Articles

• Dramatic declines in marriage and childbearing mean that a growing number of Chinese women and especially men are “bare branches”—navigating their entire lives without kin.
• By Yi & Wilcox (2021) estimate, the total fertility rate for China was about 1.0 in 2020.
• Two-child policy in Chinas was proposed in 2016.
• Mencius, the “Second Sage” of Confucianism, believed that “population is the foundation of a country.”
• Adam Smith, the “father of economics,” also argued that “the most decisive mark of the prosperity of any country is the increase of the number of its inhabitants.”
• A more promising possibility for China is religion, understood as a set of values that endow ordinary life with transcendent value.
• Confucianism is a philosophy which emphasizes the importance of family, marriage and social harmony. It advocates “large families and small government,” not marrying too late, and considers the dead and the unborn to be as much a part of civilization as the living.
• Confucianism: "Respect for the dead will greatly improve morality,” and “It is most unfilial to have no offspring.
• How can China avoid demographic disaster? Return to religion.
• China is now facing a demographic crisis akin to the one that hit Japan, which saw its fertility fall first.
• Tang (1995) revealed that there's an obvious relationship between China's large population and Confucianism.
• Confucianism is called ru jiao or kong jiao. Jiao has two meanings: religion and teaching.
• In Confucianism, there is an abstract concept of tian (heaven). It represents the universe or all natural things.
• In Chinese classic philosophy, the universe started from life--the human body.
• Because of the importance of yin and yang in Confucianism, sheng

  (reproduction) became part of the lofty realm of Chinese classic philosophy.
• Utopians generally describe societies that are supposed to be in equilibrium because they are considered capable of perpetuating

  themselves indefinitely.
• Charbit (2002) shows that Plato’s objective was rather to advocate a seemingly revolutionary, but in reality fundamentally conservative social order that some have even deemed totalitarian.
• Ibn Khaldun is a famous philosopher, and is sometimes considered the first sociologist for his critical remarks on how history should be studied. He out- lined dynastic change in terms of transformations in the governing classes and related these to changes in economic conditions, for example, the introduction of new wants and new production, the effects of luxury, trends in taxation, and

  other features of expansion and contraction.
• Ibn Khaldun is known for his history of the world (Kitab al-Jbar) and most particularly for his long introduction ( al-Muqaddimah ), in

  which he explains the methods one should use to study society,
• Ibn Khaldun' s narrative approach is piecemeal.
• Group feeling is a sense of solidarity and shared identity among people that, as Ibn Khaldun is careful to say in numerous passages, derives its strength more from a long history of companionship and joint efforts than from genealogies based.
• Ibn Khaldun' s distinction between two notions of profit: kasb and

  ribh. Kasb is the value realized from labor. Ribh is the value realized from trade.
• Ibn Khaldun was interested in the size of the urban population, not in

  regional population density.
• Mercantilism was the economic counterpart of political absolutism.
• Mercantilism promoted governmental regulation of a nation’s economy for the purpose of augmenting state power at the expense of rival national powers.
• Preventive check was a study of human agents making conscious, rational decisions calculated to maximize their own self-interest and the interest of their potential offspring.
• ‘The Population Bomb’ by Paul Ehrlich made dire predictions—and triggered a wave of repression around the world.
• The model that explains why countries go through a period of rapid population growth is called the ‘demographic transition’.