Chinese believes there needs to be some pain before you can enjoy a moderately prosperous society. Sooner or later whichever country who experiences dramatic population growth like China and India will also experience population decline. You either decline gracefully with some economic growth reduction, or you can decline by committing suicide due to drought. My humblest advice, you don't need a billion people to be a developed country.
Umm... Definitely. When did I say you need any fixed number of people to be developed.
But is that something that China would want?
Let's say today magically, China had only 1 million people, with a GDP per capita of 100k USD, (almost the highest in the world)
That would make China a small country with a GDP of 100 billion USD.
What maybe better for an individual person need not be good for the society, country, and the nation.
Also, having less people, or a declining population DOESN'T mean having higher GDP percapita.
GDP per capita has almost no correlation with land size available per capita.
Look at Mongolia. It has HUGE amounts of land and resources per capita. But its GDP per capita is a fraction that of China's.
Similarly, on the other hand look at countries like Singapore, Netherlands, etc. They are doing incredibly well even without much land and resource availability.
In fact, look at Japan, Japan today has less land per capita than even China. Yet, Japan's development levels are very high.
Development in modern world depends on
quality of human resources and NOT on land availability per capita.
Chinese believes there needs to be some pain before you can enjoy a moderately prosperous society. Sooner or later whichever country who experiences dramatic population growth like China and India will also experience population decline. You either decline gracefully with some economic growth reduction, or you can decline by committing suicide due to drought. My humblest advice, you don't need a billion people to be a developed country.
Have you ever been out of India?
Also, just to point out here. China's freshwater availability is actually decent. In fact it is more than some major countries like Netherlands. (Netherlands is a surplus producer of agriculture)
The fact is that a lot of water resources will be freed by:
- China moving out of some low level industries like textile and apparel. These require enormous amounts of water.
- Better technology adoption.
- Better water management.