Opinion | A loneliness crisis is the price China is paying for rapid modernisation
www.scmp.com
As migrant workers head home for the Lunar New Year break, it is a good time to reflect on how the loneliness that has gripped Chinese society can be alleviated.

cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/26417

As the Year of the Snake ends, more than 9 billion passenger journeys will unfold during China’s Spring Festival travel period, the greatest annual human migration on Earth. For some, these are the only few weeks in the year when families are together. For many, this is a period when they can find temporary relief from loneliness – from the striving and adjusting, even if not yet assimilating, in the cities where they work, far from their hometowns. The lucky ones, who can make ends meet and are...

From China - South China Morning Post via This RSS Feed.

  • D61 [any]
    ·
    6 days ago

    So doing a google search for "2023 Gallup research poll lonliness" brings up a bunch of articles saynig that, on average, across the world about 1 in 4 people are lonely. (Even with me misspelling "loneliness")

    The article gives the number of lonely people in China as 23%.

    Which is is about 1 in 4 people.

    So this seems less like a "crisis" and more that China is a fairly average country when it comes to self reported loneliness of its people.

    China’s one-child policy has been singled out as a cause of this wave of loneliness, but that might not hold in light of international comparisons. Japan, which has a comparable total fertility rate to China, is less lonely.

    The one child policy has been done away with for over 10 years now. There is no discussion about why having more children in a society would make its people report being less lonely. The link in this article goes to, "Too many men: China and India battle with the consequences of gender imbalance", which is another SCMP blogpost from 2018 that seems fairly obsessed about the number of unmarried men in China, men not having sex, and the amount of money not being spent on having what I'm assuming to be a typical Western-style nuclear family (mortgage, childcare expenses and medical bills, education bills, all the consumer spending that goes on with children who outgrow clothes and toys, etc).

    There could be a critique of cultures that have an expectation of having a "family" that looks a particular way (in this case, I'm guessing its a one husband with one wife and 2.5 kids along with all the trappings).

    But I have the sneaking suspicion that the South China Morning Post's blogposters doen't have any problems with that.