‘national rejuvenation’ depends on a large, growing and well-educated population. He has sought to tackle the long-term economic and social pressures from a shrinking, ageing society by lifting the limits on family size imposed by some of the country’s earlier leaders. He has taken steps to build a strong social safety network and announced a new phase of high-quality growth less dependent on legions of cheap, abundant migrant workers from the countryside. “The population issue is the most important issue for the future but is the one that is most easily neglected,” Ren Zeping, a former chief economist for the Evergrande Group, a massive housing developer, who has studied the looming demographic crunch, wrote in widely circulated comment after the population numbers were released on February 17.

One of the options available to China to address the worker-shortages it has begun to experience is to import people from the neighbouring countries, from a country such as Pakistan which has one of the youngest populations in the world. As is well known, China built its economy initially by exporting labour-intensive products to the West. However, rapid development has resulted in higher wages. Several Chinese enterprises have moved their operations to labour-surplus countries such as Laos, Cambodia, Thailand and Indonesia. Chinese enterprises have not come to Pakistan as they consider the general public is not welcoming. Some of the anti-China sentiment that has been created is the result of Indian endeavours where articles are written and sold to Pakistani authors who are prepared to publish them under their names.

However, the country is experiencing another kind of worker shortage. With its technological sector rapidly developing, China needs large number of well-educated and trained workers. With a concerted effort that is made by the government working with the private sector, Pakistan could produce the well-trained and educated work force the Chinese need. Japan with worker-shortages that are also the result of demographic change has begun to import Indian workers who have graduated from the well-known science and technology institutions the country has established over the last six decades. Pakistan could follow the Indian example.
the absolute state of this fucking country where the so called "iNteLliGeNtSiA" focuses more on sending our brains and labor- assets in other nations- to other countries rather than fixing our own shit

Fucking ghadhay boomers
 
Don't worry.

There are many Chinese people who support importing men from abroad.

The simplest example is member Beijingwalker. He keeps posting threads about mixed-race singers, mixed-race athletes, Pakistani men marrying Chinese wives, Indian husbands and Chinese wives, Western men and Chinese wives...

Beijingwalker is very happy when foreign men **** Chinese women and constantly creates propaganda threads, encouraging it. I'm not sure what the real profession of beijingwalker is? But if he is a Chinese propagandist, it means that the Chinese government is encouraging foreign men to come to China, marry Chinese women, and have many mixed-race children.

The final decision rests with the Chinese government and china leader.
First of all, the issue of lacking labors itself doesn't exist in China. Employment rate is still a headache for Chinese government. Even when the day of lacking labors comes several decades later, the AI + robot technologies will be much advanced than today.
 
Previously, I do not support your nonsense analysis regarding the no-covid policy or China will win if they and the west split.

But this time, I fully support your point.



Don't worry.

There are many Chinese people who support importing men from abroad.

The simplest example is member Beijingwalker. He keeps posting threads about mixed-race singers, mixed-race athletes, Pakistani men marrying Chinese wives, Indian husbands and Chinese wives, Western men and Chinese wives...

Beijingwalker is very happy when foreign men **** Chinese women and constantly creates propaganda threads, encouraging it. I'm not sure what the real profession of beijingwalker is? But if he is a Chinese propagandist, it means that the Chinese government is encouraging foreign men to come to China, marry Chinese women, and have many mixed-race children.

The final decision rests with the Chinese government and china leader.

Wtf is wrong with you? lol, you got some weird mental issues.

Whats this obsession over males? I'm simply talking about immigrants many of whom are skilled coming and working in industries, its literally the norm all around the world, some of the people migrate with their families, what later generations do with regards to who they marry is their business. Even Vietnam has had migration of chinese people amongst its population in its history, many of those people probably settled in vietnam.

Yesterday I watched sci-fi movie "Wandering Earth 2" . It shows in the future when Sun is about to turn into red giant, people's different attitudes toward the doom day. Some people want to make efforts to save the Earth by escaping Solar system. Some people want to become data creatures and live in data world. I believe Chinese would choose the first one. And Muslims would choose the second. We are totally different in the way of thinking.

Yeah that just sounds like some BS racist projections. lol
 
I got banned twice on Reddit

1. The first time I protested Japan's opening, accepting refugees and immigrants, and my account was banned
2. Second time, I think immigration from afganistan is bad for Germany, and my account is banned

LOL

Others support the import of foreigners, accept refugees and immigrants, support interracial marriage, support multiple births of mixed children. As for me, absolutely not. I never changed my mind, even if banned forever.

If I am the only crazy person in the world, then I accept that I will forever be crazy. I don't want to be like everyone else.
 
Not racism at all. Muslims more care spiritual world. Chinese only care real world.

No it is BS pigeonholing, there are stereotypes of Chinese people here in the US being soulless materialist sociopaths with no real humanly emotions, and only concerned with materialist benefit, perpetuated from that "Tiger mom" nonsense typecasting. With the steriotype being that the chinese don't care about freedom of expression and liberty and are happy with "oriental despotism" of the state in the form of the CCPs oppression, unlike "freedom loving" red blooded Americans. But you don't see me projecting that BS narrative carte blanc onto all chinese people.

In your silly doomsday scenario, Why would you assume that the muslim people(as if those people are a monolith to begin with) when given the choice between going to different planets and exploring, and perishing on earth, would rather choose demise? is there some sort of theological prohibition on exploring other planets? Its just nonsensical projections.
 
Yesterday I watched sci-fi movie "Wandering Earth 2" . It shows in the future when Sun is about to turn into red giant, people's different attitudes toward the doom day. Some people want to make efforts to save the Earth by escaping Solar system. Some people want to become data creatures and live in data world. I believe Chinese would choose the first one. And Muslims would choose the second. We are totally different in the way of thinking.

By the way, in the movie, human beings choose the first plan. And data lives are forbiddened because people will lose their motivation to work in the real world once they enter the data world.
That's an incredibly racist, islamophobic story you just made up
 
Previously, I do not support your nonsense analysis regarding the no-covid policy or China will win if they and the west split.

But this time, I fully support your point.



Don't worry.

There are many Chinese people who support importing men from abroad.

The simplest example is member Beijingwalker. He keeps posting threads about mixed-race singers, mixed-race athletes, Pakistani men marrying Chinese wives, Indian husbands and Chinese wives, Western men and Chinese wives...

Beijingwalker is very happy when foreign men **** Chinese women and constantly creates propaganda threads, encouraging it. I'm not sure what the real profession of beijingwalker is? But if he is a Chinese propagandist, it means that the Chinese government is encouraging foreign men to come to China, marry Chinese women, and have many mixed-race children.

The final decision rests with the Chinese government and china leader.
Probably better just relocating labor intensive parts of the Chinese economy to Pakistani especially if the products are going to or raw materials are coming from Africa or the Middle East. Similar to how Japan has build factories in ASEAN countries/Bangladesh/India and decreasing the need to import labor, shifting part of the production to a large and friendly lower labor cost country is a win win solution. Pakistan will earn more money to spend on more Chinese procure to build up more of its industries and buy more Chinese goods.

Considering the 996 expectations, many Pakistanis probably wouldn’t want to work in China based factories itself. Many Pakistani don’t want to relocate to other cities in Pakistan for manual work, much less other countries. The white collar workers and Students are a different story and would probably be more willing to move to advance their careers.

This is why a direct rail line between the two countries would be truly game changing (costing under $25 Billion). No need to depend on the Afghans and Central Asians (potential interference from the Russians, Turks, and Western countries), and its benefit to China as an alternative to sailing supplies around the Indian Ocean and south east Asia are benefits to Chinese business.

If you imaging Pakistan similar to the West coast of North America with the mountains in between the two countries like the American Rocky Mountains and China itself like the eastern 2/3 of North America, you can see this will effectively for Chinese business make the China’s logistical opportunities similar to the US and it’s two ocean routes.

Migrations, even if allowed, may result in a few million Pakistanis moving to China, but a shift of industries to Pakistan allows these factories to pick the best talent from amongst nearly the entire labor force
 
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