China’s population declines for second straight year

Good. They're overpopulated and under-developed.

Why the fuck are people worried about this? This is a great thing. Good for them, keeping their population under conrtol.

Someone tell India.

I think it's the "economy". We've set up systems where the young pay out the older people. At least that's my uneducated understanding of the situation.
However what's funny is that the economy under China (and most places in the world) is why people aren't having kids now. It's probably done more de-population than the one child policy.
- Capitalism expects infinite growth, which is impossible and unsustainable.
  It’s time for a new system. Feels like that time is now as it appears capitalism is slowly collapsing on itself.
- I think it boils down to you need a lot of kids to run a farm due to the manual labor demands. You don't need a lot of kids to work in a factory or office.
- economy definately has a major role in it. similar to a lot of western nations, there is a growing number of educated chinese people who have education in a market that isnt hiring enough for the roles that they acquired skills for. the lack of having enough higher paying jobs puts off people from having children, in particular for people who have higher education, as they are more aware of the costs attached to children.
  it all boils down to not enough people on the lower 90% have enough funds to think about having children to support the (unsustainable) social security countries often have.
Under-developed? What kind of American propaganda is that?

I've seen people argue the real numbers of the decline for China are much worse than they have shared and they may already be past the point of no return like Japan and South Korea. It's going to be interesting to see how they handle an aging population.
Asia does have a more recent tradition of kids being the retirement plan so they might fair a little better than places like the US where that is not the norm anymore. The US with their infrastructure crumbling from underfunding and a general lack of care, should provide a good side by side comparison of the ride down with the differences of family versus industry support of seniors.
China's industrial capacity stretches pretty much the entire spectrum. Instead of offshoring entirely, China has opted for automating traditionally labour-intensive manufacturing industries, which is why China now has the fifth-highest robot density in the world.
"China is no different to other countries that have deindustrialised and moved into the service sector. The population becomes more educated and skilled and healthier, and they want to do other jobs rather than work in factories or construction," said Prof Gietel-Basten.
Deindustrialised? China?
Who's making all the stuff then?
- China still makes a majority of the stuff, due to being local to raw resources (chinas major power in the industry, resource logistics), but for businesses that dont require as many resources being nearby, you see production move, mainly into countries in south eastern asia, like Thailand or Vietnam.

Clearly not harming China's economy. China saw +7.2% consumer sales, +5.9% infrastructure, +6.5% manufacturing, and was dragged down by -9.6% real estate. Those growth numbers are absurd.

That is a meaningless statement to make without a point of comparison. How do you know it wouldn't be higher if the population was growing.
Also yeah, that's to be expected, the economic harm comes in the long term.
- The average restaurant lifespan is like 3 years, and malls are emptying around the world because of the rise of ecommerce. These are anecdotes that hold both in good economic conditions and in bad economic conditions. China's going through a bit of an D2C ecommerce revolution with Douyin (274B USD in the first 10 months of 2023, growing 60% YoY) and others. For reference, Amazon's sales from their ecommerce platform is around 350B USD for 2023, and its definitely not growing 60% YoY.
Yes it seems like even the Chinese haven't figured out how to put babies to work yet.
It's going to take a few years to catch up.