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Fun on Saturday: China

Whether the population of China is 1 billion or 1.4 billion is of little importance, what is important is the age bands.   Like Japan where the average age is now 50, which literally means that half the population is older than 50, 30% of the overall population is over 65 and retired.  No longer contributing to the economy.  They are consumers, not producers.

The latest figure for China is that the total population is probably just North of 1 billion.   More seriously, the nearly 400 million who have been erased from the population census (again the figure for China is "mobile") were NOT born after 1985, when China introduced the one-child policy.   It gets worse, China has been for that entire period self-selecting gender via abortion, in favour of boys, which means that the shortage of women is now catastrophic, and women are choosing not to have children.  In large cities (and there are many) the reproduction rate is now officially below 0.7 (2.1 is the replacement level).  

These three factors are a catastrophe for China.  Demographically it has been gutted, and there are no simple fixes, because the Chinese have adapted to the one-child policy (including their homes), so they have created a self-reinforcing spiral of demographic and economic decline.

How do we know, it's easy, salaries for assembly line workers have risen 15-fold in the past decade and a half. We don't need stats for that, the market shows the jobs and their rates.  We also know that China is facing deflationary pressures, again, prices on the streets are falling.

Finally, virtually all of China's 250 million middle class has all its savings in Chinese Real Estate.   The country has between 500 million and 1.5 billion surplus homes, unoccupied, often made of paper and certainly a drag on the economy.   Between 20% and 30% of China's economy is real estate.   Finally, all state and local governments are dependent on the sale of real estate to fund their ongoing operations.  

The pro-China lobby will say, there are solutions to these problems, and the answer is yes, but the more positive outlook on China is dependent on everything working out perfectly.  For the past decade and a half, the government has done nothing!  So unlikely outcome.

Finally, over the past five years capital investment has risen five-fold in the US, Mexico and Vietnam,  The three largest beneficiaries of the exodus from China.  Foreign manufacturers are leaving, and those remaining are doing so because of the sunk costs in plants and equipment.

The problem for the OECD is how messy will be the exit, we are dependent on mineral extraction, processing, assembly and a lot of machinery manufacturing.   The biggest "risk" is transformers.   That's the problem because the West has little physical exposure to China, and the capital markets are largely closed to foreigners.   


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