Thread: The View, from China

Yes, it grew by a "mere" 3%- more than the World bank forecast of 2.7%. 2023 forecast is 5.7%, recently revised upward.
Economists see upside to China COVID chaos: higher 2023 economic growth | Fortune

I'm cool with that. I want the Chinese people to prosper. I hope the Winnie the Pooh look-a-like (Xi) is very rattled at China's falling population. He should be.

China's first population drop in six decades sounds alarm on demographic crisis

BEIJING/HONG KONG (Reuters) - China's population fell last year for the first time in six decades, a historic turn that is expected to mark the start of a long period of decline in its citizen numbers with profound implications for its economy and the world.

The country's National Bureau of Statistics reported a drop of roughly 850,000 people for a population of 1.41175 billion in 2022, marking the first decline since 1961, the last year of China's Great Famine.


That possibly makes India the world's most populous nation. U.N. experts predicted last year India would have a population of 1.412 billion in 2022 though they did not expect the South Asian nation to overtake China until this year.

India, however, only collects population figures every 10 years and its latest census, originally scheduled for 2021, has been delayed due to the pandemic.

Long-term, U.N. experts see China's population shrinking by 109 million by 2050, more than triple the decline of their previous forecast in 2019.


That's caused domestic demographers to lament that China will get old before it gets rich, slowing the economy as revenues drop and government debt increases due to soaring health and welfare costs.


"China's demographic and economic outlook is much bleaker than expected. China will have to adjust its social, economic, defense and foreign policies," said demographer Yi Fuxian.


He added that the country's shrinking labour force and downturn in manufacturing heft would further exacerbate high prices and high inflation in the United States and Europe.

"Economic growth will have to depend more on productivity growth," added Zhiwei Zhang, chief economist at Pinpoint Asset Management.

Kang Yi, head of the national statistics bureau, dismissed concerns about the population decline, telling reporters that "overall labour supply still exceeds demand".

MORE China's first population drop in six decades sounds alarm on demographic crisis

I hope the Winnie the Pooh look-a-like (Xi) is very rattled at China's falling population. He should be.

Long term demographers predict that India's GDP will surpass that of China, to become the worlds largest, late this century- for that very reason.

Of course you will never read or see this this in MSM.

Originally Posted by sabang

Of course you will never read or see this this in MSM.

Of course not, the news media report news, not some wittering fucking brown noser's youtube video.

What sort of idiot are you?

One who would rather pay attention to actual on the ground accounts from people who (gasp!) actually live and work there, than embittered rants from some nobody who has never even set foot in the place. It remains the fact that China has incurred an astonishingly low rate of Covid morbidity compared to the West. A'www shucks, but it was bad for business for a while- but now it's back to business as usual. The Omicron variant has a virtually negligible morbidity rate for vaccinated people in China.

In China, doctors say they are discouraged from citing COVID on death certificates

BEIJING (Reuters) - During a busy shift at the height of Beijing's COVID wave, a physician at a private hospital saw a printed notice in the emergency department: doctors should “try not to” write COVID-induced respiratory failure on death certificates.


Instead, if the deceased had an underlying disease, that should be named as the main cause of death, according to the notice, a copy of which was seen by Reuters.


If doctors believe that the death was caused solely by COVID-19 pneumonia, they must report to their superiors, who will arrange for two levels of "expert consultations" before a COVID death is confirmed, it said.


Six doctors at public hospitals across China told Reuters they had either received similar oral instructions discouraging them from attributing deaths to COVID or were aware that their hospitals had such policies.


Some relatives of people who have died with COVID say the disease did not appear on their death certificates, and some patients have reported not being tested for coronavirus despite arriving with respiratory symptoms.


"We have stopped classifying COVID deaths since the reopening in December," said a doctor at a large public hospital in Shanghai. "It is pointless to do that because almost everyone is positive."


Such directives have led to criticism by global health experts and the World Health Organization that China has drastically underreported COVID deaths as the coronavirus runs rampant in the country, which abandoned its strict "zero-COVID" regime in December.


On Saturday, officials said 60,000 people with COVID-19 had died in hospitals since China's policy U-turn, a roughly ten-fold increase from previously reported figures, but still short of expectations of international experts, who have said China could see more than a million COVID-related deaths this year.


China's Center for Disease Control (CDC) and National Health Commission (NHC) did not immediately respond to Reuters' requests for comment.


The doctors in this article declined to be named because they are not permitted to speak to the media.


Several said they were told such guidance came from "the government", though none knew from which department, a common situation in China when politically sensitive instructions are disseminated.


Three other doctors at public hospitals in different cities said they were unaware of any such guidance.


One of them, a senior emergency room doctor in Shandong province, said doctors were issuing death certificates based on the actual cause of death, but "how to categorise" those deaths is up to the hospitals or local officials.


'LOOKS LOW'


Since the start of the pandemic, which first emerged three years ago in its central city of Wuhan, China has drawn heavy criticism for not being transparent over the virus - an accusation it has repeatedly rejected.

Before Saturday, China was reporting five or fewer COVID deaths per day. Of the nearly 60,000 COVID-related fatalities since Dec. 8 it announced on Saturday since, fewer than 10% were caused by respiratory failure because of COVID. The rest resulted from a combination of COVID and other diseases, Jiao Yahui, head of the Bureau of Medical Administration under the National Health Commission (NHC), said on Saturday.


Michael Baker, a public health scholar at the University of Otago in New Zealand, said the updated death toll still "looks low" compared with the high level of infection in China.


"Most countries are finding that most deaths from COVID are caused directly by the infection rather than by a combination of COVID and other diseases," he said. "By contrast, reported deaths in China are mainly (90%) a combination of COVID and other infections, which also suggests that deaths directly from COVID infection are under-reported in China."


Yanzhong Huang, senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, said it was unclear whether the new data accurately reflected actual fatalities, in part because the numbers include only deaths in hospitals.


The World Health Organization (WHO) on Monday recommended that China monitor excess mortality to gain a fuller picture of the impact of the surge in COVID.


Excess mortality is when the number of deaths for a given period is higher than it should be relative to historical averages.


TESTING ENDS


Seven people told Reuters that COVID was not mentioned on the death certificates of their recently deceased relatives, although the relatives had either tested positive for the virus or displayed COVID-like symptoms.


Social media has been full of similar reports.


When a Beijing resident surnamed Yao brought his COVID-positive 87-year-old aunt to a large public hospital late last month with breathing problems, doctors did not ask whether she had the virus and did not mention COVID, Yao said.


“The hospital was full of patients, all in their 80s or 90s, and doctors had no time to talk to anyone,” Yao said, adding that everyone seemed to have similar COVID-like symptoms.


Patients, including his aunt, were rigorously tested, although not for COVID, before being told they had pneumonia. But the hospital told him it had run out of medicine, so they could only go home.


Ten days later she recovered.


Medical staff at public hospitals in several cities in China said PCR testing, which under "zero COVID" was a near daily requirement for large parts of the population, has now been all but abandoned.


Taking the focus off testing may be the best way to maximise resources when hospitals have been overwhelmed, two experts told Reuters.


Ben Cowling, an epidemiologist at Hong Kong University, said almost all patients with acute respiratory problems would have COVID: "Since antivirals are in very short supply, I don't think laboratory testing will make much difference to case management."


'BE CAUTIOUS'


A senior doctor in the eastern city of Ningbo said physicians there were told to be “cautious” about saying someone had died of COVID, but if they did wish to do so they would need to get approval.


No other disease required the same level of “caution” for entry on a death certificate, he said.


The doctor at a large public hospital in Shanghai said that weekly death rates since the recent COVID wave were three or four times higher than normal for this time of year. Most had more than one illness, but COVID worsened their conditions, she said.


"On the death certificate we fill in one main cause of death, and two to three sub-causes of death, so we basically leave out COVID," she said.


"There’s no other way but for us to follow the orders given by the hospital, which come from the government. I am too unimportant to make any decision," she said.

In China, doctors say they are discouraged from citing COVID on death certificates

The awkward fact is, Chinese life expectancy now exceeds that of the USA. This occurred during the Covid pandemic- for the first time ever. In HK, it is in fact the worlds highest- exceeding Japan. That speaks louder than any (usually biased) western media coverage- so lets see if it remains the case. The Omicron variant has extremely low morbidity & hospitalisation rates- the Chinese vaccines are quite effective there, but of course there will be an inevitable increase in Covid deaths just like in the west when things 'opened up'.

China tells the world that the Maoist madness is over – we can all make money again

China has extended the olive branch to Western democracies and global capitalists alike, promising a new era of detente after the coercive “wolf warrior” diplomacy of the last five years.


Vice-premier Liu He, the economic plenipotentiary of Xi Jinping’s China, told a gathering of business leaders and ministers in Davos that China is back inside the tent and eager to restore the money-making bonhomie of the golden years.


“We must let the market play the fundamental role in the allocation of resources, and let the government play a better role. Some people say China will go for the planned economy. That’s by no means possible,” he said.


“All-round opening-up is the basis of state policy and the key driver of economic progress. China’s national reality dictates that opening up to the world is a must, not an expediency. We must open up wider and make it work better,” he told the World Economic Forum.


The choice of Liu He as messenger of conciliation is lost on nobody. Both an economic moderniser and a graduate of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, his charm offensive in Davos hits two global constituencies at the same time.


It is a subtle way of telling the world that the neo-Maoist fever of Xi Jinping’s second term has subsided since the 20th Party Congress in October. Xi’s third term is going to be a giant pivot back to international harmony.


China is calling off its ruinous assault on technology companies – the country’s most dynamic entrepreneurs, but also the regime’s most powerful political foes. The green shoots of the next Chinese economic boom are already emerging.

“The technology sector is moving full steam ahead. We’re seeing the inflows come back through our China Connect and have got a hundred tech companies lining up to go public,” said Nicolas Aguzin, head of the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. The Hang Seng tech index is up 60pc from its nadir last year.


Aguzin said in Davos that China’s “remediation process” – a euphemism for the political purge of big business – has run its course. The Chinese people have accumulated $2 trillion in excess savings and are raring to go with an enormous spending spree.


It will act as a countercyclical buffer for the world as Europe and America struggle with recessionary forces. “China’s post-Covid reopening is the most positive catalyst for global markets this year,” he said.


Vice-premier Liu He’s conciliatory pitch is also a signal that China will return to its longstanding position as a stakeholder of the existing Davosian global order rather than a revisionist power determined to overthrow it.


“We need to uphold an effective international economic order. We have to abandon the cold war mentality,” he said, pledging a push for “economic re-globalisation”. There was not a whiff of criticism of the US or the West. No speech of this kind has been delivered by a top Chinese leader for years.


It goes well beyond the first signs of a tentative thaw at a US-China summit late last year, suggesting that China’s 20th Party Congress marked a watershed moment in Chinese strategic thinking. Whether it is authentic or tactical remains to be seen.


In a sense, the new policy is a recognition by the Communist Party that the democracies are not as weak as they looked a year or two ago. The West still controls the machinery of global finance, technology transfer, and maritime trade. The war in Ukraine has revealed that it can be remarkably unified and has a backbone of steel when seriously provoked.


Xi’s profession of friendship “without limits” for Vladimir Putin is surely an embarrassment he would rather forget – though there are some advantages for Beijing in a dependent Russia with nowhere else to turn. Russia’s military has been exposed as a paper tiger. Its value as an ally is enormously degraded.


Above all, Xi Jinping discovered that the US controls the global supply of advanced semiconductor chips, the primary fuel of the 21st century technological economy.


Without that you are nothing. China’s repeated efforts to close the chip gap have all faltered, and the latest has just been abandoned due to prohibitive costs.


Ursula von der Leyen, the European Commission’s president, struck a more sceptical tone in Davos. Speaking immediately before Liu He, she accused China of actively trying to poach European green-tech companies with subsidies, labour dumping and regulatory arbitrage, while systematically obstructing foreign access to its internal market.


“Competition on net zero must be based on a level playing field. We will not hesitate to open investigations if markets are being distorted by such subsidies,” she said.


The White House remains wary of the softer Chinese tone. The violation of the 1984 accords on Hong Kong is now an irreversible fact. Military islands are still being developed in the territorial waters of other countries in the South China Sea. It will take more than words to repair that diplomatic damage.


Deng Xiaoping long pursued a policy of “bide your time and hide your strength”. When Xi Jinping abandoned this restraint and switched suddenly to a posture of impatient menace he revealed what China might be like as the global hegemon.


This reached its apotheosis in pandemic triumphalism. It was not an attractive spectacle. Switching back even more suddenly to global happy talk will be a hard sell.


Liu He said China’s property bust had pushed the economy close to a systemic crisis, requiring a “blood transfusion” and massive state bail-out of the mortgage system to restore confidence. The worst is now over and the economy should be back to pre-pandemic trend growth of 5pc or more this year.


Officially, growth was 3pc last year. The proxy measure of Capital Economic suggested that it was far worse, with output contracting almost 7pc in November (year-on-year), before Beijing threw in the towel on zero-Covid. By this measure GDP is barely higher than it was before the pandemic.


A V-shaped economic rebound is now on the cards. China’s property curbs – the “three red lines” – have largely been lifted. All levers of policy are stimulative.


For the rest of the world, the implications are bittersweet. The risk is that surging Chinese demand for oil, gas, and commodities risks setting off another round of imported inflation before Europe and America have fully recovered.


Strap your belts for another turbulent year.

China tells the world that the Maoist madness is over – we can all make money again

Yes, I too am of the view that they should have 'opened up' sooner- bear in mind I lived in freewheeling, vibrant HK for 12 years, and I know for a fact the restrictions were really chafing there. But they didn't, and it is hard to knock their approach from a public health perspective. Of course it's an entirely different perspective if Big Biz rules the roost...

Originally Posted by sabang

Yes, I too am of the view that they should have 'opened up' sooner- bear in mind I lived in freewheeling, vibrant HK for 12 years, and I know for a fact the restrictions were really chafing there. But they didn't, and it is hard to knock their approach from a public health perspective. Of course it's an entirely different perspective if Big Biz rules the roost...

I wish I'd spent some years living in China. I think it's a really interesting country. I'm pleased their life expectancy is now at first world levels. I think life expectancy is an important metric as to how a country is going. If it was falling over many years in my country, that would be pretty disappointing.

Originally Posted by harrybarracuda

So what if they live longer?

Any nation where folks are living longer and birth rate is lower has a problem. Less working folks to support retired folks means gov must find revenue to pay retirees and/or raise retirement age.

It's a problem politically and economically.

Originally Posted by Norton

Any nation where folks are living longer and birth rate is lower has a problem. Less working folks to support retired folks means gov must find revenue to pay retirees and/or raise retirement age.

It's a problem politically and economically.

But for sabang it's some kind of notable achievement.

They've already raised the pensionable age in Oz from 65 to 67. Makes you wonder how Japan gets by- they've got the oldest population. Then you've got the Filipines- they breed like rabbits and hence a young population, but are mostly poor.

Japan raised their retirement age to 70 a couple of years ago. Anyone getting benefits between the age of 60-65 took a cut.

The ridiculous vicious circle has to stop.

Breeding yet more people to pay for the ones that no longer contribute is leading mankind over a very obvious consumption cliff.

These indoctrinated and almost insignificant cultural comparatives [and superlatives] are quite reflective of a base character that is truly unsure of itself.
The complexes of real inferiority are ignored and surely not recognized among the obsessed accusers.

Originally Posted by sabang

I remember when Melbourne was described as the most locked down city in the world- but I don't remember an unrelenting hailstorm of criticism from the media about it. Biased some?

Probably because it was the one and only time, and not the 47th.

*titter*

Originally Posted by sabang

Biased some?

Yes including China. It is what poltical leaders do to cover their fuck ups.
If you were the average Joe in China you would be subject to heavy doses of China good west bad stuff on your daily news.

Originally Posted by Norton

Yes including China. It is what poltical leaders do to cover their fuck ups.
If you were the average Joe in China you would be subject to heavy doses of China good west bad stuff on your daily news.

That is definitely true. Pretty much every day the main evening news will have a good news story about China and later a piece about some dramatic building failure or train wreck or something from somewhere that is not China. Nothing untruthful in it.
Meanwhile my friend in Shanghai, who is pretty much the average Joe-ess, has been telling me how important it is for Russia to win in Ukraine, because if they lose that means America will occupy Russia along the Chinese border. That is what people there are being told.

Originally Posted by Norton

If you were the average Joe in China you would be subject to heavy doses of China good west bad stuff on your daily news.

Ofcourse

Different ball game, than two old TD posters dueling it out over China and trying to...."reason" with each other

The population of Australia is less than that of Shanghai.