The Coming Population Collapse In East Asia

The relevant article is "East Asia’s Coming Population Collapse: And How It Will Reshape World Politics" by Nicholas Eberstadt at Foreign Policy. Eberstadt begins:

In the decades immediately ahead, East Asia will experience perhaps the modern world’s most dramatic demographic shift. All of the region’s main states—China, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan—are about to enter into an era of depopulation, in which they will age dramatically and lose millions of people. According to projections from the Population Division of the UN Department of Economic Social Affairs, China’s and Japan’s populations are set to fall by eight percent and 18 percent, respectively, between 2020 and 2050. South Korea’s population is poised to shrink by 12 percent. And Taiwan’s will go down by an estimated eight percent. The U.S. population, by contrast, is on track to increase by 12 percent.

I think that the UN projections are overly optimistic; they have consistently underestimated population declines for the past couple decades. 

    In any event, Eberstadt notes that for East Asia, "the realm of the possible for its states will be radically constricted by the coming population drop."

They will find it harder to generate economic growth, accumulate investments, and build wealth; to fund their social safety nets; and to mobilize their armed forces. They will face mounting pressure to cope with domestic or internal challenges. Accordingly, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan will be prone to look inward. China, meanwhile, will face a growing—and likely unbridgeable—gap between its ambitions and capabilities.  

 Also:

    This is not the first time East Asia has lost inhabitants. According to historical records, China has undergone at least four long-term depopulations over the past two millennia. Some of these bouts lasted for centuries. After AD 1200, for example, China’s population shrank by more than half. It took the country almost 350 years to recover. Japan and Korea also endured long-term depopulations before they began modernizing.

    But the impending depopulation is different from all the ones before it. In the past, East Asia’s (and every region’s) prolonged contractions were a consequence of dreadful calamity—such as war, famine, pestilence, or upheaval. Today, the decline is taking place under conditions of orderly progress, improvements in health conditions, and spreading prosperity. The coming depopulation, in other words, is voluntary. It is happening not because people are dying en masse but because they are choosing to have fewer children. China provides perhaps the starkest illustration of this fact. The country suspended its coercive one-child policy in 2015, yet in the years since, annual births have fallen by more than half.

And, unlike past population declines where the populations eventually recovered due to subsequent high birth rates, Eberstadt does not see any recovery this time.

    The population decline this time will have other impacts. For instance, the inversion of the age distribution:

    ... By 2050, the population in every one of the region’s countries will be smaller and older than it is now. The China of 2050, for example, will have many fewer people under 60 than does today’s China. But it will have two and a half times as many septuagenarians, octogenarians, and nonagenarians as today—another 180 million of them—even though the country’s total population will decline. In other countries, the changes will be even more drastic. In 2050, Japan will likely have fewer people than it does today in every age cohort under 70. Taiwan will have more people over 75 than under 25. In South Korea, there will be more people over 80 than under 20.

    This demographic shift will cost these countries more than just their youth. It also threatens to sap them of economic vitality. As a rule of thumb, societies with fewer people tend to have smaller economies, as do societies where the elderly make up a disproportionate share of the population. The elderly work less than the young and the middle-aged: there is a reason why demographers conventionally refer to people between 15 and 64 as the “working age” population. And although East Asia’s working-age cohort grew until 2015, the region’s labor pool is now shrinking. If projections hold, China’s working-age population will be more than 20 percent smaller in 2050 than in 2020. Japan’s and Taiwan’s will be about 30 percent smaller, and South Korea will be over 35 percent smaller.

Thus, for instance, "[b]y 2050, all of East Asia will have more people over 80 than children under 15." This obviously means, as explained in more detail in the article, that the pool of military age men will also shrink for these countries, whereas it is expected to increase in the U.S. over the same period. 

To be sure, China will remain an enormous country with a huge economy and military force. It can hardly help but remain a formidable power—indeed, it will be difficult for China to drop out of second place. The Chinese government may also be able to compensate for some unfavorable military demography with technology, such as artificial intelligence and autonomous weapons. But in a real military crisis, there is usually no true substitute for manpower. Fielding and funding a competitive military force is about to get much harder for Beijing relative to Washington, almost regardless of what the Chinese government decides.

Of course, this cuts both ways. As Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan see their recruitment pool shrink, they will become more dependent on the U.S. for military aid and assistance. Nevertheless, Eberstadt see great potential for the United States in the Asia-Pacific region due to China weakening.

    I'm not as sure about the United State's prospects as is Eberstadt. Although not discussed in his article, the only reason that the U.S. will see continued population growth is through immigration. It's possible to advance arguments both in favor or in opposition to immigration, but my personal opinion is that over the long term it is going to introduce severe social and political instability and result in the technological decline of the United States. "E pluribus unum"--out of many, one--referred to the union of the original 13 colonies. Colonies that, I would note, had been British and predominantly populated by people from (or descended from) the British isles and the Low Countries (contrary to the propaganda, blacks slaves were not a significant part of the populations of the southern colonies at that time--that would have to wait until after the invention of the cotton gin). And up until the 1970s, the U.S. was still predominantly of Western or Northern European heritage. Now the United States is a toilet full of the refuse from countries all over the world that not only are incapable of being one people, but have no desire to be one people. 

    Eberstadt also implicitly assumes that the U.S. will continue to attract immigrants at the same rates. It's possible, but there are two factors working against it. First, fertility rates are falling all over the world, which means that many countries that had significant surpluses of people historically will soon cease to have those surpluses to send to more developed countries. Second, hand-in-hand with this is that many of the countries that formerly provided us with hordes of cheap labor are becoming industrialized and will need those workers. George Friedman, in his book The Next 100 Years, predicted that by the middle or end of the 21st century the migrant tide would turn and the U.S. would actually have to start competing against other countries for migrant labor. Perhaps even China or Mexico.