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Population Collapse: Confucius Nation’s Attitude to Women
In today’s article, I will discuss and theorise why the Confucius nations of South Korea, Japan, and China suffer from low birth rates and a population collapse, which will be more than half their populations by the end of the 21st century.
China’s population will go from 1.4 billion people to less than 500 million people and, in a worst-case scenario, even lower than 400 million people.
This will be a catastrophic economic decline for China, and it will be unable to care for and pay for its old-age population.
Japan has had this problem for over 30 years, which is a big reason for its stagnation, but it became reindustrialised after World War Two and became wealthy enough in the 70s and 80s to pay for its retirement.
China doesn’t have the luxury of having the outcome because China has not gotten rich enough quickly and has not managed to transform itself from the workshop of the world into a consumer-led economy such as the United States and other Western nations.
My theory for why these Confucian nations are experiencing this level of population decline is partly due to these nations’ attitudes toward women and the fact that these countries also experienced urbanisation before Europeans and before the advent of industrialisation in the 18th and 19th centuries.
Impact of Early Urbanisation
Unlike the Western cultural tradition, China never suffered a total political and economic collapse that destroyed the governing urban culture, which was the Roman Empire elites, which was dominant in Europe from 27 BC until the destruction of the Western Roman Empire in 476 AD.
China urbanised much earlier and stayed urbanised with people living in cities; around 25% of the population, much earlier than their European counterparts, started urbanisation in the 18th century compared to China during the Spring and Autumn periods 771 BC to 476 BC.
With a significant chunk of China’s political elite and philosophers living in cities and having a city lifestyle, their appreciation for women’s work was greatly diminished.
Women were seen as domestic and sexual servants, were seen as very much lesser…
