Demographic Issues in East Asia

Demography is just so basic: the flux of people over time and space, responding to all sorts of perceived changes in opportunity, and strategizing (often at the family/domestic unit level) within the limitations of available information. Add in the random effects of disease, and the not-so-random influences of levels of nutrition and prosperity (or poverty)...

The hydraulic model of a demographic unit... the question of what controls the valves of inflow and outflow...

Some factoids:

• "...60 or so million people who have left their farms and villages in search of a better life since China began to relax economic and social controls in the 1980s. This "floating population" represents a potential powder keg for a government trying hard to control urbanization and maintain order...

  ...One legacy of the single-child policy is a distorted gender ratio at birth. The patterns are aided by the widespread use of ultrasound machines in the countryside to determine the sex of the fetus which, in some cases, lead to aborting females. A 1995 survey showed an alarmingly high ratio of 118 boys to 100 girls aged 0 to 4, compared to the normal birth ratio of 106.5:100. Some foreign researchers believe that infanticide is a factor behind the imbalance, although Chinese demographers tend to dismiss the idea and to focus instead on selective neglect. ...At one point demographers hoped that the lopsided sex ratio reflected an underreporting of girls by couples who were reserving an official space in the family for an unborn boy. But there is a growing consensus that, for the past 15 years at least, most of the "missing girls" never existed."
  (Science Vol 290, Issue 5495, 1288-1289 , 17 November 2000)

• "...The flood of peasants into China's cities is the biggest migration in human history. Already, some 200 million have abandoned their impoverished villages to move to the booming centres. Another 500 million could be on the move in the next half century."
  (Globe and Mail 22 Oct 2004)

• "In the People's Republic of China, there are 56 nationality populations: 55 minority nationalities and the majority Han. According to data from the 2000 Census of China, the minorities number over 105 million persons, representing nearly 8.5 per cent of the country's population... if the minority peoples of China were a single country, they would be the eleventh largest country in the world...
  (book review)

• "Some 600,000 Chinese have left to pursue higher education since 1980, and an estimated 75 percent remain abroad, according to the Los Angeles Times on August 8, 2004. The number of Chinese traveling abroad as tourists is rising rapidly, and is projected to be 100 million by 2020, which would make China the number four source of international tourists, after Germany, Japan and the US.

  ...China is an aging society facing a social security problem; social security currently covers only urban workers... The share of Chinese aged 60 and older is projected to rise from 11 percent today to 28 percent by 2040, and there may be too few taxpayers to support these retirees if fertility stays low. Many social scientists argue that loosening the one-child policy would lead to an increase but not a surge in births, and they recommend allowing two children beginning in the coastal cities that have experienced the most economic growth.

  ...China has become a net food importer, on track to import food worth $29 billion and export food worth $22 billion in 2004. However, falling water tables, drying rivers and polluted water sources promise to turn China into the world's biggest food importer within a decade; the amount of farm land has fallen to 123 million hectares."
  (Migration News from UC Davis)

• And Japan and Korea: "Japan has an estimated 760,000 foreign workers-- 1.5 percent of the 53 million strong work force- and two million registered foreign residents- those in Japan three months or more. Foreigners in Japan remitted $2.8 billion officially in 2003, and an estimated $5.5 billion unofficially, to China, Korea, the Philippines, Brazil and Peru.

  Japan may open its nursing labor market to foreigners, although it plans to require them to undergo hospital training in Japan before taking the national exam that leads to four-year work visas. Japan signed a free-trade agreement with Singapore in 2003, and is negotiating one with the Philippines that could provide freer entry for Filipino health care workers. By one estimate, 85 percent of the 178,000 Filipino nurses are employed abroad."
  (Migration News)

  Statistical Handbook of Japan

  Japan’s Aging Population: A Challenge For its Economy and Society Asia Source October 07, 2003

  Korea Braces for Smaller Working Population By Lee Chi-dong (Korea Times)

We have data, at least sometimes, and we can ask those data for stories. And what are the BIG stories?

• minzu
• internal migration
• the global diaspora (and various backflows, including people and remittances... and ideas...)
• changes in population composition, consequent upon demographic transition and aggregation of various family complexities

  Japan projection, Korea North projection, Koreas South projection, China projection

• inequalities, notably urban/rural, but also within societies at large

infanticide...