Any statistics coming out of China always carry a caveat: beware of the quality of the information given its source. The reasons for bias are well documented, such as a bureaucratic infrastructure that grew out of the need to meet growth quotas during the height of the planned economy era. Actually gathering the information is difficult also simply because there are a lot of people in China.

Another objection, albeit anecdotal: every ten years China conducts a national census. At first this struck me as an efficient process, given that local bureaus can rely on Neighborhood Committees (another holdover from the communist period, sort of the state-sanctioned equivalent of a community organization) to send people around to all of the homes within the neighborhood to gather detailed demographic information.

So alone I sit one Sunday afternoon minding my own business. A loud knock comes at the door – and behold, it is a demographer, one of the older neighbor ladies who has been tasked with surveying residents. I open the door, “Oh” – she says “You’re not from around here. So you’re renting?” We go through her list – she wants to know I.D. number (“Oh that’s right you people don’t have those”), marital status, education, employment, name, age, home address (“Are you sure Pie-uh-nee-ar (Pioneer) Road doesn’t have Chinese characters? I need to write Chinese characters.”) After collecting what she wants, she heads off, and I return to my previous engagement.

About an hour later she comes back – I open the door and she says “Oh. Oh yeah wait. I was here already. SORRY!” No worries – there are lots of buildings, and many Unit 202s here in sunny Bamboo-Park-New-Village.

Another hour passes, and she returns a third time. This time it’s “OHHH darn I’m wrong again. I’ve already talked to you. I’m sorry.”

If we assume that grandma-citizen-demographer was average, then it stands to reason that even something as basic as the census might have considerable upward bias, purely from being oversampled by a factor of three. And hereafter, Shanghai’s population suddenly triples. National planners develop ulcers. The world again is astounded by China’s rapid growth.

Having written at length about the deterministic relationship between growth and demographics, this site (Japan Spike) provides several very photogenic examples of the results of de-urbanization / population collapse (see this graph first). Demographics are important. They even affect stock market returns (more accurately, certain demographic indicators are good proxies for other factors that affect general market performance).

The US, on the other hand, is in a very good long-term position relative to other developed nations; and stacks up reasonably well against (currently) emerging markets, in terms of demographic trends. Out of curiosity I constructed a dependency ratio projection for several countries (dependency ratio defined as [(Pop0-14+Pop65+)/Pop15-65], and is a general measure of how many resources must be used to take care of useless old people (higher ratio is worse, at least in terms of national economic health. There are probably other spillovers, as old people make great neighbors and Chess partners).

As usual, caveat projector future impossible to predict etc etc.:

This is of course assuming that there’s no world-altering singularity in 2030. It would be nice but I certainly wouldn’t bet on it. Data from US Census Bureau International Database, excel file here.

Continue to be amazed with how direct certain aspects of Chinese social taboos are. Ex-landlady (the one who’s been trying to find a man for her daughter) calls and says, “say Tongli, you forgot some stuff at your old place. When can you come over and get it?” I arrive, grab stuff, and ex-landlady says, “why don’t you stay for dinner with us?” Inner monologue: well this will probably be awkward but I do like free food and it would be solid language practice. So I stay, and the daughter notes that she saw wine bottles in my old flat, concluding that I enjoy the occasional spirit, and offers some Korean sake. “Sure I’ll have a little bit,” I declare.

Moments later, the whole bottle goes into a big cup; I of course drink the it all to avoid being rude (seriously when was the last time a 60 year old poured you a bottle full of liquor?) Dinner is good, and the interaction not as awkward as it could have been. I learn how they came to own several flats in Pudong, and how the mother and two grandparents subsist entirely off of the daughter’s very modest income.

Having previously explained at length to the pair that foreign men are generally very bad dating prospects (pump-and-dump versus pumping out babies) it’s sort of amazing that they are so persistent. This time the mother assured me that she simply wanted a starter boyfriend of sorts, despite continued protestations. “You can start from friends!” she assured me.

Many young Chinese women behave as though they are strapped with an explosive that will detonate if they reach 30 and are unmarried. At least their parents often seem to think so. Though this behavior seems out of place among persistently aloof Westerners, Robin Hanson points out that egg count decreases to approximately 12% by age 30, with steep declines each year thereafter. He ponders a different equilibrium, where women have kids much younger and delay career/grad school until age 28+, in order to produce healthier children (or simply, more children among certain demographics, which is something the developed world badly needs). This is not to say that planned birth policy is the answer (as China has in fact done), merely to question why the status quo appears to be sub-optimal from the perspective of long-term survivability.

Perhaps aggressive landlady, with her old-lady ways, is on to something.

November 11 is single’s day (11.11) here in the Land of the Eternal Summer of the Hua Peoples. One of the most common conversations I have here with locals (particularly old neighbor ladies) goes something like: “Where are you from?” “The US” “Are you married?” “No, I’m still quite young and like my freedom” “Oh well you must have a girlfriend” “No, not right now. I really like my freedom.” “Impossible! You must have a girlfriend. You’re so nice. Do you like white girls or Shanghainese girls?” “I dunno I guess both are okay.”

Anyway, a lot of time is spent defending status as a 光棍 (lit. ‘the branch that does not bear leaves’). I’m pretty sure this branch hasn’t borne any leaves in a while, hence bachelor. As a result, it’s often necessary to extoll the virtues of singlehood. We in the West sometimes romanticize the status, whereas here it’s (in some sense) viewed as a sort of abnormality?

The concern seems unwarranted; though perhaps the old ladies are onto something: bachelors (the young and frustrated variety like me) are a big security risk, according to Valerie Hudson. From WaPost about the book:

According to sociologists, young adult men with no stake in society — of the lowest socioeconomic classes and with little chance of forming families of their own — are much more prone to attempt to improve their situation through violent and criminal behavior in a strategy of coalitional aggression with other bare branches.

Political instability in two big, heavily-armed nations, located right next to each other with previously existing border disputes; what could possibly go wrong… To some extent, the argument also sounds like something of a corollary to “the most influential political movement in the world today consists of disaffected young men willing to blow themselves up.”

A significant worry, in my mind, is how women in China will be treated in the coming decades. Without enough to go around their ‘relative status’ may very well go up in certain contexts, as they can be more selective of their choices of mates; but that will leave a lot of poorer men without women. Sex trade and violent sex crimes will increase. A simple theoretic framework would suggest: “some females will be chosen by high-status males on a 1:1 ratio, and potentially even attract or occupy more as the relative rewards to being a high-status male go up. The remaining women will face an even more skewed distribution, and low-status males will compete amongst each other for the left-over women. Assuming competition amongst the low-status cohort is mostly homogenous, they will probably be forced to (or rather be forced to force) the remaining women into various types of sharing arrangements.” (Highly recommend the movie 盲山 for an example of this process.) There will also be a widening age differential as older men marry younger women. Again, this does not bode well for the 18-30-frustrated-maybe-violent cohort.

There’s also a major demographic issue, whereby 1 out of every 6 men will be unable to start a family; I have my doubts as to whether the left-over women from the earlier digression will be doing a lot of child-rearing. China’s already facing a skewed upside down pyramid of population distribution that will get much worse before it gets better. India is at least in a better position to cope with this.

The government is trying to stop this; they’ve banned sex-selective abortion, eased restrictions on one-child in rural areas, and started numerous public campaigns (“girls are just as good as boys”). As a process, it shows just how difficult it is to alter values and incentive structures with planning. Characterize rural farmers as uncouth line-cutting ground-spitting-on boy-loving bumpkins if you want, there are many legitimate reasons for them to want sons and eschew daughters. Until those incentives or the planned birth policies change, expect the trend to continue.

The Economist cites favorable demographics as one reason to be optimistic about Africa in the coming decades. The article notes:

… A fast-growing, economically active population provides the initial impetus to industrial production; then a supply of new workers coming from villages can, if handled properly, enable a country to become more productive. China and East Asia are the models. On some calculations, demography accounted for about a third of East Asia’s phenomenal growth over the past 30 years.

I’ve opined previously that (due to one-child) China’s situation in about 15 years becomes pretty serious. Here’s China in 1990:

And 2030:

For developing countries, India and Brazil have very favorable demographics. India in 2030:

Among developed countries, the U.S. has a reasonably favorable demographic situation, for all of the attention given to the baby boomer situation. For comparison, here’s the U.S. in 2030 using the same scale:

Data from U.S. Census Bureau International Data Base.

There’s a peculiar word in modern Chinese – 撒娇 (sa1jiao1), meaning ‘to behave like a spoiled child.’ Aside from children complaining to their parents, it’s most commonly seen thusly: a young couple (19-25) will be walking down the street. The girl will start whining / complaining loudly, and the boy is expected to comfort her. If he does poorly, she may escalate: throw her shopping bags, and demand that he run to fetch them.

It’s sort of a very overt flirting game that at times looks likes reverse domestic violence, but only out in public (there needs to be an audience for face / dignity to be at risk). These very public displays of emasculation seem odd, especially in what is normally thought of as a very patriarchal society.

Perhaps the women are realizing they are in very high demand.

A recent study in the British Medicine Journal concludes that, among Chinese under 20, there are 32 million more men than women:

The findings paint a discouraging picture of very high and increasing sex ratios in the reproductive age group in China for the next two decades. The sex ratio increased steadily from 108 in the cohort born between 1985 and 1989 to 124 in the 2000 to 2004 cohort. However, the ratio then declined to 119 for the 2005 cohort…

The 120 to 100 number had been bandied about a lot; but only applies to a particular slice of the population: one that will soon be reaching mating age; where about a dozen or so out of every hundred men will be without a woman.

The happy optimist in me wants to believe that these men will just get lewd with each other, and harmonious society will emerge (there have been serious suggestions by Chinese demographers that the natural prevalence of homosexuality is about equal to the number of excess men. Not sure what happens to the homosexual women in this scenario).

The realist, of course, says that this will produce a dating / mating world very unfavorable to women: rape, prostitution, more sex trafficking, and lots of sexual frustration on both ends. Though somewhat counterintuitive, the ‘compression at the top’ trends (with wealthier men occupying more than one women at a time) will continue, and even grow more pronounced. As ‘proper wife/mistress’ quality women become more scarce, their ‘value’ as status symbols go up, and I think (all else being equal) wealthy men will allocate more resources towards that end.

Free flow of information is no defense against tyranny. 

In this Long Now Foundation Seminar, futurist Peter Schwartz debates historian Niall Furgeson. During the course of the debate, Furgeson questions why in 1991, Peter missed the most significant transformative trend of the last two decades: China. Later the two are asked what they think the next “big thing” will be – Schwartz: ‘climate change,’ Furgeson: ‘China is the next China’:

Furgeson: China will be the next China… We’re getting China wrong again… We’re heading for a far bumpier ride in China than the conventional wisdom allows. China is already more exposed to the consequences of climate change, because of it’s location and topography.

There’s also a demographic disaster unfolding as a consequence of the one-child policy… There’s going to be a huge oversupply of men, and undersupply of women in many parts of China; and more seriously there is going to be a huge imbalance between the generations within a space of 20 years that is going to cause huge difficulties for China’s practically non-existent welfare state. So if I had to pick an outlier,  it would be the ‘China screw-up’ which I think is the one thing most people think is not going to happen. 

… there are some really amazing videos you can watch of a nakedly nationalist nature that don’t seem to be government generated. My strong impression is that we underestimate the extent to which the internet and the cell-phone are allowing not liberal progressive d3mocratic forces to gain ground in China but rather the opposite. They are actually allowing a quite old fashioned, to our eyes, early 20th century nationalism to mobilize a generation in ways that I’m not even sure the Chinese leadership are in control of… The China we’re going to get is not the China of the BRICs story, it’s a China with profound social and economic problems which it will try to address by the kind of nationalism that we even forget exists. [1:17:00]

Perhaps it’s the culture shock, but all this seems spot on, in so far that conventional wisdom and mainstream media attention focuses much more extensively on the ‘economic miracle’ narrative. Do we ignore this potential worst-case at our own detriment? Unsure. 

More generally it seems that the liberalizing effects of technology are glossed over with a base assumption that their long-term effects will be dem0cratizing and socially beneficial. There are already several disturbing examples of ‘bottom-up’ censorship. In China the ‘50 cent army’ is employed to swamp potentially sensitive material with large amounts of pro-party rhetoric. The relevant question is: ‘are there effective means to separate quality information from noise / deliberate disinformation?’ So far, yes – but it seems blithe to assume such a trend will continue in perpetuity.