The US has the same demographic issue. Actually, every potential successor to US hegemony has the same issue. The only reason why it doesn't show up in the birth rates as bad here is because America takes in (or, used to take in) lots of immigrants from countries that still have babies.
China takes in immigrants in numbers so tiny they might as well not have an immigration program. Either Korea is an authoritarian nightmare no one wants to immigrate to. Europe, and to a lesser extent Japan, takes in immigrants, fails to integrate them, and then engenders a bunch of far-right nutjobs calling for revocation of citizenship and other Hitlerwords. As a double irony, those immigrant communities also trend far-right, and the argument between the two is just big and little endianism[0].
The US was special in that it was the world's "backup democracy". Nobody is equipped to replace it.
OK, but why doesn't China just fix the demographic issue instead of papering over it with immigration? Well, we already know the fix: uninvent birth control and trick horny kids into having lots of teen pregnancies. That's the circumstances of life in places with high fertility rates. Except that it unambiguously sucks to live life in a human breeding farm. Having a bunch of kids with absentee parents is extremely destabilizing to the social fabric of a country. That's the shit Nixon did to the Black community to spark a crime wave. That's why there's so many people emigrating from countries with high birth rates. And if you're thinking of further rules to prevent that, well, congratulations. You've just reinvented medieval Christian sexual mores.
The cure is worse than the disease.
[0] As in, the factions from Gullivers' Travels, not the byte order of CPUs
China takes in immigrants in numbers so tiny they might as well not have an immigration program. Either Korea is an authoritarian nightmare no one wants to immigrate to. Europe, and to a lesser extent Japan, takes in immigrants, fails to integrate them, and then engenders a bunch of far-right nutjobs calling for revocation of citizenship and other Hitlerwords. As a double irony, those immigrant communities also trend far-right, and the argument between the two is just big and little endianism[0].
The US was special in that it was the world's "backup democracy". Nobody is equipped to replace it.
OK, but why doesn't China just fix the demographic issue instead of papering over it with immigration? Well, we already know the fix: uninvent birth control and trick horny kids into having lots of teen pregnancies. That's the circumstances of life in places with high fertility rates. Except that it unambiguously sucks to live life in a human breeding farm. Having a bunch of kids with absentee parents is extremely destabilizing to the social fabric of a country. That's the shit Nixon did to the Black community to spark a crime wave. That's why there's so many people emigrating from countries with high birth rates. And if you're thinking of further rules to prevent that, well, congratulations. You've just reinvented medieval Christian sexual mores.
The cure is worse than the disease.
[0] As in, the factions from Gullivers' Travels, not the byte order of CPUs