Chinese Marriage Data Confirms Demographic Crisis

Hey all, Peter Zeihan here coming to you from…where am I? Termoli In Italy? And today we’re going to talk about some Chinese statistics that just popped out in the last couple of weeks that look really bad even by Chinese standards. So backdrop that you need to know this way is that Chinese data is awful. Part of that is just the nature of the beast. 

China really only started its industrialization process in 1978, and so the techniques that a lot of Western countries have been using for the better part of a century are new. And computerization really is only the last 20 years. And it’s a huge place. So getting the locals and the center to agree on what is normal statistics is a little hit and miss at times, and part of it is unfortunately by a degree of design, the central government sense quotas for everything and so lo and behold, the locals meet the quotas or maybe expand upon them. 

And then on top of that, you’ve got punishment issues. And where if a data point comes out, the Chairman Jinping doesn’t like the person who presents it to them, may have their job and or life forfeit. And so the people who do the data collection just stop collecting that data point, whatever it happens to be. So we have really poor data on Chinese demographics and financial issues and bonds and all these other things these days, especially health anyway. 

But there are some that are seen as not politicized. And so data for those is good. And the one we’re going to talk about today is marriage registrations. According to the new data that’s come out in the first half of the year. Those are down by roughly 6% in just the last 12 months. And that is on top of year and year declines that go back the better part of 30 years. 

This is data that has been collected since 1978. And it’s not an estimate like a lot of data. It’s actual registrations. People have actually gone to the equivalent of city hall and registered the marriages. So it’s something we relate to or it’s something that we can relatively rely upon. Now, the reason why this matters is if family formation is down, the birth rate is down, and if the birth rate is down, China’s hollowing out. 

Now, this is something we’ve been looking at at any number of angles for quite some time. What is interesting here, from my point of view, is that the marriage rate drop has been dropping much, much, much faster, two and three times faster than the. Suppose it had declined in the number of 20 and 30 somethings, where usually the people get married. 

So it gives us a little bit more accurate view of just how bad the demographic crisis is. And it was already really, really bad. Basically, we no longer have enough people under age 50 in China to even theoretically repopulate a country of 400 million people, much less supposedly the 1.2 billion that China says it has. And in internal conversations, the Shanghai Academy of Sciences is now debating how many hundred million people under age 40 they’ve over counted. 

They know it’s at least 100 million. And this year, the number 500 million popped up for the first time as a possibility. They just don’t know. And they don’t believe they have the capacity to go out and do get the information, because too many people are concerned with getting the wrong ancer anyway. It’s a tiny little window into the crisis that the Chinese are facing these days, and to be perfectly blunt, there’s no coming back from this without marriages. 

There are no children or very few. But more importantly, there are now no longer enough people to even theoretically get married in order to attempt repopulation. So it’s just a question of timing, whether it’s in single or double digits of years, of course, matters to all of us because we’re all living in the now. 

But it looks pretty rough and this isn’t going to last much longer. All right. That’s it for me for today. Till next time.