Asia (Page 619)

China’s population has shrunk for the second year in a row.

The National Bureau of Statistics reports just 9.02 million births in 2023 – only half as many as in 2017. Set alongside China’s 11.1 million deaths in 2023, up 500,000 on 2022, it means China’s population shrank 2.08 million in 2023 after falling 850,000 in 2022. That’s a loss of about 3 million in two years.

The two consecutive declines are the first since the great famine of 1959-1961, and the trend is accelerating.

Updated low-scenario projections from a research team at Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, one of the first to predict the 2022 turndown, have China’s population shrinking from its present 1.4 billion to just 525 million by 2100.

China’s working-age population is projected to fall to just 210 million by 2100 – a mere one-fifth of its peak in 2014.

Deaths climbing as births falling

The death rate is climbing as an inevitable result of the population aging, and also an upsurge of Covid in the first few months of 2023.

The population is aging mainly because the birth rate is falling.

China’s total fertility rate, the average number of births per woman, was fairly flat at about 1.66 between 1991 and 2017 under China’s one-child policy. But it then fell to 1.28 in 2020, to 1.08 in 2022 and is now around 1, which is way below the level of 2.1 generally thought necessary to sustain a population.

By way of comparison, Australia and the United States have fertility rates of 1.6. In 2023 South Korea has the world’s lowest rate, 0.72.

Births plummet despite three-child policy

China abandoned its one-child policy in 2016. In 2021 the country introduced a three-child policy, backed by tax and other incentives.

But births are continuing to fall. In part this is because of an established one-child norm, in part because the one-child policy cut the number of women of child-bearing age, and in part because economic pressures are making parenthood less attractive.

China’s National Bureau of Statistics says employees of enterprises work an average of 49 hours per week, more than nine hours per day. Women graduates earn less than men and are increasingly postponing having children.

One hope is that 2024 will see a bump in births, being the year of the dragon in Chinese astrology, a symbol of good fortune.

Some families may have chosen to postpone childbirth during the less auspicious year of the rabbit in 2023. At least one study has identified such an effect.

An older, more dependent population

The same research team at the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences and the Centre for Policy Studies at Australia’s Victoria University have China’s population falling by more than one-half to around 525 million by 2100, a fall about 62 million bigger than previously forecast.

The working-age population is set to fall more sharply to 210 million.

We now expect the number of Chinese aged 65 and older to overtake the number of Chinese of traditional working age in 2077, three years earlier than previously.

By 2100 we expect every 100 Chinese of traditional working-age to have to support 137 elderly Chinese, up from just 21 at present.

Our central scenario assumes China’s fertility rate will recover, climbing slowly to 1.3. Our low scenario assumes it will decline further to 0.88 over the next decade and then gradually recover to 1.0 by 2050 before holding steady.

We have based our assumptions on observations of actual total fertility rates in China’s region and their downward trend. In 2022 these rates hit 1.26 in Japan, 1.04 in Singapore, 0.87 in Taiwan, 0.8 in Hong Kong and 0.78 in South Korea.

In none of these countries has fertility rebounded, despite government efforts. These trends point to what demographers call the “low-fertility trap” in which fertility becomes hard to lift once it falls below 1.5 or 1.4.

An earlier peak in world population

At present accounting for one-sixth of the world’s population, China’s accelerated decline will bring forward the day when the world’s population peaks.

Our updated forecast for China brings forward our forecast of when the world’s population will peak by one year to 2083, although there is much that is uncertain (including what will happen in India, now bigger than China, whose fertility rate has fallen below replacement level).

The accelerated decline in China’s population will weaken China’s economy and, through it, the world’s economy.

It will put downward pressure on Chinese consumer spending and upward pressure on wages and government spending. As the world’s second-largest economy, this weakness will present challenges to the world’s economic recovery.

Xiujian Peng is Senior Research Fellow, Centre of Policy Studies, Victoria University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Continue Reading

While broadly touted as the future of shipboard point and missile defense, laser weapons have been glaringly absent in the US-led coalition strikes against Iranian-supplied drones and missiles used by Houthi forces in Yemen to attack commercial vessels and warships in the Red Sea.

This month, Breaking Defense reported that Rear Admiral Fred Pyle, the US Navy’s director of surface warfare requirements, has expressed frustration with the current pace of laser weapon system development.

Pyle believes that the US Navy and American defense industry need to be more intellectually honest about what is possible with laser weapons, noting a tendency by both to overpromise and underdeliver.

Breaking Defense notes that the US Navy has sought to develop a capability that would enable a sailor underway to fire a laser that knocks down an enemy drone or takes out a small boat.

The report mentions Lockheed Martin’s experimental HELIOS laser aboard the USS Preble (DDG-88) as an example of a project that aims to bring the concept closer to real-world applications.

However, the source notes that Vice Admiral Brendan McLane, the US Navy’s top surface warfare officer, has expressed frustrations with the navy’s current pace of laser weapon system development, emphasizing that laser weapons must deliver on their promise of negligible cost per shot.

Pyle said that laser weapons need physical, weight, power and cooling space that may be unavailable to current US surface combatants. The report also quotes Secretary of the Navy Carlos Del Toro expressing concerns that laser weapon development has taken a long time to bear results.

While currently available US shipboard air defense weapons are effective, their high cost per shot and limited magazine depth raise significant cost and survivability concerns.

Lara Seligman and Matt Berg mention in a December 2023 Politico article that the US Navy has used Standard SM-2 missiles costing US$2.1 million in the Red Sea to destroy Houthi drones worth just $2,000, raising concerns about the cost-effectiveness and unsustainability of this kind of warfare.

Seligman and Berg note that while US destroyers can use their five-inch guns with airburst rounds for anti-drone defense, they can only hit targets ten nautical miles away, which may be dangerously close.

While they say that US destroyers can use Evolved Sea Sparrow Missiles to hit targets closer than five nautical miles, the missiles cost around US$1.8 million per shot.

Seligman and Berg point out that US destroyers’ last line of defense, the 20-millimeter Phalanx Close-in Weapons System (CIWS), can hit targets inside one nautical mile, but the closer the drone gets to the target, the higher the chances of a successful strike.

Given that high cost-per-shot ratio, the problems would undoubtedly be magnified if the US gets into a conflict with China over Taiwan, with China having much greater production capabilities and advanced drones and missiles than the Houthis in Yemen.

US laser weapon development is thus seemingly caught in limbo due to various unresolved practical and technological issues.

A December 2023 US Congressional Research Service (CRS) report notes that proponents of high-powered military lasers have made various predictions about when these weapons would be fielded that have repeatedly passed unrealized.

Laser weapon proponents cited by CRS say that the situation has changed due to advancements in solid-state laser (SSL) technology and the adoption of more realistic goals, including the use of kilowatt-power lasers for point defense instead of megawatt-power lasers for ballistic missile defense.  

They say that skeptics may be prematurely abandoning the development of laser weapons due to past setbacks, despite steady and hopeful technological progress.

A separate August 2023 CRS report mentions that laser weapon development programs have been plagued by technological maturity issues related to improving beam quality and control, failure to deliver specialized facilities to maintain sensitive components and the lack of a defense industrial base to produce the weapons at economy of scale.

While the US Navy has positioned laser weapons on a few of its warships, it’s not clear if it has a strategic plan or timeline for widespread adoption of the technology.

Jared Keller notes in a January 2023 article for Task and Purpose that the US Navy has seven Optical Dazzling Interdictor Navy (ODIN) systems and one HELIOS laser.

Keller notes that while the navy is pushing to field laser weapons on surface warships as soon as possible it has at the same called for further at-sea testing of the HELIOS laser.

This month, Asia Times noted that the US Navy’s Arleigh Burke-class destroyers have already maxed out their upgrade potential, with internal space constraints limiting the installation of new power generation systems. That, in turn, means there is a lack of space for future sensors, communications and weapons systems.

Keller notes that Arleigh Burke Flight III destroyers may not be able to accommodate laser weapons, as most of its electric power is directed to its installed AN/SPY-6 Air and Missile Defense Radar (AMDR). That means the Arleigh Burke Mod 2.0 may be the platform of choice for laser weapons integration until the new DDG(X) design begins production in 2032.

Sebastien Roblin mentions in a Popular Mechanics article this month that the US Navy plans to upgrade 20 Arleigh Burke Flight IIA destroyers, which first entered service between 1998 and 2010, for US$850 million per ship, with each refit reportedly taking about 1.5 to 2 years.

However, Roblin points out that the Arleigh Burke Mod 2.0 upgrade program may suffer the same fate as the troubled attempts to upgrade aging Ticonderoga-class cruisers, where cost overruns and delays have hobbled full upgrades.

Roblin notes that as the US Navy has upgraded its Arleigh Burkes over the last four decades, the design is running out of free space for future upgrades including laser weapons.

Continue Reading

Customer help desks are a top target of money-saving schemes involving generative AI, as I reported earlier in an attempted takedown of the chatbot. Now I’m convinced that automating customer service will bring the apocalypse somewhat nearer, not because machines will become sentient, but because the machines turn perfectly normal human beings into morons.

It started when a family member included in my T-Mobile plan lost a handset. It happens.

Each month I fork over $18 to T-Mobile’s partner Assurant for handset protection, so I clicked on Assurant’s website to file a claim. But the website went into an infinite loop: To file a claim, the site demanded a one-time password sent to the handset in question, which is the handset that was lost, and therefore couldn’t receive a one-time password or anything else.

Use another handset from the same account to get the oneoo-time passwor, Assurant’s convenient pop-chat function told me. I should have known better. ChatBots make things up, as a couple of New York lawyers discovered when their AI-generated legal brief presented cases that didn’t exist. The same thing can happen with help desks.

Stupidly, I did as instructed. But Assurant’s system assumed that the lost handset needing tobe replaced was the one that had received the one-time password, namely my own handset. After I forked over a $250 deductible, Assurant promptly sent out a replacement for my handset, a venerable Samsung device that had worked uncomplainingly for years and remained comfortably nestled in my shirt pocket.

Once I was in receipt of the wrong replacement handset, I called Assurant customer service and explained the error (it was Assurant’s error, not mine). I returned the handset with the next UPS pickup. Assurant apologized for the error, and took a second $250 deductible to replace the handset that actually had been lost, promising to refund my first $250 deductible when the first replacement handset arrived.

In due course, the correct replacement handset arrived, and all seemed well, except for the deductibles, of course.

But I was unaware that the unquiet spirit of Franz Kafka had quietly possessed the soul of T-Mobile and Assurant customer service.

My handset stopped connecting to the network in the middle of a weekday afternoon, ten days after my initial encounter with the Catch-22 on Assurant’s website. I was traveling and between meetings. I had a backup phone (I’m the sort of Airport Dad who always has a backup) and I spent two hours on the line with T-Mobile customer service until someone figured out that Assurant, not T-Mobile, had blocked the SIM card on my handset, because it had been reported lost.

It never was reported lost – its only offense was to receive a one-time password – and Assurant customer service had known of its error for ten days. But the misinformation had worked its way through the system over those days.

At length I talked to someone at Assurant, who said that it would take one business day, or maybe one to three business days, to unblock my SIM card. I begged, cajoled and threatened the Assurant tech as well as her supervisor, to no avail. The phone still isn’t working.

Fortunately, most of my friends have stopped using cell phone connections in favor of encrypted messaging apps, and these apps run on WiFi. I can turn on the data hotspot on my backup phone and use the messaging apps on my handset with the still-blocked SIM Card.

A supervisor finally took my call at T-Mobile. I asked her if I could record the call (which T-Mobile says it does whenever you call them). She hung up. Her AI system probably flashed, “Abort! Abort!”

If you’ve been trying to call me on my regular line, and I haven’t answered, now you know why.

T-Mobile, Verizon and AT&T cost a lot more than the discounters. What you pay for is superior customer service, which means a lot in an emergency. But as AI systems metastasize through customer service departments, the advantage disappears. If you’re going to be mistreated by a machine, might as well pay less for the privilege.

Continue Reading