Let's Take A Look In The China Cabinet

This is the segment where we take a look at a few stories from China. Especially the one about their population decline. As Joe said, it's "just stunning."

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Let's take a look in the China cabinet. China. That's
really good, Mike, Yeah, really well done.

Speaker 2 (00:18):
So perhaps you've heard that Taiwan had a presidential election
recently and the party that had been empowered their vice
president sorry Mike Pence, uh actually got elected.

Speaker 1 (00:31):
Sorry Kamala Harris.

Speaker 2 (00:33):
Yeah, try not to suck Kamala anyway, I'm you know
that that was unnecessary and off the topic. And so
the guy gets elected in Taiwan, and of course China
is making all sorts of bella coos offended you better
not statements because this guy Lie ching t who who's

(00:57):
the new president, has made noises fairly strongly about Taiwan
being independent. This situation is so strange and it's it
would actually make a decent little introductory class to how
diplomacy worked. Did you know the communist Chinese have never
run Taiwan, not.

Speaker 1 (01:16):
For a single day.

Speaker 2 (01:19):
In the Great Chinese Civil War, when Chang Kai Shehek
and the democratic types got beat by the Kamis, they
were treated to Taiwan where they set up shop and
a military dictatorship really, which evolved slowly but eventually into
a representative democracy.

Speaker 1 (01:38):
But the Chinese have never owned Taiwan.

Speaker 2 (01:41):
Now, it's been for many, many years, thousands of years,
a place where mostly Chinese ethnic types hung out, not exclusively,
but and so you know, it's not completely fanciful that
they would see that, as you know, it ought to
be part of China. But it's not like it was
some break away republic that the US sponsored a coup

(02:03):
and that only happened thirty years ago, and by god
they wanted back. No, it's never been part of communist China,
and by god, it never will be if the United
States has a spine and our friends in Taiwan continue
to behave the way they've virtually always behaved well, certainly
in the last thirty years, which is no freaking way.

(02:23):
We're going to be the next Hong Kong and fall
under the oppressive, racist, horrific thumb of the Chinese Communist Party.
And so everybody has to dance around and say things
like our senile president, when he was asked to react
to the election of Taiwan, said we don't support independence,

(02:46):
which was really unspeakably dumb. I mean, that was just
terrible to say. We congratulate to the president Lie and
his party. We look forward to continuing the warm and
productive relationship we've had with the Taiwanese people, and we
continue to support the One China policy, which was an

(03:10):
idiotic policy launched back when the United States we were
duped into believing that the Chinese Communist Party actually wanted
to be buddies, and that they actually wanted to modernize
and liberalize, and that the economic liberalization we were saying
would go hand in hand with political liberalization. You know,

(03:32):
Kissinger and Nixon bought that lie, and then it continued
on for decades and decades. Meanwhile the Chinese, all the
while were merely trying to finance the growth of the
control of the Communist Party. Now that's not to deny
that there were some actual reformers there for a little
while in China, because there were, but they came and
went and got quashed and really did their footnote. So anyway,

(03:57):
so we've got to do this silly, silly dance where
we reaff firm the One China policy, which is that
there's only one China and Taiwan's like, we don't know
what Taiwan is, but we're not gonna say it's independent. Okay,
it's not you don't have it, but it's not independent,
just so strange and and JIV and and cow. What's

(04:20):
really annoying to a lot of us is that it
puts the world's greatest superpower in the position of denying
reality so as to avoid a confrontation.

Speaker 1 (04:36):
With a brutal dictator.

Speaker 2 (04:39):
And what shape that confrontation might take, nobody's quite sure.
And and you know, maybe one of those circumstances where
once you find yourself in this position, having launched and
affirmed the one China policy over and over again, it's
difficult to know what to do. Once you find yourself
in that position, you're kind of screwed. So, you know,

(05:00):
I don't know, I don't have a strong opinion on
what we ought to say. It's just insulting and illogical
and feels like we're cow tewing to the most awful
regime on earth by pretending that Taiwan isn't independent. They
have their own political system, they have their own military.

(05:20):
Their military exists to rebuff an invasion from China.

Speaker 1 (05:24):
They have their own diplomats, they have their own swimming
pools and golf courses. In what sense are they not independent?

Speaker 2 (05:33):
But we've got to pretend that they're not to avoid
pissing off the Kamis God. I hate that, I really
really hate that, but it is what it is for
what it's worth. The new president Lie says, hey, look,
look a status quo. I'm not going to try to
do anything crazy. Status quo is fine with me. So
he's softening his rhetoric, which is probably smart.

Speaker 1 (05:53):
Ah.

Speaker 2 (05:55):
If I were a leader of Taiwan, I too would
be wanting to keep things cool. Bide my time time
see what happens, especially in light of a couple of
other stories about China, this one in particular. And again
I really shouldn't wrench my shoulder patting myself on the back.
But as I and other people have been pointing out
for a long time, the mainstream media at lemming like

(06:17):
and we all know that it gets hot to trot
for these narratives. Like in the eighties, I remember it
was all about how Japan was going to take over
the world and the Japanese model was masterful and the
US was stupid, and why don't we act more like
the Japanese. Well, the Japanese model didn't work at all,
and it turned upset down in ways that I won't

(06:39):
bury with with their banking system. But it was followed
by three decades of stagnation, no economic growth, and economic misery,
more or less in spite of the incredible gifts and
talents and discipline of the Japanese people. So the modern
version of that has been that China is going to
be the juggernaut, the twenty first century juggernaut. They will

(06:59):
rule the world economically speaking. In the United States, will
be a poor it's a redheaded stepchild, an expression that
is terrible, but that will be in second place and
not nearly as relevant. And all the while, anybody who's
into China or political science or whatever like I am,
was saying.

Speaker 1 (07:17):
China's demographics are miserable.

Speaker 2 (07:21):
They're way top heavy old people, They're economic growth is stagnating,
and they're not having babies. And as a sage once
put it, I'd like to know who is the first,
because it's a good metaphor. Politics are waves, demographics are
the tide. Demographics alter everything in ways that politics can

(07:44):
merely splash at. For instance, the number of births in
China dropped by more than half a million last year
to just over nine million total, accelerating the decline in
the country's population as as women listened to the government saying, Hey,
you gotta have babies.

Speaker 1 (08:04):
Let's add babies.

Speaker 2 (08:05):
That's the way I prove your patriotic COMI Chinese person. Plus,
here's like a twenty three hundred dollars incentive to have
a baby. And I tell you what if you would
have a baby for twenty three hundred dollars, Number one,
don't Number two, if you're so foolish that you would anyway,
I'll raise your kid for you, because you're too stupid
to raise a kid anyway. Number newborns has gone into

(08:27):
free fall over the past several years. Official figures released
Wednesday showed China had fewer than half the number of
births in twenty twenty three than they did in nineteen
fifty now nineteen ninety now two thousand new The number
of births was cut in half between twenty twenty three

(08:48):
and twenty sixteen, a birth rate cut in half in
seven years. What and that was right after China abolish
their disastrous one child policy. Turns out, central planning doesn't
work for having sex either, any better than it does
for running an economy. The latest number of points to

(09:11):
a fertility rate, the number of children a woman has
over lifetime. You probably know this. A woman has to
have two point two children, some say two point one.
It changes depending on medical science, but you have to
have two point two children per woman to keep the
population the same, obviously, because the men aren't having any children,
no matter what JB. Pritzker and the gender bending lunatics

(09:33):
are trying to tell you, Dudes can't have babies. So
a woman has to replace both herself and her husband
and another tenth of a kid or so to make
up for infant mortality and premature death, which is a heartbreak,
but it happens. So you need roughly two point one

(09:54):
two point two children per woman to keep the population
the same. R right now is virtually one point oh
less than half of the stability rate, the maintenance rate,
which demographically speaking, I'm sorry, I'm sitting here stunned because

(10:15):
if you're into this sort of stuff, you're like that
civilization will be gone soon, like soon soon. Of course,
not every trend lasts forever. Jack and I both believe
that animals, including humans, have instincts for do we need
to reproduce or not based on population affluence and population

(10:36):
density and that sort of thing, and affluence and health
and lifespan. I believe it's way deep in our animal
brains in a way we don't even understand. It's worth
mentioning India, which is the most population nation and populist
nation on earth, is still having plenty of kids and
still growing. We can talk about them a little bit later.
Oh man, I'm looking at the clock. We gotta wrap

(10:57):
this up. Over the last year, China's population dropped by
two more than two million, more than twice the drop
of the previous year, and economic headwinds didn't help the situation.
So you have a bunch of young families in China,
or couples or whatever, looking at the economic picture, seeing
this giant crash in real estate values, rising, unemployment, scandal, corruption,

(11:23):
that sort of thing, and it's discouraging them from having children.
So long story short, disastrous demographic trends in China just stunning.
Armstrong Ngeti