Europe’s demographic crisis pales in comparison with East Asia’s fertility collapse. South Korea (~0.8), Taiwan (~0.7), Singapore (~0.87), China and Thailand (~1.0) lie far below the 2.1 replacement level, so each generation is roughly one-third to half the size of the previous one.

Europe’s demographic crisis pales in comparison with East Asia’s fertility collapse. South Korea (~0.8), Taiwan (~0.7), Singapore (~0.87), China and Thailand (~1.0) lie far below the 2.1 replacement level, so each generation is roughly one-third to half the size of the previous one. The effect compounds, after just two generations many of these populations would retain only 10–20% of their starting numbers, after three, single digits. Has something similar ever happened before? What disappears is not merely headcount but the continuity of language, family forms, local memory, and the economic base supporting dense urban life, pensions, and national capacity. Japan has already lived the early chapters, empty schools, rural depopulation, rising dependency ratios. The rest of East Asia is entering the same trajectory, just faster, with less time to adapt and, in some cases, stronger cultural resistance to large-scale immigration that might otherwise offset the decline. Without sustained significant fertility recovery or open immigration on a scale most of these societies have not contemplated, the region’s countries will become markedly older, smaller, and different from those that defined the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. This will have massive economic and geopolitical consequences many still do not realize.

— Michael A. Arouet (@MichaelAArouet) October 29, 2026