China's "empty nest of great powers" has become a foregone conclusion.

China's "empty nest of great powers" has become a foregone conclusion! Spring Festival has been a hasty passer-by in my hometown in the countryside.

After many years, the Spring Festival went back to the rural hometown of Zhoukou, Henan Province. I don't know if I saw too many new buildings in the big city and felt that the village was very dilapidated. Some of the new buildings seem to show that there is still some vitality in the countryside, but this is only on the surface-to put it jokingly, the rural home is a "resort" for about a year or two weeks.

The declining trend in China's rural areas is irreversible.

When I got home, it was full of thorns, as if in the wilderness. Of course, my family is not the only one in this situation. there are many such households in our village. The uncle nearby said that this area of our family is already empty. Usually the houses are uninhabited. They only go home for the Spring Festival, and some simply do not go home for a few years.

Our village is close to a river. in the past, the riverside of our village used to be the busiest place, when we even came here with bowls during lunch and afternoon lunch. When I went to the busiest riverbank five years ago, I was very surprised that it was already full of thorns. How could it be like this? At that time, the place was almost barren and neat by our feet, but it turned out to be like this a few years later.

Don't be surprised when you think about it. Basically all the people who can work have gone out to work, there are fewer and fewer children, and some children simply go to other places with their parents. The activities of the rest of the elderly are very small, who can make this place lively? Walking along the bank of the river, the footprints were clear because the land became soft and soft when no one was there. These footprints are obviously new, that is, people come back here for a visit during the Spring Festival.

Looking at the river by the village, I don't know whether it is more beautiful or more desolate. It used to be reclaimed river land, but now, the high places are almost full of poplar trees; in the low places, the river grass is dense, and some places have formed natural reeds. This is not the result of the state's encouragement to return farmland to forests and grasslands, it is all because of migrant workers. But it is a bit troublesome to plant trees on the good land on the river and by the village-planting good land while complaining about the shortage of arable land, and even panicking in some places (for example, it is more common in the south).

Now the countryside is getting more and more empty, and there are fewer and fewer children. For example, the uncle next to me, who is 64 years old, still goes out to work, and the old man in our village laughs and says, "Why don't you go out?" (he is already 64 years old). One of my uncles, 68 years old, is a standard old man who works on construction sites in other places. It is not lack of money, but that there is no one to play with at home. He told me that his village is also able to go out to work, usually can not find people in the village to play with, watching TV at home are dazzled, "forced" to go to a dry building with the same village.

Apart from the Spring Festival, the usual rural areas are basically the wives of old men, women who have not gone out and children who have not been taken away. The usual empty houses, the large mechanical negative growth of the population and the natural negative growth of the coming population determine that the great decline of China's rural areas, at least in backward areas, is inevitable.

China's "empty nest of great powers" has become a fixed trend.

How can it be our countryside that is in decline? Chinese cities can't escape either. The "empty nest" in rural areas is only a harbinger of China's "big empty nest", and a more fierce population crisis is yet to come.

My father wanted to go home to do business when he was old. I advised him to stay more in Zhejiang. Is there any hope of doing business in the countryside here? Apart from the popularity of the Spring Festival, it is usually empty, so whose business is it to do? Young people with spending power are gone, leaving the old man's wife either without money or afraid to spend money, relying on the old man's wife to buy salt for business? The person who runs a snack bar in our village says that the usual business is already very bad. Apart from planting cash crops on a large scale in rural areas, large-scale farming and opening factories in counties or good towns, there is not much hope for the development of rural areas like ours.

The uncle said, "in another thirty years, our village may be gone." I was very surprised to hear it. But when you think about it, it is. Urbanization has been advancing, and China's fertility rate has dropped to a super-dangerous level of about 1.2. In the future, cities will double the extraction of young people from rural areas, otherwise it will be difficult to sustain. By then, our village may really disappear in 2045.

Now the old and the young work together in the countryside to work in the city, maintaining the vitality of the city. Shanghai, for example, has had a natural negative population growth for 23 consecutive years. Without young people from other countries, Shanghai has become an aging city. But the good times will not last long, the ultra-low fertility rate in cities will continue, and the fertility rate in rural areas will continue to decline (young people from rural areas who go to the cities have no houses, low income, high pressure, and the fertility rate will certainly not be high). Rural people who work in cities will gradually grow old, and the vitality of China's cities will gradually fade away.

At present, China's total fertility rate of 1.2 will reduce the future population or the working population by 45% every 30 years or so. how long can the rural labor force subsidize the cities? The "empty nest of great powers" has become a fixed trend, and the whole future of China, just like the rural areas now, with the sharp reduction of the working population, the great decline has been inevitable, and it is irreversible to collapse all the way.

China's average life expectancy has increased from 35 years in 1949 to 75 years now. Longer life expectancy and lower mortality alone can increase the population from 550 million to more than 1.2 billion. It can be said that 80% of China's population growth in the past 65 years is due to longer life expectancy and lower mortality. Since China's total fertility rate was lower than the generation replacement level in 1991, the population growth is entirely due to longer life expectancy.

For example, in a "421" family, four children, two minutes, two children and one, can increase from four to seven when life expectancy doubles. However, with the death of grandparents, the number of people decreased by four at once, and the population decreased by more than half. Thirty years later, that is, around 2045, China's second baby boomer entered the age of death, with more than 20 million people dying every year, but at that time, the number of new births was only more than 6 million a year, a decrease of more than 10 million a year, and a decrease of 100 million in a few years. China's population has completely collapsed.

In 30 years, maybe our village will be gone, first because of urbanization, second because of ultra-low fertility rate, and third because cities with ultra-low fertility rate will seriously extract rural population. At that time, we can only "worship" our village during the Qingming Festival or the Spring Festival.

Don't "mess around" in the new countryside

What new countryside can be built when only the old and the young are sick and disabled? I was so worried, but Tang's sister-in-law told me that we were preparing to build a new countryside here, and the new house at the west end of the village was not allowed to be built.

What new countryside should be built? Is to tear down the existing houses, including the newly built buildings, and then build high-rise buildings around the town, all living in high-rise buildings, this is the new countryside we are going to build here. Isn't this "driving the peasants upstairs"? It turns out that our new countryside here is so troubled.

Is it necessary to tear down new houses, subsidize some of the farmers, and then let them go to the town to buy new buildings, the farmers spend more, the government spends more, and for most farmers they only come back to live once a year?

If the building is built around the town and on both sides of the road, it is bound to take up new arable land. Although building high-rise buildings to move out the village can free up a lot of arable land, such arable land is of poor quality and expensive, at least in the past few years. Under the circumstances that a large number of cultivated land in many rural areas are abandoned and semi-abandoned (for example, two or three seasons of a year become one season), the conversion of good farmland to forests and grasslands, and the continuous development of agricultural technology (increase in output), is it necessary to carry out this extremely uncost-effective reverse?

Hey, stop messing with the "new countryside", don't hurt me so fast that I can't find my own village.