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The problem with all this nonsense (yours and @WhiningCoil's) is the projection of the degenerate American condition where somewhat organized 20th century things are next to impossible to do, so you have to rely on Bronze age factors like the proportion of – to a large extent functionally illiterate, obese, criminal and unhealthy, but at least physically mobile – population to kick the can down the road. Infrastructure cannot be adapted. Automation cannot be done, that's fake news, that'd require, like, electric engineering and other nerd shit that doesn't offer good P/E for the financial fraud class to get fat off. The olds will consume the surplus, or else revolt, because you cannot do anything against pensioners (eg provide very cheap industrialized welfare to have them shut up, or as @veqq says, just let them live out their lives in the naturally cheap countryside). Housing bubble will crash and bury the economy, because of course, the debt is secretly much higher than it seems, because Communists always lie with their fake statistics, we learned that from the Soviet Union, the previous “champion” of electronics exports and gacha games.
It's surreal to watch how their nation-scale companies like BYD operate, compare this to the shambolic, truly late Soviet bullshit going on in the US, and then observe all this Gordon Chang tier punditry. Their working age population is right now just short of 1 billion people. They're, it seems, overall higher quality people too, they live longer, ask for less and work harder. Tighter margins all around, higher efficiency of converting revenue to capex… There is, admittedly, a lot of population locked in agriculture and low-productivity sectors, so fine, the effective discrepancy in workforce might be “only” 5x. Do you seriously imagine that economies of scale in a nation with 5x the American workforce will amount to Wile-E-Coyote running off a cliff. Okay, I'll keep watching how it goes.
Yes. Find me a single instance in history where a nation was able smoothly transition through a period of declining population as the old begin to outnumber the young.
Especially one that is utterly dependent on continued imports of agricultural products and energy and most raw materials for that workforce to do anything productive.
https://www.cfr.org/article/china-increasingly-relies-imported-food-thats-problem
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=62804
They are simply unprepared to weather any situation where they can't afford to purchase necessary economic inputs from other countries.
Which is what their population cliff threatens to cause.
Can you give me a list of failure cases?
This is uncharted territory. All developed countries are aging, and all of them are losing out in overall population productivity through some combination of aging, dysgenics and demographic replacement. It's not even clear that China is declining faster than the US – at the very least, they are consistently graduating more and more highly educated workers, while Americans are struggling to hire literate people for menial jobs. Quantitatively, Chinese workforce size will continue to exceed the entire Western world's one for decades. Dependency ratio will reach Japanese levels in, what, 2045? This is not serious.
What does this have to do with anything? They'll keep importing soybeans from Brazil and iron from Australia. They have $1T trade surplus and, for some years, have been annually installing as much or more industrial automation than the entire rest of the world combined. Their problem right now is not workforce, but that the world is too poor to absorb their exports.
Do you just operate on the assumption that China is a land of mobilized peasants gluing sneakers by hand, and when peasants get old, the gig is over?
Will they?
Population decline isn't limited to China.
https://agenciadenoticias.ibge.gov.br/en/agencia-news/2184-news-agency/news/41065-populacao-do-pais-vai-parar-de-crescer-em-2042
https://www.abs.gov.au/media-centre/media-releases/birth-rate-continues-decline
Lot of countries in the same boat. Every country wrangling with population decline at around the same time means they all have to handle internal economic strife, and may not be able to maintain productivity needed to export as much.
I operate on the assumption that China relies on international trade, and the PRIMARY value they provide to trade for is cheap skilled labor and, concurrently, massively industrialized manufacturing.
Both of which rely heavily on their population remaining steady.
I operate on the assumption that China has no fallbacks if they lose the ability to provide cheap labor and manufacturing to the world.
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I don't think this is entirely true – my understanding is that a lack of population growth is considered a contributor to the decline of the Roman Empire, and I suspect (although I haven't put intense study into the issue) that similar factors may have contributed to poor French performance in the Second World War as well. I think there are distinguishing factors in all of these cases, but to the extent that we have historical analogies, they give us cold comfort.
And yet it is unable to employ all of those workers – the United States has a better youth employment rate than China (even after China "recalculated" their data to make it look better). Perhaps you and Faceh are focusing on the wrong Chinese employment problem.
There is something to the French case, but modern fertility collapse is uncharted territory in that it happens globally, for new reasons, in conditions of rapidly rising productivity via technological progress. I do not believe that “this country has higher TFR”, alone, is now predictive of much of anything, except the population age structure itself.
Fair enough, and yes, this goes to show that they're not on the verge of economic decline through labor shortages.
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The denominator here is likely to be extremely low.
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