Andrey Lankov
In the modern world, the birth rate is falling everywhere, but in East Asia the situation with this is catastrophic. Six high-income countries in the region (three of them have a kind of international status, but now it does not matter) with high incomes – Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Hong Kong and Macau – round out the world fertility rankings, according to the CIA’s World Factbook.
In order for the country’s population to remain stable, the total fertility rate must be at least 2.1 births per woman. In Malaysia, for example, the total fertility rate – 1.76 – is now lower than in Belgium. In general, in Europe there are 1.5-1.7 births per woman. This, of course, is not enough, but it is still higher than in East Asia, where among developed countries this indicator only in Japan exceeds 1.2.
The sociological reasons for low fertility in developed countries are well known, and almost everything that applies to Germany and Italy applies to Taiwan and South Korea. However, these general and undoubtedly correct considerations cannot explain why it is the countries of East Asia that are leading among the rich countries in the race to zero fertility.
Success over Confucius
Fertility is falling not only in the rich countries of the region: in China, the total fertility rate is also declining rapidly, in 2020 it reached an all-time low of 1.3 births per woman. In Beijing, where not long ago they fought against fertility, they began to deploy a program to encourage it – and in the ranks of the Chinese leadership, panic about this is increasingly felt.
Taking into account the special situation in East Asia, it is logical to assume that the local specificity, which aggravates the global problems, may be associated with some features of the East Asian culture that differ from the western one. Of course, these features are superimposed on the socio-economic changes that are occurring everywhere and lead to a decrease in the birth rate in Germany, and in France, and in Mexico, and in Iran.
East Asia is a Confucian region. In some countries of the region, Christianity was superimposed on the Confucian tradition, but its spread, which began in earnest a little more than a century ago, could hardly greatly change the traditions that had been formed over the previous two millennia.
There is one curious feature in the Confucian worldview: in Confucianism, there is no idea of afterlife retribution, which is so important for Christianity and even Islam.
A Christian, if only he is not a Calvinist, knows: “It is as difficult for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of God as it is for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle” (in the original, it seems, there was not a “camel”, but a “rope”, but this does not change the essence of the approach ). In Christianity, it is implied that there is a certain higher authority, the Last Judge – perhaps harsh, but certainly just, who judges a person according to the highest criteria and rewards virtues not in the mortal earthly world, but in the future life. In a Christian society, the fact that this or that person seems to be a “loser” around him cannot be perceived as an indicator of his moral imperfection. On the contrary, any Christian knew – and the church constantly reminded him of this – that a beggar can be more pleasing to the Lord than a rich man.
In the East Asian (that is, somewhat simplifying, Confucian) tradition, there was no developed idea of afterlife retribution. More precisely, this idea existed somewhere on the periphery of mass consciousness, referring rather to the field of popular superstitions.
The concept of afterlife retribution is to some extent present in Buddhism. However, for most of East Asian history, Buddhism there was a semi-marginal religion – the faith of the lower classes, women and other commoners, to whom, for the most part, the Confucian cultural and political elite treated with a mixture of irony and arrogance.
Lacking the idea of afterlife, the Confucian ethics was built around the fact that a person who has mastered the Confucian canon and commentaries to it, simply as a result of reading these “correct” books, becomes highly moral and worthy of various successes and honors.
It was tacitly assumed that in Confucianism, Heaven (a distant analogue of the Christian God) rewards a person for his moral perfection already in this world. This reward manifests itself, however, primarily in material form – in money, luxurious residences, beautiful concubines and, most importantly, service success, which for Confucian ideologists was perhaps the main one of all awards.
Of course, other traditions also existed in Confucianism – for example, the tradition of a noble man who, while remaining faithful to the collapsed dynasty, refused to serve the new masters of this world. Or, for example, the tradition of a brave bureaucrat who fights corruption and lack of principle and eventually dies, but remains a hero in the memory of posterity. In both these cases, the reward was not a lifetime earthly success, but the memory and respect of descendants, which was expressed through historical texts. However, this option for saving the soul was available only to a small number of representatives of the elite – somehow they did not write books about the deeds of the peasants. In general, it was earthly success that was important in Confucianism, which was not a temptation and devilish temptation, but a confirmation that Heaven favored a given individual.
But how does this all relate to the current catastrophic fertility situation?
In pursuit of success
In the countries of the European tradition, with all the focus on material success, there is still a feeling that a person who, for one reason or another, has not achieved such success, remains a worthy member of society. And the small crustaceans of office plankton, chained in the shell of their tie-skirt uniform, and the loader and the cleaning lady are not perceived as morally flawed people and are punished for this by fate and God.
In principle, few of those who grew up in a Christian (albeit in a “atheist-Christian”) culture would argue that a modest pizza delivery man or a mother of many children who wraps sandwiches in McDonald’s can surpass most of those whose names are on the Forbes list. But for a person brought up in a Confucian culture, this is not so obvious.
This leads to the fact that parents in East Asian countries, to a much lesser extent than European parents, are willing to put up with the fact that their children will not achieve earthly success. Adding to the tension is the fact that most of these countries have underdeveloped welfare systems, so that the fate of the South Korean loser is usually sadder than the fate of the Swedish loser.
However, in none of the developed countries of East Asia a person has long risked dying of hunger or freezing on the street in winter – there is still a minimum social security system here. Nevertheless, the very fact that a child will eventually become conditionally in the “bottom 25%” of the social hierarchy frightens all parents – including those who themselves belong to this “bottom 25%”. It’s not so much about material problems and everyday inconveniences, but about the general attitude towards those who could not achieve anything in life: these people are perceived as, to a certain extent, morally defective.
Concerned parents are willing to spend huge amounts of money just to keep their children at a certain minimum acceptable level, which has grown over the past decades in all countries of the region. As a result, world-rich East Asian youth are growing up in a highly competitive environment that is unthinkable in most European countries. Korean, Japanese and Taiwanese teenagers (as well as teenagers from not yet so rich China or Vietnam) spend their school time in uninterrupted classes, in a feverish preparation for entering a university. They live according to the famous principle of the Red Queen “to run to stay in place”, and their parents strongly encourage such behavior.
In these countries, the state actively subsidizes education, which, from a formal point of view, is quite cheap. However, in practice, in order to maintain the bar and prevent children from facing social failure rather than poverty, parents are forced to invest huge sums in education and social advancement of their children. The school in these countries is free or almost free, but without numerous courses, tutors and additional classes, it is almost impossible to enter a minimally decent university, and additional classes cost a lot of money.
As a result, the child becomes a financial burden. A South Korean, Japanese, or Taiwanese family in the middle or lower middle class currently has no chance of promoting more than two children into this class. A smart strategy is to limit yourself to one child, in which you should invest as much as possible. Some, on the other hand, defect altogether from the fronts of the merciless struggle for the reproduction of the middle class, preferring to remain childless and remain in the ranks of the middle class at least by themselves.
Recent measures by the Chinese government, which have tried to drastically restrict tutoring, are a reflection of this situation. China, which has taken a sharp turn and almost instantly switched from a policy of restricting births to a policy of encouraging it, understands that huge spending on tutoring is one of the factors that forces parents to limit the number of children in the family. However, the most likely outcome of these efforts is clear from the experience of other countries in the region – for example, South Korea, where similar policies were pursued by authoritarian regimes in the 1980s. Everywhere, attempts to limit private spending on education have failed – and China is unlikely to be an exception.
The attempts made in the region to solve the problem by social democratic methods, which worked quite well in Europe, seem to be doomed to failure. Bans on extracurricular activities, leveling the learning environment in schools and standardizing school curricula, the transition to free education are all good measures, but they do not affect the main thing. East Asian parents are concerned not with the absolute, but with the relative level of their children. It is not so important for them what the children will learn, it is much more important where these children will be in relation to a certain average level: to be much below this level is a shame for them. Therefore, measures aimed at improving access to education for all do not affect this race, but simply move the starting position further and further.
Courtesy: (Carnegie)
