German Embassy in China usually posts on Weibo and gets crickets — barely many likes or comments. But yesterday they dropped this: “Germany is NOT rushing to buy air conditioners! We care about the environment. We just swim in our beautiful artificial lakes (former coal mines) to stay cool. Very eco-friendly! ” The post instantly exploded. Chinese netizens flooded the comments: “You’re typing this with AC blasting in your Beijing embassy, aren’t you?” “So Germans just live in lakes now?” Nothing says “climate leadership” like lecturing from behind cooled glass while telling everyone else to take a swim. Peak 2026 diplomacy.

If you wanted to lower the fertility rate how would you do it? You would give all the jobs to women and then not hire the men. Men then wont have the money to be providers that can support a family. Since women only marry men who make more than them fewer people will get married. Women will then spend all their time working rather than having a family.

I have two observations: Korean women are overwhelmingly endogamous, much more so than Korean men. And secondly, it's the decline in the status of Japanese men. Korean women are much more likely to marry Chinese and Vietnamese men than Japanese men, whose JMKF marriages have fallen .

The population crash no one wants to talk about: China’s crown jewel is running out of people. Shanghai’s latest fertility rate is reportedly just 0.53, barely a quarter of what is needed to sustain a stable population, and even lower than South Korea’s record-low 0.72. But this is not just about “young people changing priorities.” It is also about a brutal economic reality: China has made family formation financially impossible. In many Chinese families, home ownership is still treated as a prerequisite for marriage. The future mother-in-law in Shanghai often expects the man to own an apartment before the wedding with her daughter even happens. Now look at the housing burden: Shenzhen: 26x income Beijing: 22x Shanghai: 21x Hong Kong: 16.7x When marriage requires property ownership, and property costs 20+ years of income, the result is predictable: delayed marriage, fewer marriages, fewer children, and collapsing fertility. Shanghai's demographic engine is stalling and is hardly an exception. Fewer births today mean fewer consumers, fewer homeowners, fewer workers, and a much weaker China tomorrow.