Giorgia Meloni: The hard work is just starting

 

Giorgia Meloni, October 21, 2022

 

In the space of four years, Giorgia Meloni has gone from being the leader of a minor party to being the leader of Italy, with an absolute majority in both houses of parliament. But she will not find it easy to put her electoral platform into practice.

 

 

Four years ago, when I last wrote about Italy’s political situation, Giorgia Meloni was leading a party that had won only 2% of the popular vote. Her party was, in fact, the smallest member of a coalition dominated by Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia and Matteo Salvini’s Lega Nord. All of that changed with this year’s election. Her party took 26% of the vote, and the coalition 43%. She is now Prime Minister.

 

Meloni rose to power because she lacked the weaknesses of her two coalition rivals. She wasn’t an establishment conservative like Berlusconi, and she wasn’t a northern regionalist like Salvini. She was thus seen as the one who could best represent the entire country and deal with its problems, especially the existential crisis of rising immigration and falling fertility. Will Italians continue to have a homeland for themselves and their descendants? Or will they go the way of other nations that are now footnotes in history?

 

That may sound like hyperbole. With a population of sixty million, Italians will surely enjoy a supermajority in their country for years to come. Keep in mind, however, that their mean age is 47; therefore, more than half are past the age of reproduction. With a fertility rate of 1.3 children per woman, the smaller "procreative fraction" of the population will fall by almost 50% with each generation. Meanwhile, the foreign citizen population has risen from 1.3 million in 2002 to 5.2 million in 2021. The total number of immigrants is actually larger:

 

In 2021, Istat estimated that 5,171,894 foreign citizens lived in Italy, representing about 8.7% of the total population. These figures do not include naturalized foreign-born residents (about 1,620,000 foreigners acquired Italian citizenship from 1999 to 2020, of whom 130,000 did so in 2020) as well as illegal immigrants, the so-called clandestini, whose numbers, difficult to determine, are thought to be at least 670,000. (Wikipedia 2022)

 

The demographic crisis is key to understanding Meloni’s electoral platform:

 

·         taxation that takes the size of the nuclear family into account

·         a lower sales tax of 4% on goods for young children

·         public funding of housing for Italian families who do not own a home. Eligible families must have at least one gainfully employed member

·         no birthright citizenship and no decriminalization of illegal immigration

·         a naval blockade to halt illegal immigration across the Mediterranean

 

Although her coalition enjoys an absolute majority in both houses of parliament, she will not find it easy to put her platform into practice:

 

She will very soon have to deal with the European Court of Human Rights, the Court of Justice of the European Union and the United States, if she does not respect the treaties on the management of immigration, Islam, free and undistorted competition and the European Union's defence policy.

 

If she is really very brave, she will carry on regardless and continue her policy. That is when the European Central Bank will deal with her. Indeed, Italy has become, thanks to Berlusconi, a beggar. It owes its survival only to the accommodative policy of the ECB, which massively buys its abysmal debt, and protects it from hedge funds. Remember that the ECB holds 780 billion [euros] of Italian public debt (30% of total debt), and that this is only growing. Italy's 10-year borrowing rates have already exceeded 4%, which is completely unbearable for the country's budget. Then it would be enough for the ECB to stop its purchases, or even to sell part of its stock on the market at a low price, to immediately raise this rate to stratospheric levels, and make Italy look like Zimbabwe. And the same people who were yesterday in the street with signs of support will throw stones at her while insulting her. (Falento 2022)

 

Looking to the future

 

To date, nationalist victories have been on the periphery of Western Europe, and not in its core. The periphery is home to people who have not fully assimilated into the Western world-system, largely because they are less proficient in English—the main conduit of neo-Western culture. So it is difficult to make them understand ideas and social norms that emanate from the core, let alone comply with them. As a general rule, the periphery is where a world-system has the most trouble imposing its will, not only politically and economically but also culturally and ideologically.

 

The next decade will see rising tensions between the core and the periphery, and it’s difficult to say which will prevail. The periphery is being taken over by nationalists, like Giorgia Meloni, while the core remains dominated by elites who are pushing the globalist project: on the one hand, they want to export high-wage jobs to countries where labor is cheaper; on the other, they want to import low-wage labor for jobs that cannot be exported, i.e., jobs in construction, agriculture, and services.

 

That is why median wages in the West have scarcely risen over the past half-century. High-wage “breadwinner” jobs in manufacturing are largely gone, and the jobs that remain are increasingly low-paying ones in services. During the 2020s, wage stagnation will give way to a leveling downward of wages throughout the West. Elsewhere, the leveling upward will be modest and uneven. The inner periphery will get the worst of both worlds: they’re not poor enough to attract low-wage industries, but not rich enough to attract the financial industry jobs that are concentrated in London, New York, and other world centres.

 

It is doubtful whether globalization will be a net benefit for the average person in the world.  Wealth is created most efficiently in high-trust societies, and those societies are the ones most affected by “replacement migration.” We may simply end up with a world where most workers are equally poor and equally mistrustful of each other.

 

 

References

 

Falento, A. (2022). Giorgia Meloni ne pourra rien faire si elle ne sort pas de l’Union européene. Riposte laïque. September 26. https://ripostelaique.com/giorgia-meloni-ne-pourra-rien-faire-si-elle-ne-sort-pas-de-lunion-europeene.html  

 

Frost, P. (2017). Terra Nostra, for how long? Evo and Proud, November 23. https://evoandproud.blogspot.com/2017/11/terra-nostra-for-how-long.html  

 

Wikipedia (2022). Immigration to Italy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_to_Italy

Not getting the concept

 

In selling mass immigration to the public, Japan’s government is faced with a semantic problem. Many have trouble understanding the concept, i.e., foreigners can come in large numbers, receive citizenship, and be treated as if they really are Japanese. (Wikicommons – Maya-Anaïs Yataghène)

 

 

An ideology will spread more easily among people who already understand its concepts, and such understanding is made easier by a common language. Conversely, an ideology will spread less easily across a language boundary. The problem is not simply one of translating the words but also one of reformulating the concepts, which may seem less familiar in another language and culture.

 

For that reason, globalism has spread unevenly around the world. It has penetrated the thinking of nations that widely use English as a first language, especially their chattering classes. It has less easily penetrated where English is poorly understood. This has been the case in East Asia, especially Japan.

 

The Japanese exception

 

That country is linguistically isolated from the English-speaking world to a high degree, despite close economic ties. In 2019, Japan ranked 53rd in English proficiency out of a hundred non-English-speaking countries, down from 49th the year before. Even China had a better ranking (Nippon.com, 2019).

 

Japan’s linguistic isolation is part of a tendency toward cultural isolation that goes back to the two-century-long period of sakoku ("closed country"), when the government forbade Japanese nationals to go abroad and severely limited trade with other countries. That policy didn't fully end when Japan opened up to the world in the mid-nineteenth century. There has continued to be an unwritten policy of protecting Japanese culture and identity.

 

This isolationist tendency is now viewed as a problem by the ruling Liberal Democratic Party. Because of a very low birth rate, the population shrank by about 1.7 million between 2010 and 2018 and is projected to lose another 20 million by 2045 (Davison and Peng 2021). Stopping this demographic decline will require radical changes to the economy, particularly the balance between work and home life. There is also a deeper problem with consumer culture: advertising tends to promote the lifestyle of singles, since they have the most disposable income. Corporate advertising thus projects images of happy carefree singles, and such images influence how ordinary people see themselves.

 

While some moves have been made to improve work/life balance in Japan, fertility will not immediately return to replacement levels, even with generous incentives. We’re dealing with ingrained attitudes, as well as an uncooperative consumer culture. Policy makers are thus tempted by a seemingly easier solution—mass immigration—and that seems to be where they’re heading:

 

[…] some scholars and policymakers have called for a vigorous increase in the number of immigrants admitted to the country. [...] Sakanaka (2015), for example, argues that Japan would need to accept 10 million immigrants over the next 50 years (an average of 200,000 per year) to sustain its population and economy. (Davison and Peng 2021)

 

In 2014, a government commission came out in favor of increased immigration: "With the falling birthrate, in order to raise productivity, we will strategically bring in foreign talent (gaikoku jinzai) as we encourage a national debate, and we will design the development of our interactions with them" (Roberts 2018, 90).

 

A matter of semantics

 

In selling mass immigration to the public, the government is faced with a semantic problem. Many have trouble understanding the concept, i.e., foreigners can come in large numbers, receive citizenship, and be treated as if they really are Japanese. This was a finding from in-depth interviews with people from all walks of life:

 

An unexpected finding of our research was that the notion of immigration as we know it in the West — migration to a foreign country with the intention to settle as a permanent resident or naturalised citizen — was somewhat foreign to many of our interview participants. When asked for their opinions on immigration, many participants assumed the term 'immigrant' (imin) was synonymous with 'temporary foreign worker' (gaikokujin rodosha) and that 'immigration policy' (imin seisaku) was inclusive of temporary worker programmes like the Economic Partnership Agreements (EPAs) that bring in up to 1000 nursing and care work interns from the Philippines, Indonesia, and Vietnam each year. (Davison and Peng 2021)

 

This misunderstanding can be seen in the following exchange between the interviewer (Davison) and nurses at a hospital:

 

Participant:

There's one thing I don't get. When you say immigration ... if someone likes Japan and wants to live here ... Is that the kind of person you have in mind? Or someone who just wants to come here for a short time to make some money ... Is there a difference between those kind of people? When you say immigrants ... I don't understand the concept.

 

Davison:

I mean people who come here and get citizenship, Japanese citizenship.

 

Participant:

Get Japanese citizenship? So they're Japanese?

 

Most of the interviewees were initially neutral or favorable toward immigration. They often changed their minds when told that immigrants are "people who come to Japan with the intention to settle in the country and perhaps naturalise as Japanese citizens" (Davison 2021). This confusion may be due to government discourse on the subject:

 

For example, 'immigration policy' is frequently presented as 'acceptance of foreign workers policy' (gaikokujin rodosha ukeire seisaku) and, in official messaging, the implication of permanent settlement is often left unstated. (Davison 2021)

 

To some degree, the confusion may be deliberate. The government may realize that immigration is more acceptable to the public if presented as a temporary worker program, even if it provides a path to permanent residency and citizenship.

 

 

References

 

Davison, J. and I. Peng. (2021). Views on immigration in Japan: identities, interests, and pragmatic divergence. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies. January 8

https://doi.org/10.1080/1369183X.2020.1862645

 

Nippon.com (2019). Japan's English Proficiency Drops among Non-English-Speaking Countries. December 4

https://www.nippon.com/en/japan-data/h00594/japan%E2%80%99s-english-proficiency-drops-among-non-english-speaking-countries.html#:~:text=Japan%27s%20English%20Proficiency%20Drops%20Among%20Non%2DEnglish%2DSpeaking%20Countries,-Culture%20Language%20Dec&text=A%20survey%20has%20revealed%20that,both%20South%20Korea%20and%20China.

 

Roberts, G.S. (2018). An Immigration Policy by Any Other Name: Semantics of Immigration to Japan. Social Science Japan Journal 21 (1): 89-102. https://doi.org/10.1093/ssjj/jyx033

The Japanese alternative

Japan is robotizing not only manufacturing but also the service sector (Wikicommons - Michael Ocampo)



In my last two posts I argued that South Korea has embraced not only ultra-low fertility but also mass immigration. In this, it has more in common with Western Europe and North America than with neighboring China and Japan.

China is out of step with Western immigration policy for understandable reasons: it is only now exhausting its reserves of cheap labor and, furthermore, has problematic relations with the West. But those reasons hardly apply to Japan—a Western ally with fewer and fewer people of working age. Yet that country has been going its own way on immigration, just as it has in other areas, notably automation and robotization.  In the West, robotics research is a low priority, except for military applications. In Japan, it is a high priority and has the stated aim of staving off immigration:

"Japan's push for automation has historically been driven by political and social resistance to large-scale immigration by non-Japanese, rooted in the idea that there would be a deep cultural incompatibility with such immigrants," says Grant Otsuki, a lecturer in cultural anthropology at Victoria University of Wellington.

"In contrast, robots are generally seen as compatible with tradition and culture, or at least 'neutral', and therefore more acceptable than immigrants." (Townsend 2019)

Robotic beings have a good image in Japan, as shown by a spate of movies where a shy boy falls in love with a female android: Chobits (2002), Cyborg She (2008), and Q10 (2010). In contrast, we see a darker image in Western movies, such as the Terminator series, Ex Machina (2015), and Blade Runner (1982 and 2017).

Keep in mind that culture is upstream from policy. If you think movies are made only to provide entertainment, you probably also believe that newspapers serve only to cover the news and that advertisements are used only to sell a specific good or service. Culture is an effective way to shape future policies.


South Korea and Japan: different responses to the same demographic crisis

The South Korean response

Although South Korea and Japan face the same demographic crisis, i.e., an aging society and a low birth rate, they have responded in very different ways. South Korea has greatly liberalized its immigration policy, both in law and in enforcement of the law. Since 1997 the country has opened up its labor market to guest workers and has relaxed enforcement to the point that half of all migrants are undocumented (Moon 2010).

Song (undated) sees a link between the beginning of large-scale labor immigration to his country and the IMF bailout of 1997. However, the "Memorandum on the Economic Program," written by the South Korean government in response to the IMF, says nothing specific about immigration. There is only a promise to implement "labor market reform" and take "further steps to improve labor market flexibility" (IMF 1997). Perhaps other promises were made off the record.

To gain support for large-scale immigration, the government began to promote multiculturalism from 2006 onward:

But the South Korean media also began to host fervent discussions of multiculturalism. In 2005-2006, the number of articles on the topic tripled from previous years. The media shift was echoed by a change in policy from the top, initially driven by President Roh Moo-hyun. The campaign then crossed ministerial divisions and party lines, surviving the changeover from the liberal Roh administration of 2003-2008 to the more conservative administration of President Lee Myung-bak. Lee's government sought both to persuade the public to embrace immigrants and to promote integration by educating new foreign-born brides in the intricacies of Korean culture. The Ministry of Gender Equality and Family simultaneously started a campaign to persuade the public to accept multiculturalism. Immigration commissioners and the presidential committee on aging set multiculturalism as a national priority to combat a maturing society. South Korea was to become a "first-class nation, with foreigners" — a phrase echoed throughout government documents and speeches. (Palmer and Park 2018)

Watson (2010) ascribes this new policy to the neo-liberalism that has dominated both the Right and the Left, particularly since the IMF bailout of 1997:

For the conservative government, South Korean nationalism and democracy is fundamentally tied to the doctrine of neo-liberalism. Neo-liberalism refers to the flow of economic migrant labour and mobile global capital. This global environment also requires government policies to attract foreign migrants and workers into South Korea's economy and society.

Multiculturalism is a state-led response to these global changes. The policies of multiculturalism define the present and future economic, security and cultural national strength of South Korea. Critics suggest that, in fact, the GNP regards multiculturalism as an instrumental policy of increasing national state power in this global environment. (Watson, 2010)

The GNP is the Grand National Party. It dominates the political right and resembles mainstream Republicanism in the United States:


The Japanese response

Meanwhile, Japan has been much less willing to open its borders, despite being East Asia's primary destination for foreigners. Its illegal immigrant population has actually declined through stronger law enforcement, and legal immigrants have been mostly overseas Japanese from Latin America. Last year, however, its parliament passed a law to bring in foreign workers for jobs in construction, agriculture, the hotel industry, cleaning, and elder care. Initially, 500,000 were slated to come over the next five years, but the total was cut to 345,000 (Denyer 2018; Nikkei 2018; Shigeta 2018).

Those numbers are still much lower than the 2.4 million foreign workers currently in South Korea, a much smaller country in size and population. In addition, Japan's guest workers will be paid the same as Japanese doing the same work (Denyer 2018). This is in stark contrast to South Korea, which has the largest wage gap between local and immigrant labor in the OECD (Hyun-ju 2015).

Japan is still criticized for not opening up enough. One example is this Washington Post article, whose author warns the U.S. against becoming another Japan:

Now, to be clear, Japan is a wondrous nation, with an ancient, complex culture, welcoming people, innovative industry — a great deal to teach the world. But Japan also is a country that admits few immigrants — and, as a result, it is an aging, shrinking nation. By 2030, more than half the country will be over age 50. By 2050 there will be more than three times as many old people (65 and over) as children (14 and under). Already, deaths substantially outnumber births. Its population of 127 million is forecast to shrink by a third over the next half-century. (Hiatt 2018)

Robotization may make life easier for Japan's growing numbers of elderly but will it pay for their pensions? Mind you, the same sort of question could be asked about low-wage immigration to the U.S.


Why is Japan so different?

A key reason seems to be a high degree of cultural autonomy and a correspondingly high degree of cultural isolation. The term "isolation" might seem strange for a country that does so much importing and exporting. Nonetheless, manufactured goods are not the same as beliefs. The latter are distributed not via shipping containers but through shared language and through shared discourse spaces in academia, entertainment, and the media.

Poor knowledge of English

English has become the language of globalism, and knowledge of English correlates worldwide with public acceptance of core globalist beliefs. In Japan, English is not widely used or understood, even among the well-educated:  

Although English is a compulsory subject in junior high and high school in this country, Japanese still have a hard time achieving even daily conversation levels. According to the most recent EF English Proficiency Index, the English level of Japanese is ranked 35th out of 72 countries. The top three are the Netherlands, Denmark and Sweden, which are all northern European nations. Among Asian countries, Singapore is placed sixth, Malaysia 12th, the Philippines 13th, India 22nd and South Korea 29th. Japan places between Russia and Uruguay. (Tsuboya-Newell 2017)

Sullivan and Schatz (2009) found that attitudes toward learning English correlated negatively with patriotism (defined as positive identification and affective attachment to one's country) and positively with nationalism, internationalism, and pro-U.S. attitudes. Here, "nationalism" is defined as "perceptions of national superiority and support for national dominance"—what Steve Sailer has dubbed "Invade the world, invite the world!" 

Relative isolation of academia

Academia can propagate a new discourse in several ways:

- by inculcating it in young adults

- by acting as a trusted gatekeeper that serves to distinguish between "correct" and "incorrect" discourse.

- by mobilizing scarce intellectual resources for the development and dissemination of "correct" discourse.

New forms of discourse, like globalism, cannot easily penetrate Japanese colleges and universities by means of overseas-trained leaders. Unlike the case in many other Asian countries, educational authorities prefer to select future leaders from within, attaching little importance to foreign experience and credentials for promotion within the system (Yonezawa et al. 2018, p. 235). Foreign-born professors are hired mostly for teaching English language and literature.

Relative isolation of policy makers

This relative isolation is true for Japanese in general, including policy makers. International organizations, like the IMF, have little input into public policy, in large part because Japan's debt is almost wholly Japanese-owned. This economic independence has been a longstanding characteristic of Japan and enjoys support not only from the political left but also from the political right:

In Japan, unlike many of the social democracies resisting capital movements, the most important political opposition came not from organized labor and a political Left anxious to prevent capital flight and to protect the welfare state; rather, it came from nominally "conservative" politicians; many bureaucratic agencies, including the MOF; and protected, cartelized sectors of the economy, including banks, securities houses, and insurance firms. (Pempel 1999, p. 911)

In the West, globalism coopted first the Right and then the Left. That process is still at an early stage in Japan.


Conclusion

I would like to conclude with three points: 

- Japan will be a nice place to visit during the troubled 2020s. The same decade will see South Korea become more and more like the West, especially the United States—in keeping with stated policy goals.

- English is the language not only of globalism but also of anti-globalism. Just as Japan will move toward globalism more slowly than the West, it will also move away more slowly ... when that time comes. As for South Korea, it will enter a period of polarization, perhaps violent polarization.

- Japan shows that the Western model of modernity is not the only one, or even the best. The Western model is a product of specific circumstances, particularly the presence of a large rentier class that feeds on growth while doing little to make growth sustainable. At home and abroad, our rentier class continually pushes for high rates of growth through expansion of the money supply, through mass immigration, and through rapid exploitation of resources that are either non-renewable or slowly renewable. 

Japan's slow-growth model is problematic in other ways, but it promises to be more sustainable in the long run.


References

Denyer, S. (2018). Japan passes controversial new immigration bill to attract foreign workers. The Washington Post. December 7
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/japan-passes-controversial-new-immigration-bill-to-attract-foreign-workers/2018/12/07/a76d8420-f9f3-11e8-863a-8972120646e0_story.html  

Hiatt, F. (2018). Anti-immigration Republicans have a decision to make about America's future. Washington Post January 2018
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/without-immigration-america-will-stagnate/2018/01/28/e659aa94-02d5-11e8-8acf-ad2991367d9d_story.html

Hyun-ju. (2015). Korea's wage gap between local, foreign workers largest in OECD. The Korea Herald, September 9
http://www.koreaherald.com/view.php?ud=20150909001162  

IMF (1997). Memorandum on the Economic Program. December 3.
https://www.imf.org/external/np/loi/120397.htm#memo  

Moon, S. (2010). Multicultural and Global Citizenship in the Transnational Age: The Case of South Korea. International Journal of Multicultural Education 12: 1-15.
https://ijme-journal.org/index.php/ijme/article/view/261 

Nikkei (2018). Abe vows to bring in more foreign workers. Nikkei Asian Review. June.
https://asia.nikkei.com/Economy/Abe-vows-to-bring-in-more-foreign-workers  

Palmer, J., and G.-Y. Park. (2018). South Koreans learn to love the Other. How to manufacture multiculturalism. Foreign Policy. July 16
https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/07/16/south-koreans-learn-to-love-the-other-multiculturalism/  

Park, Y-B. (2017). South Korea Carefully Tests the Waters on Immigration, With a Focus on Temporary Workers. Migration Policy Institute, March 1
https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/south-korea-carefully-tests-waters-immigration-focus-temporary-workers  

Pempel, T.J. (1999). Structural Gaiatsu: International Finance and Political Change in Japan. Comparative Political Studies 32: 907-932.

Shigeta, S. (2018). How Japan came around on foreign workers. Nikkei Asian Review, June.
https://asia.nikkei.com/Politics/How-Japan-came-around-on-foreign-workers

Song, H-J. (undated). Immigration Policy in South Korea & Japan - A Comparative Perspective Theoretical framework. University of Tsukuba. International and Advanced Japanese Studies. PowerPoint presentation
http://japan.tsukuba.ac.jp/09225Song.pdf

Sullivan, N. and R.T. Schatz (2009). Effects of Japanese national identification on attitudes toward learning English and self-assessed English proficiency. International Journal of Intercultural Relations 33(6): 486-497
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0147176709000236

Townsend, R. (2019). Japan's big dilemma: robots or immigrants? Asia Media Centre. March 1
https://www.asiamediacentre.org.nz/features/japans-big-dilemma-robots-or-immigrants/

Tsuboya- Newell, I. (2017). Why do Japanese have trouble learning English? The Japan Times, October 29
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/opinion/2017/10/29/commentary/japan-commentary/japanese-trouble-learning-english/#.XWK2DHdFzct 

Watson, I. (2010). Multiculturalism in South Korea: A Critical Assessment. Journal of Contemporary Asia 40: 337-346.

Yonezawa, A., Y. Kitamura, B. Yamamoto, and T. Tokunaga. (2018). Japanese Education in a Global Age. Sociological Reflections and Future Directions. Springer. 
https://books.google.ca/books?id=shdnDwAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&hl=fr&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false

Stumbling into the future

China's TFR before and after introduction of the one-child policy (Chaparro and Kulkarni 2015). Did that policy really change anything?



The European world has entered "demographic autumn"—on the one hand, fertility rates have fallen below replacement level; on the other, non-European immigration has risen progressively. These two trends can have only one outcome.

A similar demographic autumn is developing in East Asia. In some ways the situation is worse—fertility rates are at their lowest here. The record is held by the provinces of northeastern China, which have a total fertility rate of only 0.75 children per woman (Wang 2018). South Korea has an estimated TFR of 0.96, and a significant number of those births are to immigrant mothers from Southeast Asia (Haas 2018). Japan is doing better only by comparison, with a TFR of 1.4.

As for China as a whole, the rate is officially 1.6 and unofficially 1.05; the authorities revise this statistic upward to include second children who go unreported because they are illegal under the one-child policy (Wang 2018). That policy was scrapped in 2016, yet those second children still seem to be in hiding. Do they really exist? Did they ever? The Chinese government is stuck in a classic quandary: what do you do when you realize you've not been telling the truth?

The truth is that China’s TFR is half of what it needs to maintain its current population. This should be no surprise. In fact, it’s in line with what we see in Taiwan (1.1), in Singapore's Chinese community (1.1), and in Malaysia's Chinese community (1.3). Looking back, one can wonder whether the one-child policy ever had much impact on the TFR (Chaparro and Kulkarni 2015). The decline seems to have deep roots in modern Chinese society:

China faces an intractable and protracted demographic crisis driven by millions of individual family planning choices made by its increasingly wealthy and urbanized population. Policies restricting births imposed by the authorities have played only a contributing role in the drama. Similar aging trends can be seen throughout East Asia, especially in Japan, Taiwan and Hong Kong — territories that never had the types of legal restrictions imposed upon mainland Chinese couples.

[...] The current relaxation of family size restrictions is simply too little, too late. Before the policy was completely abolished in 2013, the Chinese government relaxed the one-child policy by allowing 11 million couples in which both spouses had no siblings to have two children. However, by May 2015, only 18 percent of eligible couples had taken advantage of the opportunity. This shows to what extent China's declining fertility is driven by personal considerations, as opposed to public policies.

In October 2015, the country's National Health and Family Planning Commission estimated that some 90 million families would qualify for the new, two-child policy. By the end of the year, however, only two million families had applied for permission to have a second child. China Daily conducted a survey in 2016 which showed that nearly 60 percent of working mothers do not want a second child, citing time and energy needed to raise it. Other concerns of the women included career risks, the pain of childbirth and little faith in their marriages. (O'Reilly 2019)

This problem is made worse by the gender imbalance: fewer girls than boys are being born. China now has 33 million more males than females. Finally, there is no reason to believe that the decline will stop at one child per woman.


Stumbling into the future

China's workforce is already shrinking, and the total population will begin to shrink before the mid-2020s.  The decline could be offset by pro-natalist measures. For instance, men and women could be encouraged to remain in rural areas and small towns, where conditions are better for family formation. To deal with the shrinking workforce, there could be measures to phase out low-paying jobs through automation and robotization. Of course, there must first be a willingness to act. Unfortunately, such willingness is far from evident, to judge by the current denial and inaction.

China will stumble into its demographic future, with one ad hoc solution after another. One of them may be immigration: "[China] currently hosts some 900,000 legal migrants and untold numbers of illegals, most of them factory workers from Vietnam. Also, desperate Chinese bachelors, unable to find Chinese mates because of the gender imbalance, are increasingly marrying Cambodian or Vietnamese women" (O'Reilly 2019). This is not to say that immigrants will be actively recruited. As is already the case, most will come illegally, being lured by jobs and empty housing. The onus will then be on the authorities to act—in the face of opposition not only from the business community but also from the migrants' home countries, many of which provide Chinese industry with valuable raw materials.

The solutions will ultimately depend on the ideological environment. Westerners often believe that the Chinese are intensely nationalist. In reality, there is a range of views within China, with the majority supporting civic nationalism. This is not coincidentally the view that the government promotes, partly out of conviction and partly to co-opt Tibetans, Muslims, and other minorities. Meanwhile, younger, university-educated people are moving toward the globalist consensus that reigns in the West.

One such person is Yinghong Cheng, who went abroad to study and is now a professor at Delaware State University. His latest book has a chapter titled "Racism and Its Agents in China" (Cheng 2019). In it he argues:

As an ideology, racism or racial discourses do not exist for their own sake or by themselves but always reflect power relations that may be addressed in other social hierarchy-based or identity-related discourses. In China today, racial thinking can appear in various discourses addressed to the political and ideological needs of the party-state, cultural and intellectual elites, and ordinary citizens: nationalism, patriotism, statism, social Darwinism, Han Chauvinism (or Hanism), non-Han ethno-nationalism, populism, and the Chinese civilizational supremacism in general (associated with the traditional ethnocentrism of China). (Cheng 2019, p. 241)

Elsewhere, he describes Hanism as “an ultra-ethnic supremacism” that “comes close to racism in its way of essentializing differences in a condescending manner” (Cheng 2019, p. 264). “The anti-Qing Hanist racism and a racial hierarchy of the world are the twin of the discourse of race in modern Chinese history. Like any other racial discourse in the world, they reflect power relations in reality but construct imaginary orders for a racially ideal—or “natural”—world” (Cheng 2019, p. 16). “… the Han political and intellectual elite exploited the social science disciplines of history, archaeology, and ethnology to establish the centrality of the Han blood and ancestors …” (Cheng 2019, p. 7).

Cheng overstates his case when he describes racism as an ideology that always reflects power relations. This is untrue if we examine its core value: preference for one’s kind. Throughout history and prehistory, humans have cared a lot about their kith and kin, even to the point of sacrificing their lives—and this has been no less true in simple societies with no elite or ruling class. Indeed, the oldest societies were essentially clans of related individuals. Furthermore, kinship is key not only to human life but also to the lives of organisms incapable of having ideas, let alone an ideology. 

Please note: I'm not arguing that kin preference is innate (although that argument can be made). I'm simply saying that it predates ideology and has long been the main organizing principle of society. Perhaps it's now obsolete. Perhaps it’s time for us to become self-defining individuals in a global marketplace. That’s the mainstream liberal argument. But that’s not Cheng's argument. He is arguing that kin preference always was wrong, and now we finally have a chance to get rid of it for good—by eliminating the "agents of racism." How this elimination is supposed to happen is not discussed. Indeed, he never applies to himself the sort of painstaking analysis he applies to others.

In all this, Cheng’s thinking is strangely ahistorical. If kinship has always been the basis for human society, perhaps there is a reason. Perhaps it has been the best way to organize social relations. Or perhaps not. Could we at least have a debate without being accused of base motives? Or being eliminated?

A big problem here is cargo-cult reverence for the West, and this reverence extends to the individualism and globalism that has become so dominant in North America and Western Europe, particularly in elite circles. Cheng denounces China for not doing enough to follow their example, while quoting Chinese writers who point to the resulting problems. If that model of society is already problematic in the West, where it has existed for a longer time, has deeper roots in the culture, and has greater chances for success, why should it do better in a country like China?

Cheng further reveals his ahistoricism when he argues that racism suits elite interests. Yes, it did back in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when elites were nation-based. But they haven’t been that way for some time. Elites no longer have a national conscience, particularly in the West. Their self-interest now pushes them to liquidate the nation-state, notably by outsourcing jobs to low-wage countries and by insourcing low-wage labor for jobs that cannot be outsourced in construction, agriculture, and services. It is this two-way movement—and not "racism"—that is steadily increasing the Gini index, the most common measure of the gap between the rich and the poor.

Do China’s elites still have a national conscience? One can wonder. Unfortunately, this question goes unanswered in Cheng's book. Only nationalism is seen as problematic in the new China, and only nationalism is viewed as serving elite interests. Yet globalism, too, exists within a context of power relations. It, too, serves certain interests. 

As China's working population continues to shrink, will the elites push for higher wages so that labor may be used more sparingly? Or will they keep wages down by bringing in migrant labor? Which scenario is more likely if policymaking is in their hands? And which scenario will get better coverage in the Chinese media?


References

Chaparro, R. and K. Kulkarni. (2015). Does high population growth help or hurt economic development? Cases of China and Pakistan. International Journal of Education Economics and Development 6. 162. 10.1504/IJEED.2015.070629.
https://www.inderscienceonline.com/doi/abs/10.1504/IJEED.2015.070629

Cheng, Y. (2019). Discourses of Race and Rising China. Palgrave Macmillan
https://books.google.ca/books?id=ht-GDwAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&hl=fr&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false

Haas, B. (2018). South Korea's fertility rate set to hit record low of 0.96. The Guardian, September 3
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/sep/03/south-koreas-fertility-rate-set-to-hit-record-low

O'Reilly, B. (2019). China lacks the wherewithal to adjust to demographic decline. Austrian Economics Center
https://www.austriancenter.com/china-lacks-the-wherewithal-to-adjust-to-demographic-decline/

Wang, M. (2018). For Whom the Bell Tolls: A Retrospective and Predictive Study of Fertility Rates in China (November 8, 2018). Available at SSRN: 
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3234861 

The Crisis of the 2020s

China's population pyramid. The crisis of the 2020s will be triggered in part by the end of cheap imports from China and the return of inflation.

New Year's 2021. Little seems to have changed over the past three years. Technologically, there are more smart devices to entertain you or to help you with your work. Economically, things are supposed to be better, but that's not your impression. Politically? Not much either. Most of eastern and central Europe has gone nationalist, but they always were, weren't they? There's Italy, where Berlusconi governs with two nationalist parties, but isn't that a rerun of what he finagled two decades earlier? Finally, North Africa is in the news, but no one seems to know what's going on there.

Yet something is afoot. A friend makes a remark he never would have before. He of all people! At the health club you try to follow the news on TV, but it seems harder to follow than usual. You're thinking of traveling abroad, but it's more complicated, supposedly because of the terrorist threat ...

***************************************************

The Crisis of the 2020s will not be readily apparent when the decade begins. Nationalist parties will be in power over most of Europe, but the Western European "core"—the United Kingdom, France, and Germany—will still be postnational. Yet even there nationalist parties will have made inroads at the regional and municipal levels. These electoral successes will be self-reinforcing, with one leading to another, especially in regions that are culturally and linguistically similar.

But this nationalist consensus will have to reckon with an opposing consensus that is already in place and likewise self-reinforcing. This postnational consensus took shape in the 1940s, when elites throughout the West blamed nationalism for the Second World War and the preceding depression. It grew stronger in the 1950s and 1960s with competition by the two superpowers for the hearts and minds of emerging nations in Asia and Africa. The Cold War had the perverse effect of making the United States and the Soviet Union mirror images of each other, each trying to preach its own universal gospel to the unconverted. 

This elite consensus entered a new phase with the end of the postwar boom in the 1970s and a slowdown in economic growth throughout the West. This slowdown has been attributed to several causes:

- The postwar boom was driven by low prices for raw materials, especially oil. In the 1970s oil prices spiked, as did prices for other key commodities.

- The postwar boom was also driven by population growth—the baby boom. Young adults spent more on housing, children's clothes, educational supplies, and other family-related purchases. They also became more willing to invest in the future, both personally and collectively, since they were literally investing in their children. During the 1960s fertility rates declined dramatically, and by the 1970s declines in school enrolment and household spending had become noticeable. 

- A backlog of technological innovation had piled up during the Great Depression and the Second World War. By the 1970s this backlog was largely gone.

- Thrift and saving had become ingrained during the depression and the war. By the 1970s the culture had shifted toward greater acceptance of living beyond one's means.

These causes should be viewed with some caution, since the slowdown happened across very different political and cultural contexts in North America, Western Europe, and Japan. It also happened in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Slow growth may simply be the historic norm, and economies return to this norm as they mature. In any case, policy makers are less interested in causes than they are in solutions, and to find solutions to slow growth they have consciously or unconsciously turned to postnational thinking for inspiration. 

A slowly growing economy isn't necessarily bad for the average person. Because population growth has likewise slowed throughout the West, economic growth, however sluggish, translates into more wealth per capita. Because companies can no longer count on a growing market, they have to compete much more with each other for market share, thus improving the quality of the goods and services they offer. They also have to compete for a limited supply of labor, thus bidding up wages and raising productivity through automation and robotization. Japan has taken that path, and it isn't doing so badly despite the doom and gloom one hears. Labor scarcity means that 74% of Japanese aged 15 to 65 have a paid job—well above the OECD average of 67%. Only 1.2% of Japan's labor force has been without work for a year or longer—below the OECD average of 2%. Also, Japanese life expectancy at birth is 84 years—well above the OECD average of 80 years.

Slow growth may not be bad news for the average person, but it is for the rentier class—those whose income comes not from work but from dividends, interest, and speculation. When economic growth falls to 2 or 3% a year, this becomes their return on investment. It's not enough to live on, at least not in the style they're used to.

The rentier class has thus pushed Western governments to make the economy grow faster than it normally would. Since the 1970s, growth has been spurred through financial stimuli of one sort or another: tax cuts, deficit spending, lower interest rates, and monetary expansion. This is still a popular response, but the shortcomings are now well-known. The immediate one is inflation—in the 1970s inflation rose to double digits throughout the West. It has since been contained by a mix of money supply management and globalization, i.e., outsourcing jobs to low-wage countries and insourcing low-wage labor for jobs that cannot be outsourced (agriculture, construction, services). In the U.S., massive low-wage immigration began with the Reagan amnesty of 1986, although this outcome was emphatically denied at the time. Upward pressure on wages has further slackened with the decline in unionization, itself largely a result of globalization, particularly the loss of jobs in manufacturing and the shift to less easily unionized jobs in services. Finally, immigration itself has been seen as a way to stimulate the economy through increased aggregate demand, particularly for real estate and construction.

While these stimulus measures help to spur growth over the short term, the outcome seems more dubious over the long term. Today, interest rates are at record low levels throughout the West, and immigration is running at record high levels—in the U.S., legal immigration alone is over three times what it was in the 1960s. Yet year-to-year economic growth is much lower: 1.6 to 2.5% in the 2010s versus 2.3 to 6.5% in the 1960s.

The economy seems to habituate to these stimulus measures. We thus have the apparent paradox of more and more stimulus producing less and less growth. This paradox has three causes:

- People take further growth for granted, particularly in their willingness to go into debt. Growth becomes a Ponzi scheme.

- Uninterrupted growth leads to accumulation of inefficiency. Without periodic recessions to remove wasteful companies and work practices, the economy becomes less productive.

- Sources of immigration have shifted to cultures that are less oriented to the market economy and to the values that make it possible. Historically, most economic growth has been within two culture areas: Europe, especially northwest Europe, and East Asia. These cultures are characterized by high levels of trust, high future orientation, and low willingness to use violence for personal disputes (Clark 2007; Clark 2009; Frost 2015; Frost 2017; Frost & Harpending 2015). Most immigrants to the West no longer come from either culture area. As a result, trust is declining, fear of violence is increasing, and more resources are being earmarked for external behavioral controls (police, private security), which are replacing the internal behavioral controls that used to be enough. Transactions now have to be double-checked for evidence of fraud, theft, or counterfeiting, with the result that economic activity costs more and in some cases is no longer worth doing.

For the near future, Western policy makers will continue to follow the postnational consensus, not so much because they believe in it but rather because they are immersed in it and have little exposure to alternate views. This echo chamber will, in fact, cause the prevailing consensus to become more radical over time. One example is the recent call from Canada's council of economic advisers for a sharp rise in immigration:

The 14-member council was assembled by Finance Minister Bill Morneau to provide "bold" advice on how best to guide Canada's struggling economy out of its slow-growth rut. 

One of their first recommendations, released last week, called for a gradual increase in permanent immigration to 450,000 people a year by 2021 — with a focus on top business talent and international students. That would be a 50-per-cent hike from the current level of about 300,000.

The council members — along with many others, including Economic Development Minister Navdeep Bains — argue that opening Canada's doors to more newcomers is a crucial ingredient for expanding growth in the future. (Blatchford 2016)

This is the backdrop for the Crisis of the 2020s. On the one hand, the postnational consensus will continue to radicalize in the core countries of the Western world. On the other hand, a very different consensus will dominate most of central and eastern Europe, with inroads being made into France and Germany. These opposing consensuses will diverge more and more, if only because mutual antagonism will make dialogue impossible.

The crisis itself may be triggered by one or more factors:

- Inflation will return after a four decade absence. China's supply of cheap labor is drying up, and alternate sources, such as Africa, will prove unsuitable. Prices for certain commodities, especially food, may also rise. This will be pivotal because globalism has gone unchallenged among the elites largely because it has delivered on its promise of inflation-free growth.

- There will be a growing realization that the new migrants to Europe have a different work ethic. They will end up being tax consumers rather than, as hoped, tax payers. Forget about them paying for your pension and health care.

- The French presidential election of 2022 will be much closer than the one in 2017, the result being a narrow defeat or a narrow victory for the Front national. Either way, the country will become ungovernable. A similar situation may or may not develop in Germany after the 2021 federal election.

- NATO may try to intervene in one or more countries in eastern or central Europe.

The actual trigger will matter less than the instability of the world-system. This instability will cause even minor conflicts to escalate, either within the Western European core or, perhaps, in response to a failed intervention in Eastern Europe.

Such escalation will be demanded by those who support the postnational consensus, yet it will work to their detriment. A world-system is stable only if, as Wallerstein (1974) argued, it meets three conditions:

- Military strength is concentrated in core societies

- Ideological commitment to the system is pervasive, i.e., "the staff or cadres of the system (and I leave this term deliberately vague) feel that their own well-being is wrapped up in the survival of the system as such and the competence of its leaders. It is this staff which not only propagates the myths; it is they who believe them."

- Peripheral societies are unable to unite against core societies.

Conflict, especially armed conflict, will destroy the illusion that the postnational consensus is a consensus and thus the only sensible way of viewing reality. Uncertainty and disenchantment will spread even among "sensible" people. Furthermore, if military strength no longer remains concentrated in the core, being used, for example, to intervene in the periphery, there may not be enough people in uniform anymore to defend the entire world-system. Defeat in one country may lead to a chain reaction where one country after another defects to the other side.

References

Blatchford, A. (2016). Finance Minister's key advisers want 100M Canadians by 2100, Thestar.com October 23

https://www.thestar.com/business/2016/10/23/finance-ministers-key-advisers-want-100m-canadians-by-2100.html  

Clark, G. (2009).The Domestication of Man: The Social Implications of Darwin, ArtefaCToS, 2, 64-80

http://campus.usal.es/~revistas_trabajo/index.php/artefactos/article/view/5427 

Clark, G. (2007). A Farewell to Alms. A Brief Economic History of the World, Princeton University Press, Princeton and Oxford.

Frost, P. (2017). The Hajnal line and gene-culture coevolution in northwest Europe, Advances in Anthropology, 7, 154-174.

http://file.scirp.org/pdf/AA_2017082915090955.pdf

Frost, P. (2015). Two Paths, The Unz Review, January 24

http://www.unz.com/pfrost/two-paths/

Frost, P. and H. Harpending. (2015). Western Europe, state formation, and genetic pacification, Evolutionary Psychology, 13, 230-243.

http://evp.sagepub.com/content/13/1/147470491501300114.abstract

Wallerstein, I. (1974). The rise and future demise of the world capitalist system: concepts for comparative analysis, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 16(4), 387-415.

https://e-edu.nbu.bg/pluginfile.php/138807/mod_resource/content/0/pol-222Wallerstein.pdf