save an endangered species: have sex with me
So, yeah. All those Japan jokes I've made over the past few years?
I guess I had it coming: Taiwan has beaten out Japan with the lowest fertility rate in the world, at 1.07 children born per woman. (Lots of pretty charts, if you're interested. Or here, although Wikipedia puts Singapore lower.) That doesn't really scare me. Nothing wrong with small families, and there are still too many people anyway.
Less publicized projections of zero population growth in Taiwan by 2025, on the other hand...
This is going to bring about a whole slew of social problems over there: class conflict, ethnic tensions over immigration (already a growing problem), economic stagnation, a growing homeless elderly population, and possibly, in the long run, even extinction. We laugh at Japan for having negative population growth now, but it's not beyond reason that Taiwan will soon follow suit.
So...clearly, something has to be done.
...
*awkward*
No, in all seriousness, Taiwan might go to hell, but Taiwanese-Americans like me are doing fine. There are currently 23,046,177 people in Taiwan as of this year's census. There are an estimated 500,000 Taiwanese people currently living in the United States (exact numbers are hard to come by as identifying as "Taiwanese" is politically controversial, and the U.S. Census Bureau tries not to piss off Chinese-Americans of mainland descent). The U.S. annual population growth rate is 1.01%, which is expected to stay stable for the next fifteen years, with some U.S. Census Bureau sources (damn it I hate their website) hinting that the growth rate for Asian/Pacific Islanders may actually be much higher than the national average. So it might even be possible that there will be more second- and third-generation Taiwanese-Americans than Taiwanese people at some point.
At that point, the Taiwanese diaspora would be in the perfect position to invade and conquer Taiwan.
反攻小陸? ^_^
(Side note from finding this data: Apparently there are only 4,272 Taiwanese people living in all of New York City, out of a total population of 8 million. There are more people living in the small Midwestern college town of Oberlin, OH--not counting students--than there are Taiwanese people in all of New York State. Which explains why, me aside, they all seem to know each other. Not so much a diaspora community as much as a potluck.)
also, corruption Ma Ying-jeou KMT corporate jet motorcade partisanship blah blah blah I don't give a fuck.
I guess I had it coming: Taiwan has beaten out Japan with the lowest fertility rate in the world, at 1.07 children born per woman. (Lots of pretty charts, if you're interested. Or here, although Wikipedia puts Singapore lower.) That doesn't really scare me. Nothing wrong with small families, and there are still too many people anyway.
Less publicized projections of zero population growth in Taiwan by 2025, on the other hand...
This is going to bring about a whole slew of social problems over there: class conflict, ethnic tensions over immigration (already a growing problem), economic stagnation, a growing homeless elderly population, and possibly, in the long run, even extinction. We laugh at Japan for having negative population growth now, but it's not beyond reason that Taiwan will soon follow suit.
So...clearly, something has to be done.
...
*awkward*
No, in all seriousness, Taiwan might go to hell, but Taiwanese-Americans like me are doing fine. There are currently 23,046,177 people in Taiwan as of this year's census. There are an estimated 500,000 Taiwanese people currently living in the United States (exact numbers are hard to come by as identifying as "Taiwanese" is politically controversial, and the U.S. Census Bureau tries not to piss off Chinese-Americans of mainland descent). The U.S. annual population growth rate is 1.01%, which is expected to stay stable for the next fifteen years, with some U.S. Census Bureau sources (damn it I hate their website) hinting that the growth rate for Asian/Pacific Islanders may actually be much higher than the national average. So it might even be possible that there will be more second- and third-generation Taiwanese-Americans than Taiwanese people at some point.
At that point, the Taiwanese diaspora would be in the perfect position to invade and conquer Taiwan.
反攻小陸? ^_^
(Side note from finding this data: Apparently there are only 4,272 Taiwanese people living in all of New York City, out of a total population of 8 million. There are more people living in the small Midwestern college town of Oberlin, OH--not counting students--than there are Taiwanese people in all of New York State. Which explains why, me aside, they all seem to know each other. Not so much a diaspora community as much as a potluck.)
also, corruption Ma Ying-jeou KMT corporate jet motorcade partisanship blah blah blah I don't give a fuck.