1 billion 386 million people already live in the Celestial Empire, and they seem to be trying to breed further. Why are the majority of the planet Chinese?
It is worth considering right away that the Chinese civilization is one of the first on the planet. The ancient Egyptian nation no longer exists, the Babylonians too, but the Chinese have existed for more than five thousand years. For example, during the famous peasant uprising of the "yellow bands" against the Han dynasty in the II-III century AD. e. the rebels alone numbered 2 million people, and in general in China at that time there were 100 (!) million inhabitants. And here is an interesting question: why exactly the Chinese reproduce at such a cosmic speed? After all, both in ancient and in medieval Europe, they also had 10 children in families, but the population did not increase so seriously.
Concubine conveyor
The recipe is simple: the Chinese have surpassed everyone. On average, 20 offspring were born in a standard family of the Celestial Empire, and this was among the poor peasants: richer people, including merchants and officials, had several wives and dozens (if not hundreds) of concubines. Suffice it to say that the number of "sexual servants" of the emperor of the said Han dynasty consisted of 700-900 (!) Girls who regularly gave birth to children. In Western Europe, in poor families, babies were sometimes killed or left at the doorsteps of convents, because the babies had nothing to feed. In China, children in ancient times were given birth by the "conveyor belt" method, purposefully: suddenly, out of two dozen offspring, at least one would break into "people", provide poor parents in old age.
Surprisingly, they lived in the then Celestial Empire much more than in Europe in the "dark ages": it is worth remembering the King of France Philip IV, who died at the age of 46, his son Louis X, who died at the age of 27, Philip V, who went to the next world at 29 years, and Charles IV - he was put in a coffin at 34 years old. The food of the poor Chinese has always been mainly vegetable, not meat, and this allowed them to live up to about 60 years, which at that time - as now 120.
The only problem with such an insane number of people was the food itself. Outbreaks of famine were much more common in China than in Europe. For example, the last to break out was the so-called "Great Famine" in 1958-1961. As a result of the miscalculations of the Mao Zedong government in rice crops, 36 million people died. It is interesting what exactly this kept the Chinese in antiquity and the Middle Ages from serious military expansion: how to move away from the main rivers that provide rice with water, and go on campaigns to no one knows where, suddenly the whole army will die from lack of food?
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Do people breed on purpose?
However, there are many conspiracy theories: they say, the number of Chinese is deliberately overestimated by 2 or even 3 (!) Times. Former Chinese President Chiang Kai-shek, who fled to Taiwan in 1962, said: "The Communists are overstating the number of Chinese so that the whole world is afraid of the Chinese army." In fact, as Chiang Kai-shek believed, no more than 400 million people live in the country. A similar opinion is shared by the Russian expert on China Kirill Lotkov, stating: they say, the PRC is a closed country, there have never been independent calculations in its history, what numbers they want, they will "draw" such for themselves. According to Lotkov, China needs a huge population to put pressure on its neighbors, because the very fact that there are 1.5 billion Chinese people sounds scary: therefore, one should not take their word for it. The same assumptions were expressed by a publicist from Latvia Sergey Vasiliev, citing the following data:in the United States, 485 million tons of grain are harvested per year, and this is enough to feed 300 million people, and in China - 546 million tons of grain. How is it that the Chinese are still not dying of hunger? True, it is worth noting that the inhabitants of China mostly eat not bread, but rice. Other conspiracy theorists point out that even after the war with Japan (1937-1945), where China lost 30 million people, its population, according to statistics, suddenly increased by 60 million! In general, it is impossible to verify this, rumors are inevitable.even after the war with Japan (1937-1945), where China lost 30 million people, its population, according to statistics, suddenly increased by 60 million! In general, it is impossible to verify this, rumors are inevitable.even after the war with Japan (1937-1945), where China lost 30 million people, its population, according to statistics, suddenly increased by 60 million! In general, it is impossible to verify this, rumors are inevitable.
Peasants, taxes and pigs
Let's say a few words about the comments on how to feed such a lot of people. At the moment, China is doing this relatively well. Most of the large agricultural land is concentrated in the estuaries of rivers such as the Yellow River and the Yangtze. Already at the end of the eighties, China, which had previously bought food abroad, began to export food: the Soviet Union, which had caught up in recent years, remember the Great Wall stew. Until the beginning of the two thousandth, until the vast country was saturated, there was a strict order: peasants were forbidden to move to cities. They had to live in the villages and produce the products the state needed. Now, if a farmer breeds pigs, he does not pay tax to the state for three years - and can get an interest-free loan for his production: China is very attentive to food. After all, if something happenedand famine will begin in a gigantic state, and this, to put it mildly, will be a disaster. "We are better off overproduction than shortage," the Chinese communists do not hide.
True, having grown rich, China has recently begun to deviate from these principles and is already buying a little rice from Vietnam and Thailand. What this will lead to will be seen. Only now the PRC began to produce high-quality products, before that the food was somewhat rude, because the most important thing was just to feed a billion-plus people.
Penalty for the second child
Another version, "more terrible": there may be no less Chinese, but … more. Yes Yes. The fact is that in 1979-2015. in China, in the name of birth control, a policy approved by the Communist Party was in effect: "One family - one child." If a couple dared to have a second child, they should have paid a fine: from 4 to 8 average annual (!) Salaries, depending on the region. This became the privilege of only rich people. As a result, according to some estimates, there are allegedly from 100 to 300 (!) Million "illegitimate children" in China who were hiding by their poor parents in order not to "get" fined. They didn't go to kindergarten, didn't go to school. Their fate was unambiguous: to join the ranks of guest workers, who for a penny doing hard work in the PRC's megacities, such as Shanghai, Guangzhou, Beijing and Shenzhen. If you believe specifically in this option,then it becomes simply scary, because at such a pace the Chinese will soon completely occupy the whole world.
Nevertheless, the official point of view of the PRC government is different. China's population is aging, there will be no one to work there, and the country may lose its status as a "global factory." That is why in 2015 the Chinese were allowed to have two children per family. On January 2, 2019, the South China Morning Post reported a sensation: last year, China's population fell by 1 million 27 thousand for the first time. Why? There are significantly fewer women in China than men, and many young couples are in no hurry to have children, because health care is paid, education is also paid, toys and children's clothing cost a lot of money.
“China used to threaten the whole world with its population, but now it will suddenly start dying out,” a Chinese business man told me sourly in a personal conversation. This is, of course, an overly panicky point of view. Although in fact - about the number of Chinese on the planet, you no longer know what to think.
Georgy Zotov