Why write about this

This site keeps asking one question: what holds East Asians together?

After asking for a while, I often get stopped by my own question. Say it as well as you like, but what does it look like inside one household? A person works out the mortgage and the rent every month; a young couple works out whether to have a child and who will look after it; someone who has worked away from home for thirty years works out whether to go back to the hometown when old. These sums are done every day, and the people doing them mostly don't have time to read about a "core."

What I think now is: a core, however good, if it can't say how a family gets through the days, is empty. Big principles finally have to land in everyday life. Current Affairs is about that landing.

What I write about

Housing, cars, children, marriage, old age, money. And one more that many people mutter about inside and seldom say aloud: is the hometown still a way back?

What money is, how interest rates and exchange rates work, those principles and that history go in Huozhi; here I deal only with the numbers of the moment.

Five groups have been written so far: population, marriage and gender, the economy, hometown matters, and the countryside. Housing and cars have their titles and some gathered numbers, but no pieces yet. How Hong Kong and Singapore handle housing and old age, whether people and money can be plugged in and out like a USB stick, how the older and younger generations get along: all of that is further down the list.

How I write

The method is plain, four things.

One, public data. The tables of the statistics bureau, the Ministry of Civil Affairs and the Ministry of Education; the tables of other countries' statistical offices. Every number gets its year and source, and where I've read the original and where I've only read someone's retelling are marked differently.

Two, get the numbers right first. An example. In 2023, 7.68 million couples registered marriages and 3.6 million got divorced. Divide, and it's nearly a half, and looks frightening. But those who divorced that year had married ten or twenty years earlier; they're not the same group, so that division is wrong.

Three, what other places have done. Japan, Korea, Singapore, Israel: what they did, whether it worked, what it cost.

Four, how each side argues. Every piece has a section called "Looking the Other Way" with the strongest opposing case, including against myself.

And there's a fifth kind, speculation, such as living in a car, or following the water and grass. Such pieces say "speculation" in the title, and facts and imagination are written separately.

Already written

Population. "Why Have So Many Kids? There's No Throne to Inherit." In 2025 the country had 7.92 million births and 11.31 million deaths. The young people's quip I didn't try to refute; I worked it out by its own arithmetic: a private think-tank estimates that raising one child to age 17 costs on average 538,000 yuan. For a single household, its sum is right. What it leaves out is the word "later," who will look after you in old age.

Marriage and gender. "Is Divorce Common, and Is It the Nation's Problem?" China's crude divorce rate in 2023 was 2.56 per thousand, about the same as the US, higher than Japan and Korea. The bigger change is in marriage: in 2024 it was about a fifth lower than the year before. Nearly all Chinese children are born inside marriage; when fewer people marry, there are fewer children.

The economy. "Cheap and Good Value Are Two Different Things" takes apart the "cheap" claimed by warehouse clubs, e-commerce and roadside stalls. "Special Supply, Sam's Club, Wet Markets, Roadside Stalls: When Something Goes Wrong, Whom Do You Find?" starts with a two-year-old child who ate "children's" black cod for about eight months, was found to have raised mercury in his blood, while the fish's test report said it had passed. The more I looked into it, the more I felt that when we say "reassured," what we really mean is that someone is answerable for us.

Hometown matters. "What Was Overtaken Was the First Half of the Year." Online it was said that Hunan's GDP had been overtaken by Anhui; checking, Hunan still led by about 232 billion yuan for the full year 2025, and what was overtaken was the first half of 2026, when Anhui moved ahead by about 33.6 billion. Half a year's figure can't hold up the word "decline."

The countryside. Nine pieces, all asking about the old home. When you were small, seven or eight in ten people around you lived in the countryside; by the end of 2025, three in ten were left. From 2013 to 2024, rural primary schools fell by more than half, about 19 fewer a day on average. There are 301 million migrant workers nationwide, average age 43.3. Of rural people over 60, 41.9% rely mainly on their families for support; the state's basic pension in 2026 is 163 yuan a month. In a measured study in a county-level city in Hubei, rural bedrooms in winter were at 5 to 11 degrees about sixty percent of the time. There are also the rules on homestead land, and what became of seven ancestral halls in one town in central Hunan.

Behind these numbers are people. 163 yuan a month is real money to an old woman in a village. Three hundred million migrant workers are growing old far from home, and many of the buildings in the cities were laid up by them brick by brick. In writing these I try not to speak from a height.

My leaning

Let me say it up front.

Housing. My leaning is to think that mainland commercial housing is a bubble, whether you compare with Southeast Asia or with the whole world along any dimension. In a 2019 People's Bank of China survey, housing made up 59.1% of urban households' assets. Having sixty percent of a family's wealth riding on one thing is itself a risk. Behind it is an inertia: living with land and property as the core asset. I think that inertia should be put down. The big mansions of the Hunan Army generals in central Hunan, I'll use later as a comparison: wealth stored as a big house, does it keep?

The yardstick. The yardstick for whether someone has "made it" in our place is too narrow: money, power, a house. What I want is balance, not "the more you have, the more you get; the less you have, the less you keep." There should be more than one yardstick; money, power, rank, a house, none of them should be the only one; and there must be a floor that doesn't collapse.

Mobility. A person shouldn't be locked into one city or one country, and money should be able to move too. Some advise young people not to rush into buying a house, buying a car or marrying. On houses and cars I broadly agree; on marriage I don't.

Two people. Opposition between men and women I think is wrong. Starting a family should be complementary, one facing outward and one facing inward. Whoever is stronger and earns more faces outward; a woman who is strong may face outward, and a man who looks after the home need not be ashamed. I'd like young people to feel again that love is worth longing for, rather than being pushed along by oppositional feeling.

Children. What I worry about most is children and the birth rate, and, to put it bigger, the future of East Asians. South Korea's total fertility rate for 2025 is provisionally 0.80; the one exception among developed countries is Israel, at 2.87 in 2024.

The hometown. Some middle-aged people treat the hometown as a way back; I think it's half right and half unreliable. A way back needs three things all in place: house, land, people. House and land, rules can provide; people, rules cannot. A person needs somewhere to rely on and return to (a yigui). If people are bound to move, that yigui has to be something you can carry with you.

These are leanings, not conclusions. Every household's sums are different, and I won't decide for anyone; but how I see it, I'll say plainly.

Looking the other way

First, the average doesn't include your household. National numbers, spread onto one household, often don't match. The table on old people's sources of livelihood is a sample; "hometown" is a word the statistics bureau doesn't count at all. What numbers can say is less than what days contain.

Second, house prices may not be a bubble. The strongest case for that is the 2017 paper by Glaeser and co-authors: house prices were 2 to 10 times construction cost, but Chinese households have too few investment choices, demand is strong, and as long as new supply is held down, prices may hold. On the other side, Rogoff and Yang's 2020 paper says an adjustment is necessary and unavoidable. I read only the abstracts of both.

Third, complementarity doesn't always run smoothly. Bertrand and co-authors in 2015, using US data, found that in households where the wife earns more than the husband, the wife actually does more housework, marital satisfaction is lower, and divorce is more likely. The sample is American; I haven't found a Chinese one. But it goes right at my "whoever is stronger faces outward," and I must deal with it seriously.

Fourth, days may not need big principles. Some will say that when days go well, people gather by themselves, with no need for any yigui; hanging belief on firewood, rice, oil and salt just adds another load to the day. My doubt is this: the things that used to take care of "a proper end in old age" and "being remembered after you're gone" have thinned. Can money fill the space they left?

Which sum is the hardest to work out in your household this year?

References

Ratings: 🟢 original read; 🟡 second-hand or abstract only. Detailed sources are at the end of each piece.

  • National Bureau of Statistics, Statistical Communiqué on the 2025 National Economic and Social Development, 28 February 2026 (births, deaths, urbanisation rate) 🟢
  • National Bureau of Statistics, 2025 Migrant Worker Monitoring Survey Report, 30 April 2026 🟢
  • National Bureau of Statistics, China Population Census Yearbook 2020 (urban/rural population; main sources of livelihood of people over 60) 🟢
  • Ministry of Education, annual education statistics (number of rural primary schools) 🟢
  • 2026 Government Work Report (minimum basic pension for urban and rural residents) 🟢
  • China Statistical Yearbook 2024 (Ministry of Civil Affairs data): in 2023, 7.6821 million marriage registrations, 3.6053 million divorces (including court judgments), divorce rate 2.56 per thousand, as relayed by the media 🟡; Ministry of Civil Affairs, Q4 2024 Civil Affairs Statistics: 6.106 million marriage registrations in 2024, down about 20.5% on the year 🟡
  • US CDC FastStats; Japan's National Institute of Population and Social Security Research, Population Statistics; Statistics Korea (crude divorce rate comparison)
  • Statistics Korea's provisional 2025 total fertility rate of 0.80 as published on 25 February 2026 (Reuters and others) 🟡; Israel's 2.87 is the World Bank figure (the UN estimate is 2.79; the basis differs) 🟡
  • YuWa Population Research, Report on the Cost of Childbearing in China, 2024 🟡 (private think-tank estimate)
  • People's Bank of China, Survey of Assets and Liabilities of Urban Chinese Households, 2019 (housing 59.1% of total household assets; full text reposted by Jiemian News and others) 🟡
  • Glaeser, Huang, Ma & Shleifer, "A Real Estate Boom with Chinese Characteristics," Journal of Economic Perspectives 31(1), 2017 🟡 (abstract only)
  • Rogoff & Yang, "Peak China Housing," NBER Working Paper 27697, 2020 🟡 (abstract only)
  • Bertrand, Kamenica & Pan, "Gender Identity and Relative Income within Households," Quarterly Journal of Economics 130(2), 2015 🟡 (abstract only)
  • Hunan and Anhui statistics bureaus' GDP data for 2025 and the first half of 2026, as relayed by the media 🟡
  • The Hema "children's" black cod case: reports in The Paper, Red Star News and Yangtze Evening Post 🟡
  • A measured study of the winter indoor thermal environment of rural homes in Zhongxiang, Hubei 🟢
  • Book of Rites, "Liyun": "the old have a proper end"