Population of China if the CCP never came to power?

Population?

  • 0-1.0 billion

    Votes: 5 7.0%
  • 1.0-1.4 billion

    Votes: 4 5.6%
  • 1.4 billion (OTL)

    Votes: 4 5.6%
  • 1.4-1.6 billion

    Votes: 23 32.4%
  • 1.6-1.8 billion

    Votes: 19 26.8%
  • 1.8-2.0 billion

    Votes: 4 5.6%
  • 2.0+ billion

    Votes: 12 16.9%

  • Total voters
    71
No specific details, but assume the CCP never take control of China, the Kuomintang do instead. (so no Great Leap Forward, Cultural Revolution, One Child Policy)

How different would the Chinese population be?
 

Gabingston

Kicked
It'd be slightly larger, but not by a ton. While they definitely wouldn't screw up as badly as Mao did (no preventable famine that kills 50 million people, for example), the Kuomintang were not saints by any means. No one child policy means that the Chinese birth rate doesn't drop as fast as IOTL, but it'd still drop with industrialization and urbanization. Taiwan has a rock bottom fertility rate of 1.1-1.2 as of 2021, and while I don't think a fully Nationalist China's TFR would be that low, it would likely be quite a ways below replacement level by 2021. So, with all that in mind, I predicted that Kuomintang China's population would be around 1.4-1.6 Billion, higher than OTL but not drastically.
 
Didn't we have this exact same topic a few weeks ago? Anyway I think it would be considrrably higher, but also with a lower standard of living and higher poverty rates. Like India IOTL.
 
Going by Taiwan's demographic transition probably another 250 million or so chinese added, with birthrates clearly still in decline.
 
Probably about the same. No one child policy, but the KMT isn't going to do all the natalist policies that Mao enacted.
 

mial42

Gone Fishin'
Probably about the same. No one child policy, but the KMT isn't going to do all the natalist policies that Mao enacted.
Out of curiosity, do you know any specific natalist policies that Mao enacted? From what I know, China's population growth had more to do with spiking life expectancy and plummeting infant mortality rates combined with a largely rural population and lack of modern birth control methods then explicitly pro-natalist policies.
 
Didn't the communist government at one point encourage people to have as many kids as possible, before they imposed a one-child limit?
 
Out of curiosity, do you know any specific natalist policies that Mao enacted? From what I know, China's population growth had more to do with spiking life expectancy and plummeting infant mortality rates combined with a largely rural population and lack of modern birth control methods then explicitly pro-natalist policies.
I don't have sources on hand right now, but I remember some kind of slogan like "Many kids are many future communists".
 
I'd guess somewhere in the range of - 20 % and + 20 % comapred to today. Avoiding the maoist idocy has the potential of putting China 30 years ahead in its demographic transition which would work againt the commonly held idea that the population would be larger.
 
Assuming a relatively competent KMT government a normal demographic transition should result in a population of about 1.6 billion people. Keep in mind that an incompetent goverment can delay the demographic transition, as it happened in the indian subcontinent and the middle east, but also quicken it as it happened in CCP China.
 
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