One billion, three hundred million people for 20% of the entire world's population. That's a staggering amount of people for one country. So your challenge, if thoust choose to take it upon thyself to abide by it, is to make China have much smaller population.
AHC: China with a much smaller population.
- Thread starter MrNumbahOne
- Start date
Much of China's enormous population was because of the Maoist policy of encouraging births due to Mao's beliefs of an inevitable nuclear war. I think most of the modern day population comes from that, as does the one-child policy, as a result. Prevent such a policy from being enacted and you'll have a China that doesn't have such a large population. Still big, just not as big.
Eh, if you took away the birth encouragement and the one-child policy, it works out to be about the same. In 1950, the population of India was 350 million, while China was 555 million.
You'd need nuclear war or Malthusian catastrophe or something.
Easily done outside of the 20th century by continuing China's development lead and turning it into a very developed nation with corresponding low birthrates.
But speeding up China's development to the degree that it will matter over the course of even 100 years (depending on your definition of "much smaller") is much more difficult. Let's say some miraculous leader comes along with all the right answers in 1912, and the same for their predecessor and their predecessor and China's reached the top of the heap by 1950. We're still probably dealing with something close to the figure of 500-600 million.
Even if you have growth near the replacement rate, or even the mildly negative growth you see in some Most-developed nations, you're still looking at easily one of the two most populous countries in the world (assuming a mostly-unified India.)
Of course there's a super-easy cheat, which is to say that there are many scenarios where the population of China (as recognized) might be only 23 million today, if Nixon and other factors are removed/altered.
But speeding up China's development to the degree that it will matter over the course of even 100 years (depending on your definition of "much smaller") is much more difficult. Let's say some miraculous leader comes along with all the right answers in 1912, and the same for their predecessor and their predecessor and China's reached the top of the heap by 1950. We're still probably dealing with something close to the figure of 500-600 million.
Even if you have growth near the replacement rate, or even the mildly negative growth you see in some Most-developed nations, you're still looking at easily one of the two most populous countries in the world (assuming a mostly-unified India.)
Of course there's a super-easy cheat, which is to say that there are many scenarios where the population of China (as recognized) might be only 23 million today, if Nixon and other factors are removed/altered.
Of course there's a super-easy cheat, which is to say that there are many scenarios where the population of China (as recognized) might be only 23 million today, if Nixon and other factors are removed/altered.
I like the way yoou think!
Seriously, if the Nationalists still get pushed off to Taiwan, then Mao dies, avooiding the Sino-Soviet split, then ???, then the entire Eurasian Communist blok merges into a single country, whether its called the USSR or EastBlok or whatever, then 'China', as least as a country, WOULD refer to just Formosa.
I don't think so. China's birth rate was so high in the 1950s, '60s and early '70s that the population has continued to grow since then, even under the one-child policy, due to simple demographic momentum.
If you slow the population growth back in the 1950s, it would have most likely halted altogether by now, as in the case of Japan. This does not require adoption of the one-child policy. In the 1970s, China reversed course and launched a campaign to encourage families to reduce their number of children, on a purely voluntary basis. This worked well: China's fertility rate was cut in half between 1970 and 1980. By that point it was approaching the (low) rates of its East Asian neighbors, but the government decided to go a step further anyway and implemented the one-child policy. Even if it had not done so, there is reason to believe that China would have sub-replacement fertility anyway, given the way it was trending, and especially with the urbanization of the population that came after the 1970s.
If China had adopted the voluntary campaign in the 1950s (instead of encouraging the opposite), it would probably have somewhere between 100 and 200 million fewer children born over the next two decades, and in turn they'd not have produced all the children they have. We'd probably end up with a Chinese population of around 900 million or so today.
Another possibility: have the Kuomintang win the Civil War, which probably leads to a similar population trend. China's economy would have developed and urbanized much sooner and it would probably have had very low birth rates for awhile now, like Taiwan does.
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600 million people is a much smaller population of OTL's 1 billion 300 million. Even just a billion people seems like it'd satisfy the undefined challenge of having much fewer people, given that the difference is roughly equal to the third most populous country in the world.
Going on our 500-600 million population estimate, what would be the implications of butterflying 700-800 million people in China?
