Good news: China's population could start falling!
China's population is set to get smaller for the first time since the great famine struck 60 years ago...
China accounts for more than one-sixth of the world's population, yet after four extraordinary decades in which the country’s population has swelled from 660 million to 1.4 billion, its population is on track to turn down this year, for the first time since the great famine of 1959-1961.
According to the latest figures from China's National Bureau of Statistics, China's population grew from 1.41212 billion to just 1.41260 billion in 2021 – a record low increase of just 480,000, a mere fraction of the annual growth of eight million or so common a decade ago.
While a reluctance to have children in the face of strict anti-Covid measures might have contributed to the slowdown in births, it has been coming for years.
China's total fertility rate (births per woman) was 2.6 in the late 1980s – well above the 2.1 needed to replace deaths. It has been between 1.6 and 1.7 since 1994, and slipped to 1.3 in 2020 and just 1.15 in 2021.
By way of comparison, in Australia and the United States the total fertility rate is 1.6 births per woman. In ageing Japan it is 1.3....
Despite forecasts that this will be "the Chinese century", these population projections suggest influence might move elsewhere – including to neighbouring India, whose population is expected to overtake China within this coming decade.
Observations
As is typically the case with articles such as this, the author irrationally equates population growth with national political influence, when in fact the converse is true. The last sentence in the above article reveals the author quaking in fear that India may become more overpopulated than China. Oh, the horror!
In America, the radical Democrat left is pushing their subjects to abandon fossil fuels under the bogus green new deal. It's all political theater oriented toward decimating the middle class and forcing even more government regulations on the public.
Consider that the United States contains 332 million people. China contains 1.4 billion people.China contains 4.2 times as many people as the United States.
Does it really make sense to deny permits to mine natural resources in America, with heavy environmental regulations and instead import the same resources from China, with essentially zero regard for environmental regulations? It seems fairly obvious that the global environmental impact will be significantly higher under the latter scenario.
It also seems obvious that China's quest for global domination, compounded by the demands of its gargantuan population, will ultimately leave little resources for others to use. Population reduction and stabilization makes sense for all nations.
China Is Polluting California's Air, Tree hugger, 11 February 2019:
... "Scientists found Asian air pollution contributed as much as 65 percent of an increase in Western ozone in recent years,"... A number of studies have come to similar conclusions, with one study finding "29% of particulates in the San Francisco area came from coal power plants in China."
"[overpopulated[ Countries like China, India, Nigeria, Bangladesh, and Vietnam are accumulating intolerable levels of pollution. In some of these countries, pollution is responsible for one in four deaths, far more than infectious diseases like malaria," continued the report....
Visualizing The Global Decline Of Fertility Rates, ZeroHedge, 12 June 2022:
Here's some background information: Exponential growth, doubling time, and the Rule of 70.
See this interesting 5 minute interactive tutorial: Understanding Exponential Growth.
Book: Who Will Feed China?: Wake-Up Call for a Small Planet, Worldwatch, 1995.