I posted yesterday on a Foreign Affairs article about China’s fight against demographic decline. Here I include its analysis of other East Asian countries:

In 1989, Japan’s fertility rate dropped to its then lowest level: the “1.57 shock,” as it became known, induced Japanese authorities to expand childcare facilities and establish one of the world’s most generous systems of parental leave, at least on paper. After Taiwan and South Korea hit the same point in the early years of this century, their governments created new parental leave policies, expanded preschools, and offered financial bonuses to couples for having children. Singapore took an even more aggressive approach, establishing government-run matchmaking programs and public housing policies that strongly favor married couples.

None of these ambitious measures mattered much. Fertility rates are not merely well under the replacement level of 2.1 births per woman, as is true for other aging countries such as Russia (1.8), Germany (1.6), or Italy (1.3). Hong Kong, South Korea’s rate is astonishingly low: 0.81 births per woman. By comparison, even geriatric Japan looks positively fecund at 1.37.

East Asia faces the same problems—high housing costs and demand for additional years of education—prompting young people globally to delay marriage and childbirth, or forego them altogether. However, as Taiwanese scholar Yen-hsin Alice Cheng notes, conservative social values play a particular role in East Asia. Roughly 40 percent of American births are out of wedlock. In Iceland, over 70 percent are. In Taiwan, Japan, and South Korea, that figure is four percent, two percent, and 1.5 percent, respectively.

Behind declining marriage and birth rates lie highly gendered social expectations of who will take care of small children and elderly in-laws. Sweden and Japan have among the world’s best systems of paid paternity leave. In 2019, around 90 percent of Swedish fathers took it. Only 7.5 percent of Japanese fathers did.

A survey conducted by the AP-NORC Center revealed that Americans believe that immigrants are coming to the country to improve their lives and contribute to the country’s democracy. They also believe that there was a “nefarious intent” to bring in immigrants to influence the outcome of elections.

Most Republicans believe that the main reason why immigrants came to the US was to improve their lives and contribute to the country’s democracy. Yet over 20% strongly agree, and an additional 25% somewhat agree, with the statement that some people (the elite) in the U.S. are trying to replace U.S. born Americans with immigrants and to transform the country. 12% of Democrats strongly agree with that statement. From here.

Tucker Carlson described in 2021 the “great replacement” as “the replacement of legacy Americans with more obedient people from far away countries. They brag about it all the time, but if you dare to say it’s happening they will scream at you with maximum hysteria.”

According to a report in the New York Times, Charles Herbster, Trump-endorsed candidate for the Nebraska governor’s office, who lost in the May 10 primary, believes that the coronavirus that infected people in the US in early 2020 was manufactured in China and brought into the U.S. illegal immigrants. He also claimed that drug smugglers from Mexico were responsible for the outbreak.
From here.

Foreign Affairs has an article, China’s doomed fight against demographic decline:

The median age of a Chinese citizen has increased significantly since 1978, reaching 38.4 years in 2021. If the country’s fertility rates continue to decline, the median age of a person could reach over 50 by 2050.

In 2016, China’s government scrapped its one-child policy. In 2021, it began implementing policies aimed at increasing childbearing. However, these efforts are unlikely to help raise the country’s fertility rates. The ruling Communist Party’s re-embrace of gender norms is also expected to contribute to the country’s declining birth rates.

In the 1970s, China launched a population planning program aimed at discouraging couples from having more children. The number of births per woman dropped dramatically from 5.8 to 2.7 in 1978. The program’s targets encouraged authorities to adopt policies that could lead to forced abortions and sterilizations. Fines for violating the program were typically several years’ worth of salary for the average citizen.

By 2000, Chinese academics had begun to voice concerns about the long-term demographic consequences of these policies, including significant imbalances in male-female sex ratios at birth—the result of sex-selective abortions. Officials initially assumed that merely rolling back long-standing state restrictions would boost birth rates. In 2013, Beijing announced that couples would be allowed to have two children if one parent was an only child. In 2016, the one-child policy was formally scrapped in favor of a two-child policy; in 2021, it became a three-child policy.

As the results of the 2020 census trickled out last year, Beijing went into overdrive. In the summer of 2021, the Politburo adopted the three-child policy and rolled out a comprehensive pro-natalist strategy aimed at removing financial and practical barriers deterring couples from having children.

The Washington Post notes Yascha Mounk’s latest book, The Great Experiment: Why Diverse Democracies Fall Apart and How They Can Endure. “We all know the reasons. Ethnic hatreds come easy. When scapegoating demagogues stoke them during hard times, they make the classic promise: Break the democracy pact, and people like you can be great again.”

What happens if you believe, as Vice President Mike Pence told the Republican National Convention in 2020, that “the choice in this election is whether America remains America”? And what happens when your version of America loses?

Immigration is at the core of this distress. The shock that 50 million people for whom English is not the dominant language at home. The shock that Nigeria is the source of the highest educated immigrant group.  The shock that immigrants  due to citizenship have become voting eligible. 

Mounk tries to rewrite the basic pro-immigrant slogan: “He asks us to abandon the tired slogans, the “melting pot” and the “salad bowl,” in favor of the “public park” metaphor: “A public park is open to everyone.” “A public park gives its visitors options.” “A public park creates a vibrant space for encounter.” “

(Stephen Douglass in 1869 had coined the term “composite nationality.“)

A copy of the book’s introduction is here.

From the summary on Amazon:

Some democracies are highly homogeneous. Others have long maintained a brutal racial or religious hierarchy, with some groups dominating and exploiting others. Never in history has a democracy succeeded in being both diverse and equal, treating members of many different ethnic or religious groups fairly. And yet achieving that goal is now central to the democratic project in countries around the world. It is, Yascha Mounk argues, the greatest experiment of our time.

Drawing on history, social psychology, and comparative politics, Mounk examines how diverse societies have long suffered from the ills of domination, fragmentation, or structured anarchy. So it is hardly surprising that most people are now deeply pessimistic that different groups might be able to integrate in harmony, celebrating their differences without essentializing them. But Mounk shows us that the past can offer crucial insights for how to do better in the future. There is real reason for hope.

It is up to us and the institutions we build whether different groups will come to see each other as enemies or friends, as strangers or compatriots. To make diverse democracies endure, and even thrive, we need to create a world in which our ascriptive identities come to matter less—not because we ignore the injustices that still characterize the United States and so many other countries around the world, but because we have succeeded in addressing them.