LordsFire
Internet Wizard
First off, no it isn't, it's two children, and second off, this is after the damage has already been done.
It was preceded by a two-child policy in the sixties, and was implemented in 1978/79, running until 2015. It was then changed back to the two-child policy. In the 80's they modified it so that rural families that had a daughter could have a second child, but it was still strictly one-child in the city.
Now, to make that clear, that means that for almost forty years, the Chinese were forcibly cutting their population size by almost half. Compounding the problem from an economic standpoint, is the fact that this comes at the same time as finally not being in constant danger of starvation, combined with improvement in medical care, mean that people were living longer and longer past both the age of retirement, and the age at which most people could practically keep contributing to the economy even if they weren't retiring.
This means that as they go over the hump, China is facing an absolutely enormous population crunch. Historically, only major plagues and famines could result in anything nearly this bad. There are enormous economic consequences to all of this.
China's major boom in prosperity has been based on four things:
1. An utterly destitute Communist economic system becoming much more free-market.
2. Cheap labor being available for western companies to take advantage of for all their production facilities, and western countries actively courting the Chinese allowing this. They would also build things nobody wanted just to create job.
3. An enormous population of young adults and middle-aged people to do tons of work.
4. The ability to rampantly steal other people's technology and Intellectual Property Rights.
That was China's position in the 90's through to ~2019.
Now:
1. Winnie the Jinping has been tightening the system up, making it less free market.
2. Chinese labor is more expensive than alternatives in Mexico, Vietnam, India, and others. Western nations are now a lot more pissed with China, Japan is paying their own companies to get manufacturing out.
3. Their population dividend is running out, hard, and they're on a downswing now.
4. While it hasn't stopped, technology theft has rapidly slowed.
And on top of all of this:
5. The Chinese are in hilariously enormous amounts of debt.
6. The Coronavirus backlash.
On the flip side, for all their problems, they are in a much better place than they were in 1990, so if they don't fall to total anarchy, they'll end up somewhere that is still better than they once were.
