#aging population

most of those children won't go into elderly care. old people die a lot — replacing them won't help anyone.

Like all bakers, their day starts before dawn. Hours later, as the mid-afternoon light streams through the windows of their kitchen, Masayuki Kaneta, 85, and his son, Shigeuki, are still at work, rolling out long strings of barley and brown sugar dough that will be chopped, baked and bagged to produce one of their signature confections. Representing the third and fourth generations, the Kaneta family can trace their history in the village of Nanmoku back 140 years. Once a thriving community in the mountainous interior of Japan’s main Honshu island, about 100km (62 miles) west of Tokyo, the last few decades have seen the community go through a rapid decline.

Ming Ming, a boisterous six-year-old, longs to have a playmate, but his mother is adamant that she will not have another child.

“No way! One is quite enough,” Li Hong gasps. “Childcare, after-school activities, tutoring … you want them to have a good education but it costs money. We’re just ordinary working folks, not the super rich. The cost of bringing up two kids would kill us!” says the 43-year-old supermarket cashier from the southern province of Guangdong.

Li herself was born just before the one-child policy began in 1980. As an only child, she says the cost of bringing up her son on top of caring for her elderly parents and those of her husband were her main concerns.

The Covid pandemic has not helped. It began when her son was starting kindergarten, but the regular class suspensions meant she could not work full-time. Looking after a toddler all day in a small flat left her constantly exhausted. “I simply don’t have the energy for two,” she said.

Women are ‘invisible’

For three-and-a-half decades, the one-child policy that was meant to control the population exacted a huge social and human cost on Chinese society. Forced abortions, sterilisations, the use of intrauterine contraceptive devices as well as hefty financial penalties left physical and emotional scars on millions of women and traumatised families.

Thirty-five years after the one-child policy’s implementation, China is left with one of the lowest birthrates in the world.

Fearing the adverse social effects of an ageing population and a looming shortage of working-age people, the Chinese government has tried to boost the birthrate by partially lifting the one-child policy in 2013 and allowing couples to have two children if one of the spouses was an only child. In late 2015, the authorities announced all married couples could legally have two children.

But these measures failed to trigger a baby boom: In 2016, China reported 18.46 million births – just 1.4 million higher than the average number of births in the previous five years. The figure was well below the increase in births that the government had projected, which was between 2.3 and 4.3 million a year. Annual births continued to drop thereafter: from 17.23 million in 2017 to 15.23 million in 2018, 14.65 million in 2019, 12 million in 2020, then to 10.62 million in 2021. The authorities further eased the birth limit in 2021, raising it to three children per couple.

“The declining birthrates seem to be irreversible, but the government does not have a gameplan,” Dr Ye Liu, a senior lecturer in international development at King’s College London says. “It’s all about the power of men over women and utilisation of women’s bodies as economic means. In short, men make policies for women. In the recent party congress, there were many promises made but none for women. Women are ‘invisible’.”

Chinese scholars campaigned to scrap the one-child policy for more than a decade, on the grounds that the country’s total fertility rate was worryingly behind the replacement rate. In the 1970s, the total fertility rate (births per woman) fell from 5.8 in 1970 to 2.75 in 1979. In the 1980s, the rate hovered above the replacement level of 2.1 that would allow the population to replace itself, but since the 1990s, it has declined to below the replacement level. The 2010 and 2020 censuses yielded total fertility rates of 1.18 and 1.30 respectively. This further fell to an alarming 1.15 in 2021, according to figures from the National Bureau of Statistics.

More sticks than carrots

Key factors behind the low fertility rate include the rising costs of bringing up children amid rapid economic development in the past three decades, as well as the lack of social welfare provisions for families such as free or low-cost childcare, academic studies have found.

Fewer young Chinese people are getting married, and those who do are having children at a much older age, or not at all. When asked why, they routinely cite the rising cost of living, stagnating professional mobility, and the pressure of traditional gender roles on women.

Movie Recommendation: Robot and Frank

This one was a real treat. I was lucky enough to catch Robot and Frank, in the theater when it first came out. This would have been back in Sacramento, shortly after Mom died. We saw it at the Tower Theater, a Sacramento landmark that I hope survives this COVID nightmare that threatens to close so many small and struggling businesses.

From Wikipedia:

Robot & Frank is a 2012 American science fiction comedy-drama film directed by Jake Schreier and screenplay by Christopher Ford. Set in the near future, it focuses on Frank Weld, an aging jewel thief, played by Frank Langella, whose son buys him a domestic robot. Resistant at first, Frank warms up to the robot when he realizes he can use it to restart his career as a cat burglar.

Robot and Frank does an amazing job highlighting the difficulty that adult children face, trying to straddle two worlds. In one world, you are expected to build a career and a family of your own. In the other world, you are expected to provide care for your aging parent. And in modern times, world 1 places so many geographic limitations and time constraints on you that you have less and less ability to live in world 2. 

In Japan, this problem has come to a head, as 33.0% of the Japanese population is above the age of 60, and the youth have been conditioned to think of their careers above all else. 

The low birthrate, unsurpassed longevity and deep-seated aversion to immigration mean the population is expected to shrink by 20% by 2050 — The impact on the healthcare system will be staggering, made worse by the shortage of younger workers to support and care for their elders.

To meet the demand for caregivers, people in government, welfare services, and robot industries have developed elaborate visions of nursing robots; the Japan Robot Association sees elder-care robots inflating the personal robot industry to forty billion dollars in 2025 from the current four billion.

Timothy N. Hornyak, Loving the Machine. The Art and Science of Japanese Robots (Kondasha International, Ltd., 2006)  

via twitter.

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We have asked Congress to renew the Older Americans Act which supports a range of home and community-based services, such as meals-on-wheels and other nutrition programs, in-home services, transportation, legal services, elder abuse prevention and caregivers support.