Happy Lantern Festival!

[cashew]

It is officially the last day of New Year's!

Sweet dumplings! Lanterns! Uh...apparently also traditionally the day when Chinese girls are finally allowed outside the house to go meet guys. This is why a bunch of romance poetry is written about lanterns, because girls get one day of freedom to scope out potential love interests.

It's honestly shocking how the Chinese population managed to grow at all during the imperial era... (Hint: they had marriage laws that punished families for not making enough babies. Again, I'm very glad all that shit is behind us now. Except for how there's a few crazies left in government who want to bring back those marriage laws to counter the current population decline and it's like...wow. Glad they're still fringe at the moment. For now. 🤞)

(OT: I wish rulers would figure out that the way to deal with population decline is to import more immigrants. Like...FFS, there's so much labor that we could be bringing in.)

Comments

[tanithryudo]

Immigration has its own problems though.

[cashew]

Immigration is only a problem if you believe that outsiders coming in will "steal the jobs" as it were. Plus, legal residency and social benefits are not the same thing. Giving immigrants legal status doesn't mean they get the same social benefits of a citizen (especially in China, where legal residence just means you get tagged and ID, but no social benefits, so permanent residents still have to pay out of pocket into the state owned health system). If the problem is not enough unskilled/low skilled labor to do the job that no one else wants to do (which is the only real worry linked to "low birthrate"), having lots of immigrants basically solves the problem.

Now, if the worry is that immigrants will fundamentally change the cultural norms...well, that's a whole different issue that has nothing to do with declining birthrate. And given Chinese history's many, many centuries of absorbing an influx of immigrants, I really don't think "preserving the purity of the Han culture" is a concern based on any kind of reality. Like the culture survived not only two dynasties of minority rule, it also survived multiple invasions and the century of humiliation from Western imperial colonizers. I think the strength of Han culture is capable of sinonizing whomever else is coming in the future. The only thing approaching "purity" in Han culture is 汉字. So unless the government is stupid enough to abolish it as the official language, there's no real threat. We already have a couple hundred regional dialects, I doubt a couple dozen more new foreign accented dialects are going to make a meaningful dent to the language.

The logistics of how to manage an expanded proportion of immigrant workers would of course require some bureaucratic updates to the central registry system, but like...computers make that much easier these days. It's not like we need thousands of record keepers copying and re-copying the database by hand to keep it updated. As for housing the growing population...again, if the concern is a population shortage, that problem solves itself.

Now, if the problem is too many people, then yes, immigration is going to make the problem worse. But that's not the concern right now. The concern is not enough births, which means immigration is the easiest fix and wouldn't really trigger social problems that the system isn't already prepared to handle.

[tanithryudo]

I mean, not just talking about the US's issues with immigration, but also Europe and such. I guess it also matters where the immigrants are coming from, and why they are immigrating.

[cashew]

With Europe, it's not immigration that's the issue. It's refugees. The problem with refugees is that the influx is sharp and intense and refugees aren't really part of the workforce nor can they speak the language. Getting them up to par language-wise is going to take a lot of effort (as opposed to illegal immigrants who already have language skills, but don't have legal labor protection thus are the most heavily exploited labor class).

Like, in China there's already a substantial amount of Vietnamese/Thai/Filipino illegal immigrants working the lowest paying jobs. It's part of how manufacturing is able to keep the cost low. Letting those guys get legal residence and have babies in China and putting those kids through the Chinese school system to generate more labor isn't going to really upset anything system-wise. Once those kids have been fully brainwashed (because let's be real, Chinese education is basically PUA), giving them a way to become "loyal Chinese" is a quick and easy way to expand the population without forcing people to make babies.