[[Ed. note: In this typed interchange, Sterling does a lot of quoting from other source materials. So Quotes mean it came from somewhere else; Where you see (())'s, it's Bruce's own aside]]

Q: "Bruce: please say more about weird Chinese demographics."

A: Here's some stuff out of a British think-tank:

"As early as 2015, China's working age population will actually start falling. By 2040, today's young workers will be pensioners - in fact the world's second largest population, after India, will be Chinese pensioners. (...)

"There could well be 100 million Chinese people aged over 80, more than the current worldwide total, as Richard Jackson and Neil Howe point out in their excellent paper, The Graying of the Middle Kingdom (CSIS 2004). (...)

"Because of China's one-child policy there will be fewer new workers under its so-called "4,2,1" population structure - four grandparents, two parents and one child. This is a demographic transition that many countries go through. But a process that is taking a century in the west will take 40 years there. The desperate rush for economic growth is fuelled by fears that China could grow old before it grows rich.

cont'd:"Not so long ago, China was one of the world's most youthful countries, with a median age of 20. Its median age is now estimated at 33. By 2050, the United Nations forecasts, China's median age could be 45, against 43 for the UK and 41 for the US.

(((That's not the weird part - just getting old. Every country's doing that. This is the weird part: the Chinese gender imbalance.)))

"Imposing the one-child policy on these long established customs is having an extraordinary effect. If you can have only one child it becomes highly desirable to have a boy. The rule is not as strictly enforced as it was, but you can now see its effect on the second child, which in the eyes of many Chinese really is the last chance to have a boy. For every 100 female second children, there are 152 males. Overall, there are now about 120 boys for every 100 girls in China.

"The country is waking up to this extraordinary imbalance. Last year it banned ultrasound testing to try to stop gender-based abortion. But already it means China is facing a world not unlike a traditional Oxbridge college, with far too many men relative to women. That is why we can already read in the media accounts of young women being bribed or even kidnapped from places such as North Korea or Vietnam. China is going to have to attract large-scale female immigration or many of its young men will leave."

(((I'm not sure that I buy the mass-migration theory, but there's never been a society anywhere, ever, with that kind of age and sex-ratio structure. China forty years from now looks like a lumberjack camp for geezers. I wish 'em luck with that.))