🌏👀 Global Eyes, Asia Edition

🗞 China's demographic bomb is exploding. Southeast Asia doesn't trust China. The US flogs its Asia-Pacific plan. North Korea's Covid numbers don't add up. And a nine-course meal in Bangkok ...

Photo by Duongtoan via Pixabey.

🚨 In the magazine: China’s web: Vivek writes about China’s dominance of the world’s supply chains, and why that’s not going to change anytime soon.

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🌏📜 Everything you need to know about the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework:

The new framework, which is perceived as an economic correlative of the US Indo-Pacific strategy, is not a Free Trade Agreement, as clarified by the US. Instead, it’s a loose framework that brings together 13 countries to shape rules on key focus areas like the digital economy, trusted supply chains, clean economic growth, corporate accountability, and anti-corruption.

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🇨🇳 China

Traffic, pedestrians and joggers reappeared on the streets of Shanghai as the city began returning to normalcy with the easing of a strict two-month Covid lockdown. (AP Photo/Ng Han Guan)

📉 China’s doomed fight against demographic decline:

China’s birth rates have continued to plummet. In 2021, they fell to the lowest level since the famine-induced years that followed the Great Leap Forward in the late 1950s. As a result, China’s official total fertility rate—or the number of children that would be born to a woman if she were to experience current age-specific fertility rates throughout her reproductive years—has declined to 1.3. Some observers believe the true figure to be closer to 1.1, on par with that of other rapidly aging societies in East Asia. …

The rapidity of this population decline has forced significant revisions to official estimates of how fast China will age. When the Chinese government issued its 15-year population development plan in 2016, it projected that China’s total population would not begin to decline until 2030. Now that turning point may likely be reached as early as this year. 

👵🏽🧓🏽 China’s demographic time-bomb is ticking faster:

In the industrial, heartland of southern China, companies are accelerating the installations of industrial robots because they cannot get enough young workers and labor costs are soaring. … [B]y most measures China’s population challenges are the most urgent and severe in the world. The tremendous pressure on the country’s overwhelmed hospitals and underfunded pension system is already beginning to tell.

📈 Rethinking the link between demography and inflation: Two economists argue that inflation is tied to China’s demography, so it could be around for years to come: