To be thorough in our discussion of China’s demographic collapse, we must explore as many potential solutions as possible…even if one of those is a UAE-style model of imported workers (aka slavery).
China is already implementing quasi-slavery to help feed their solar industry, but this barely dents the demographic problem. The scale needed to flip the demographic script just isn’t feasible; we’re talking about importing at least 100 million workers. Any idea where that would come from?
The reality of the Chinese demographic situation is that their traditional system cannot withstand it, but that goes for capitalism and socialism as much as communism. So, new economic models will be ushered in, we just don’t what those will look like yet.
Everybody car video today, running errands, and they don’t have time. Anyway, I’ve got a question here that’s come in from the Patreon crowd. And it’s about experimenting with new economic models. So the world that we’re moving into is facing population collapse among people who are under age 55, having places like China, Japan, Korea and Germany and Italy first, and then moving on from there to other places.
So the question is, how about some models that we generally look down upon because they’re, you know, gauche, like slavery, specifically, could China replicate something like, the United Arab Emirates has done where the population, is basically sustained by a huge imported workforce that does all the serious work. Could you do something like that while the Chinese agent of mass retirement.
Two problems with that strategy. Number one, they’re already doing it to a degree. Keep in mind that while 90% of the population of China is Han Chinese, there are a number of minorities that haven’t been completely genocidal into nonexistence. And one of them, the Uyghurs of western China in the Zhejiang region are already existing in a degree of slavery.
They they stationed Chinese Communist loyalists within the homes of people to make sure that people don’t have kids. And anyone who shows any sort of religious inclination, like wearing headgear, for example, or maybe saying a prayer in private is sent off to a reeducation camp, which is basically a work camp. And so almost everyone who has installed a solar panel in the last four years is benefiting from that system on a global basis because the silicon is processed and turned into solar lakes, in Zhejiang.
And that really hasn’t moved the needle very much. Now, of course, there are only so many viewers versus, you know, ¥1 billion. Which brings us to the second problem is scale, when you’re in the United Arab Emirates and you only have a single digit number of million of Arabs that need to be supported with imported workforce, that’s one thing, especially when you’re drawing people from, say, Palestine or Pakistan or India.
But there are a lot more Han. And so you would need to import bare minimum cheese. At least 100 million people in order to make a system like that work. And the scale of that just is not possible. And if you look at the countries that border,
China, there’s no easy source. Russian Siberia is largely unpopulated.
Everything east of the Urals is under 15 million people. Kazakhstan has of more people than that, but most of them aren’t in the border region. Most of them are further north. You get to Duke of standing Kyrgyzstan again. The eastern reaches are completely uninhabitable. And if you go south, you’re hitting Vietnam. And if the Vietnamese hate the Chinese more than anyone else.
Myanmar is jungle and mountain, and most of their people are again on the other side of the mountains. And and of course, India is on the other side of the Himalayas, and that is everyone. So, you’d be having to bring in literally tens of millions of people from at least a couple thousand miles away. So the feasibility of that is not great.
But keep questions like this coming, because we’re gonna have to figure out something as the world the populates the relationships among supply and demand and labor and capital are all breaking down. And the models that we have now, whether it’s fascism or socialism or communism or capitalism, simply aren’t going to work much longer for a lot of countries.
And the sooner we come up with some other ideas, the better.
