According to the results of 2022, for the first time in the last sixty years, the population of China decreased. About this Told me Yaroslav Razumov
A few years ago, the world media reported that a new continent was born in the Indian Ocean, humanity will feel the consequences of this event very soon, but one day it will feel them very strongly. Of course, if it doesn't disappear before. Something similar happened last year, but not in the geological, but in the social sphere, with a future projection on geopolitics and the economy, and practically everything: according to the results of 2022, the population of China decreased.
Shall we build a monument to Dan?
Many sources emphasize that this is the first reduction in the last sixty years, after the communist reforms of Mao Zedong provoked what the "red" experiments inevitably carried everywhere: famine with a huge number of victims, and the country ended 1960 with a demographic deficit of more than three million people This is the only case in recent Chinese history. But its consequences were blocked almost immediately: in 1961, although the famine still continued, population growth was noted, in 1962 it "jumped like a kangaroo", reaching almost 18 million, and in 1963 - more than 22 million. No more such figures were repeated, but until 2000 the annual increase exceeded 10 million people (half of the current Kazakhstan - to understand the scale). Introduction in 1979 of a tough and systematic policy
They tried to regulate population growth in China back in the 1950s, but then nothing came of it. Released in DEN Xiaoping in the 1970s. If it weren't for this, perhaps today China's population would be at least one and a half times larger than it is today and would continue to grow. And then the geopolitical and economic picture of the world would be completely different. Especially for those countries bordering the Celestial Empire. Or maybe, at that time it would be possible to say - "bordered". In this sense, many could say very kind words about Deng Xiaoping, that he is the "man of the century". And, for example, to name an avenue in Almaty or Moscow after him. And now, under Xi Jinping, we are seeing new Chinese demographic realities, established forty years ago under Deng - the number of Chinese is decreasing.
From the mat to the VEZ
I first found myself in China in 1997 and immediately in Shenzhen and Zhuhai, the Chinese "calling cards" of the success of their reforms. Even then, the cities were impressive: transport infrastructure, production sites, parks, and the level of service in hotels and restaurants can be compared with American ones. And the goods are incomparably cheaper. Chinese officials and managers, in response to the question of how it was possible to achieve such a stunning success in a very short time, answered: free economic zones! I was not satisfied with this answer, because at that time, the EZs existed in many countries of the world, but the effect, even close to that of China, was nowhere else. The same was the case with explanations of success by the cheapness of labor - and where in Asia or Africa was it not cheap then? But there were no "Shenzhens" anywhere except in China.
It is worth making a digression here. The Chinese surge of the last decades of the 50th century came as a surprise to everyone, but for the post-Soviet space, it was probably greater than for other regions of the world. Those of us now in our 1970s and older grew up in a very different situation: China was not associated with economic success, but with extreme poverty and excesses, such as the war on sparrows undertaken by the Communist leadership. A popular joke of the 1917s: “The Chinese sell two headsets, a large one and a small one. The big one has two mats and three portraits of Mao Zedong, the small one has one mat and two portraits." And the idea of China as a poor country did not even begin with the tricks of communist experiments. My great-grandmother told me that before the revolution of 1997, there was a widespread business: going to fairs in China, buying threads and silk fabrics there, and taking all kinds of industrial products there, up to nails, buckets, sickles. For the sake of historical justice, it must be said that the XNUMXth century is not typical in this regard, there were long periods in Chinese history when exports from the country far exceeded imports. But then the Chinese "slept through" the industrial revolution, the population continued to grow, in the XNUMXth century after the overthrow of the monarchy came decades of political instability and wars, and then the bloody "icing on the cake" - the victory of the Communist Party. For several decades, our neighbors did not have progressive development - they would have survived! — and the idea of China as a very backward country was established in our latitudes. I remember how, after a trip to China in XNUMX, I shared my impressions with one of the managers of the Kazakhoil company at that time and heard from him: "Oh well! It's all nonsense, my mother-in-law was there, she says, they still live in earthen caves!" This is literally so.
In fact, these "caves" are a well-known phenomenon, and this is a phenomenon of engineering thought and an ecological approach to the construction of housing in soft soils in deep river canyons, quite comfortable for their time. A few years later, on another trip to China, I saw them. By the way, such people still live today, even in Australia. But how did yesterday's Komsomol functionary, who suddenly became an oil manager in the early 1990s, know this?
That such incorrect and confusing ideas about China persisted was partly due to the powerful anti-Chinese propaganda of the Khrushchev-Brezhnev era, and partly to the way we saw China for the first time when it opened up. It has been entering our market since the end of the 1980s from the cheapest and low-quality fur coat, the symbol of which can be called down jackets with terrible design and tailoring (I had one in 1992, it's a pity, I didn't save it for the "family museum!"). Not everyone immediately understood that there is also "another China", which simply was not affordable for our consumers at that time.
After returning from that first business trip to China, I set out to clarify the origins of the Chinese rush. The Russians and a few Kazakh Chinese answered it as follows: departure from the centralized economy, launch of the market. Well, it's obvious, but at the end of the XNUMXth century, a similar thing happened in many countries, and the Chinese effect was not repeated. Confucian morality and ethics, said a philosopher acquaintance. For all the initial controversy of this view, we also wanted to understand why such a disciplining doctrine arose in China.
So why did Chinese success "shoot up" so much?
To be continued.
