"Beijing has employed a variety of carrot-and-stick approaches to increase the birthrate, from labelling single women as 'leftovers' if they remain unmarried"
I wonder how worse this "subcritical humanity" problem must get before governments actually treat it like a real problem, instead of taking ineffective token measures like that.
I think it's one of Iain M. Banks' "Outside Context Problems", a problem that governments cannot even see (other than as a labour shortage), let alone understand its causes or what to do about it.