A Chinese sea change?
Two developments yesterday highlighted the risks for China. Chinese officials announced that the country’s population declined last year for the first time in more than 60 years. They also released data showing that the country’s economy grew only 3 percent last year, well below the government’s target of 5.5 percent.
Both these outcomes are closely linked to Chinese policy. Decades-long government efforts to reduce birthrates nationwide, including the policy of allowing most families to have only one child, sped up the population decline. And the economic slowdown is in part tied to the zero-Covid policy that China backed away from only last month, which left the country unprepared to reopen.
The birth rate reduction was abundantly clear---that alone foretells a changing economy as the population ages.
"A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity, an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty” ---Sir Winston Churchill
"Political extremism involves two prime ingredients: an excessively simple diagnosis of the world's ills, and a conviction that there are identifiable villains back of it all." ---John W. Gardner
“You can’t go back and change the beginning, but you can start where you are and change the ending.” ---C. S. Lewis
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