SPONSORED BY  | | | | May 1, 2024: What will happen to the population of China? Plus, the longest-ever case of COVID, and how to heal rifts between parents and adult children. —Andrea Gawrylewski, Chief Newsletter Editor | | | Last year, India surpassed China as the most populous country on Earth. China's population began shrinking in 2022, and experts now say their numbers will dip well below 1 billion (up to even half its current size) by 2100.
How this happened: In 1980 China's population age distribution looked like a typical demographic chart–a pyramid with a wider base representing more young people than old. China's one-child policy from 1979 to 2015 helped to reinforce a 40-year trend of falling birth rates, limiting the size of families and dramatically decreasing the proportion of young people. Other factors contributed too, like quickly rising incomes, education levels, urbanization and better access to birth control.
| Shuyao Xiao; Source: 2022 Revision of World Population Prospects. United Nations, 2022 (data) | | | Why it matters: In the coming decades, the ratio of people who are dependent on working-age people will balloon. This could have potentially socially destabilizing effects in China, namely not enough working-age individuals fueling the economy or available to care for an older population.
What the experts say: There may be an "optimum" population for China, write Lex Rieffel, founder of the From the Bridge Foundation, and Xueqing Wang, a Ph.D. candidate at Princeton University's Office of Population Research. "China's population is becoming better educated. The country is also installing more industrial robots than any other nation. There is no plausible reason to believe that China's economic productivity will stop increasing," they say. Especially if birth rates stabilize in China in the next 20 years, the beginning of the next century could see a more stable population structure overall.
|  | Shuyao Xiao; Source: 2022 Revision of World Population Prospects. United Nations, 2022 (data); Lex Rieffel and Xueqing (Zoey) Wang (additional calculations) | | | How it might happen: Chinese women will play a key role in the future of China. "Chinese women are caught between the patriarchal demand that treats childbearing as normative and the authoritarian state's pronatalist push," said Yun Zhou of the University of Michigan in a November 2023 webinar. Fewer Chinese women want to get married and have kids, despite the government's efforts to encourage those milestones. Many experts think societal inequalities are at play, like unequal career advancement opportunities and high rates of domestic violence. "It seems that the government's birth policy is only aimed at making babies but doesn't protect the person who gives birth," one Chinese woman told the New York Times in January. "It does not protect the rights and interests of women." | | | • The longest COVID case recorded so far lasted for nearly two years. | 4 min read | | | • A group of 40 researchers signed a declaration saying that there is a "realistic possibility of conscious experience" in reptiles, fish, insects and other animals. | 4 min read | | | • ADHD can have hidden benefits, and some of them are awesome. | 6 min read | | | SPONSORED CONTENT BY HOWTHELIGHTGETSIN | Roger Penrose, Lisa Randall, Joscha Bach and More Lock Horns This Spring | The world's largest ideas and music festival HowTheLightGetsIn returns to Hay-on-Wye from 24-27 May and will feature a stellar line-up of Nobel Prize winners and global thought leaders, alongside a host of award-winning musicians and comedians. With over 350 speakers and performers, check out the festival's newly released programme and don't miss out on an exclusive 30% off tickets with code SCIAM30 before tickets sell out. | | | • Healing rifts and estrangement between parents and their adult children is particularly challenging, but possible, writes Joshua Coleman, a private practice psychologist in the San Francisco area. Mending these relationships requires that "both parents and adult children show humility," he says. "From the parent must come a recognition that, despite their good intentions, their now-grown child experienced their behavior as more hurtful than they realized." Meanwhile, the adult child must recognize that their parents are "in the throes of genetic dictates, partner provocations, childhood traumas, financial threats and cultural milieu." Efforts on both sides of the argument can create opportunities for a closer and deeper relationship between parents and their sons and daughters. | 7 min read | | | • Schools in many countries around the world have had to close at some point in the last few weeks because of extreme hot temps. | Reuters | • Three women were infected with H.I.V. while getting a "vampire facial" at an unlicensed spa in New Mexico. | The New York Times | • A new regulation from the Chilean government aims to preserve dark skies for astronomy. | Inverse | | | Global economies won't be the only thing changing in the future as a result of dropping birth rates. Families will be smaller, along with the total number of relatives each person has. Such new demographics will put unprecedented pressure on caregivers of both children and older adults, who are, you guessed it, primarily women. Whether we want our populations to grow or not, policies that support women as workers and caregivers are essential. | Thanks for being a science-loving reader of Today in Science. Email feedback and comments to: newsletters@sciam.com. Until tomorrow! | —Andrea Gawrylewski, Chief Newsletter Editor | | Subscribe to this and all of our newsletters . | | | | Scientific American
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