Picking up a thread from last week, a reader sent me this surprising piece from a Japanese newspaper.

It fortifies my belief that one of the demographic phenomena of the

present age is the cratering of the East Asian birth rate. Japan is

already in the sink of course, but China will follow. Young women in

urban China just don’t want to have babies. Several Chinese friends

have remarked to me, when discussing the “one child” policy, that it’s

not necessary. Increasingly, the difficulty with urban young Chinese

women is persuading them to have even one.