The End of East Asia As We Know It: Urbanization, Extinction, and What Comes Next

Hi, I'm Dong Xiong. Welcome to Digging into China, where we take a deep dive into what's really happening in China and share some unique insights. Today, let's talk about the massive population decline sweeping across Asia. In East Asia, birth rates have cratered and the population are shrinking year after year. This isn't the news to anyone anymore. A lot of people explain it purely through economics. They say incomes are falling, living costs are through the roof, so folks do the math and decide kids just aren't worth it. The idea is simple. Fixed economy, raise per capita income, and suddenly people will want to have babies again. Population rebounds, problem solved. But here's the thing. That's not what's actually happening. The drop in birth rates isn't directly tied to economic factors or income levels. It has a much tighter connection to something else, urbanization. Many viewers think urbanization is automatically a good thing, more people moving into cities, enjoying modern life, reaching a higher level of civilization. But that's a fundamental misunderstanding. And East Asians have this almost irrational, worshipful view of urbanization itself. And that very worship is one of the reasons for the population collapse. So we need to unpack what urbanization really means and what it's actually doing to us. Right now, birth rates are falling across the globe. But East Asia is getting hit the hardest. This region looks like the most prosperous, productive, and civilized part of Asia on paper. In reality, it's already deep in the grip of plunging fertility and a full-blown population crisis. According to a piece from Business Insight, East Asian countries consistently rank near the bottom globally for birth rates. Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan, all under massive pressure from high living costs, have all landed in the global top five for the lowest birth rates. China's birth rate has also plummeted in recent years, cracking the global top 10 for the lowest. Back in February 2020, Taiwan's Economic Daily reported that the low birth problem was already threatening the very survival of East Asian nations. Japan's Ministry of Health, Labor, and Welfare preliminary states showed about 705,000 babies born last year, the 10th straight year of decline. In Taiwan, the Interior Ministry put last year's newborns at around 108,000, also down for the 10th consecutive year. And it's expected to keep falling. South Korea's total fertility rate last year was 0.8. That's a slight uptick from the two years before, but it's still among the world's worst. And in China, the drop has been shocking. New births last year hit a record low since the founding of the People's Republic. So whether it's democratic systems or authoritarian ones, whatever these East Asian nations think about their own ethnic superiority, the outcome is the same- a population crisis. That tells us the fertility collapse and the population emergency aren't really about the political systems or ethnicity. So what is it about? Last year, the Brookings Institute put out a research paper that dug into exactly this. They argued the most direct cause in East Asia is intense social competition, the way parents get caught up in involution, endlessly pouring resources into education so their kids can fight for scarce opportunities. This hyper-competitive Asian-style child-rearing keeps driving up the cost of raising kids until the next generation just taps out and says, forget it. That analysis is basically correct, but it still only scratches the surface. Today I want to go deeper. The reason East Asian parenting is so cutthroat and competitive is because populations are hyper-concentrated in high-density living. Resources can't keep up with the clustering of people, so you get too many fighting over too little, and involution kicks in. This explosion in population density and extreme concentration is basically what we mean by urbanization. It's using every tool available to herd scattered rural populations into giant cities, creating these high-density, high-pressure social structures. East Asia has an unusually large number of these megacities. Japan's Greater Tokyo area is the world's most populous urban region with 37 million people. Seoul's metro area packs in 25 million. Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou each have urban populations exceeding 20 million. And there are plenty more Asian cities over 10 million. So the urbanization rate here is off the charts. A 2025 academic article on urban studies points out something consistent throughout human history. As population density rises, birth rates tend to fall. There is an inverse relationship. Human reproductive behavior has always had this negative dynamic with density. Living things have to allocate limited time, energy, and resources between competing instincts, mainly survival versus reproduction. When survival pressure spikes because of crowding, the weight given to reproduction drops. People prioritize staying alive over having kids. And here is the kicker. These massive urban clusters in Asia were built in an incredibly short period of time. UN Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific data shows that since 1990, East Asia has had by far the steepest urbanization curve in the broader Asia Pacific region. This reckless pedal-to-the-metal urbanization was bound to create serious problems. East Asian countries sped up urbanization for the sake of economic output. But no nation can change the fundamental speed at which humans adapt to new environments. That's wired into our genes. We can adapt to crowded cities, but there is a limit and a natural pace. When the external world changes faster than we can handle, the discomfort becomes intense and you start seeing all kinds of abnormal behaviors. Frankly, I am against looking at urban problems solely through the lens of birth rates. That's a dehumanizing angle. It treats people like production units or human resources instead of actual living beings. Falling birth rates are just the tip of the iceberg. East Asia's rapid urbanization has also produced a wave of mental health issues and broad social problems. Chronic stress in cities breeds anxiety, depression, and even schizophrenia. Physical health deteriorates. Sub-health has become the normal state for urban populations. The double assault on body and mind has led to declining sperm counts and quality in men, rising infertility in women, and more. So Asia's breakneck urbanization isn't just creating low fertility, it's producing collective behavioral abnormalities and a kind of societal sickness. High-density city living reminds me of that famous animal experiment, Universe 25. In it, a huge number of mice were put into a closed environment with plenty of resources. As the mouse population grew and resources got strained, their behavior started mirroring what we see in human cities. They stopped reproducing properly, turned violently aggressive toward each other, and even showed homosexual behavior. Eventually, the whole colony went extinct. Modern cities feel like a scaled-up version of Universe 25. People keep sinking deeper into this environment, exhibiting stranger behaviors. Will it end in collective extinction? This problem isn't unsolvable. There are basically two paths. First, fundamentally change the structure of urban society so city life becomes tolerable and livable again. The second is more straightforward, bring in immigrants to replace people who won't have children. Let's break both down. The Universe 25 experiment is useful for understanding urbanization's downsides. But it's been badly misinterpreted for years. We need to clear up those misunderstandings if we are going to find a way out of this trap. Universe 25 was a 1960s experiment by zoologist John Cajon. He put mice into a high-density enclosure with abundant resources. At first, the mice thrived and bred rapidly. But once the population hit a saturation, abnormal behaviors emerged. They abandoned normal mating and child-rearing, withdrew from social interactions, or became extremely aggressive with no discrimination. In the end, the entire population died out. People often use this as a literary analogy for human cities, predicting we will behave like the mice, stop reproducing, and go extinct. But that's not precise. This was quantitative experimental science, not literature. Cajon's real goal was to find the density limits an individual could handle. From the mice, he concluded that about 12 individuals were the threshold. Beyond that, individual behavior deteriorated and eventually triggered a broader sociopsychological collapse. Scholars Ramston and Adams at the London School of Economics wrote a paper titled Escape from the Laboratory, Cajon's Rodent Experiments and Their Cultural Influence. They pointed out that popular culture has oversimplified the results into a simplistic cause-and-effect doom narrative, a modern urban legend. In other words, Universe 25 doesn't predict humanity's future. Because of the difference in body and brain structure, humans handle high-density living far better than mice. We are actually better suited to big cities. As I mentioned earlier, as long as the pace of environmental change doesn't exceed our ability to adapt, humans can handle urban density. But the key isn't just density, it's also social structure. That paper argues that when density stays below critical thresholds, strengthening grassroots community ties and expanding space beyond the physical into intellectual and spiritual dimensions can promote healthy social interaction and sustain normal life even in crowded conditions. Humans tolerate high density better than mice because of our neocortex and more advanced social structures. These allow us to recognize and understand one another and to sacrifice some individual needs for shared goals, a higher form of cooperation than animals achieve. Evolutionary economics research has long shown that for most of human existence, there were no cities or states. Our genes are most familiar with small-scale social groups built around kinship and family. Modern megacities have demolished those familiar kinship-based communities, along with religious groups, clans, and village networks. People lose the everyday social fabric that gives life meaning. Once completely cut off from those genetically familiar small groups, humans become nothing more than wage slaves grinding away in big cities. So, in theory, what East Asia's big cities should do is stop treating economic growth as the only goal. They need to pursue de-urbanization reforms, strengthen small-group social organizations, revive traditional religious and clan-based beliefs, and give civil society more breathing room. At the same time, they should develop networks of medium and small cities instead of doubling down on megacities. In practice, that's extremely difficult. East Asian countries are hostages to GDP numbers. Big corporations and conglomerates aren't likely to abandon their centralized models anytime soon. Those models are perfect for extracting maximum value from workers and pumping up the economic stats. Authoritarian states like China are even less likely to change. They need concentrated, easily managed populations of urban laborers. We all know things have inertia. The faster you are driving, the harder it is to brake. When you are going full speed, you have to ease off gradually first. Slam the brakes and you crash. Because of the inertia from decades of breakneck urbanization, East Asia can't just stop cold. So fixing the population crisis can't rely only on internal fixes, it will mainly depend on external force. Immigration My prediction is that given East Asia's typically short-sighted outlook, these countries won't change course until they are basically burned through their urban populations. When the human resources in big cities have been turned into slack, they will face an existential crisis. Then they will panic and start importing immigrants en masse to fill the demographic hole they can't repair themselves. Where will those immigrants come from? We can't just look at global birth rates. New migrants are constrained by geography. Closer regions with higher fertility get priority. It will mostly be in intra-Asian migration. Data compiled from Google, the World Bank, and other sources shows the highest birth rates in Asia are in places like India, Pakistan, the Philippines, Vietnam, and Malaysia. Kazakhstan also has notably high rates, often more than three times those of East Asia. So there is a strong chance that once East Asian countries have essentially done this to themselves, we will see large waves of immigrants from Southeast Asia, South Asia, and Central Asia pouring into the cities. They will intermarry with whatever local population remains. The descendants of East Asia's ethnic groups will likely change significantly in appearance, culture, and language. This could give rise to new ethnicities, new nations, and new civilizations in the region. That's how history works. Bigger forces than any of us can control. The truth is, city life that's grinding down locals can look pretty attractive to outsiders. That's one of the strange things about human nature. As the writer Qian Zhongshu put it in Fortress Besieged, people inside the city want to get out, people outside the city want to get in. He was talking about relationships and marriage. But the metaphor applies to so much more, including urbanization itself. If you can understand this pattern and use it wisely, it can bring real rewards in your own life. Thank you so much for watching. If you find this video helpful, please like it, drop a comment below, and hit the subscribe button right here. It really helps YouTube suggest my video to others. I'll be back with more content soon. Until then, be well.