Why Asia Stopped Having Kids

High conformity and the need for life scripts

Asians have stopped breeding. Really, almost everyone has stopped, but one group has taken things to a new level. The entire first world other than Israel is just at or below replacement. But “low fertility” in European derived societies means around 1.2 to 1.7 children per woman. Among East Asians, the range is more like 0.7-1.2.

Here are the 15 countries and territories with the lowest fertility rates as of 2023 according to the Population Research Bureau.

This is quite incredible. Five out of the bottom seven are in East Asia. Now, you might say it’s not fair to count Hong Kong, Macau, and Singapore separately since they are cities. But South Korea and Taiwan are pretty sizable nations. China, the second largest country in the world, is only slightly better. And Japan is among the places that just barely miss making the list. At 1.3 births per woman, it is the demographically healthiest of the group. Moreover, the non-East Asian countries on the list tend to be locations that have a lot of outmigration. This explains Puerto Rico, along with some of the poorer nations in the EU. But East Asians under a wide variety of conditions end up with rock bottom fertility rates without any obvious explanations as to why.

“Confucius of the Gaps”

In my article on East Asian exceptionalism, I explained that the region was full of people who are outliers on a wide range of traits, namely high levels of academic achievement, low fertility, and low levels of dysfunctional behavior in the forms of things like crime and illegitimacy. These characteristics are shared by the peoples of China, Japan, and Korea, and the diasporas that descend from them. Each of these nations – and Taiwan and Singapore, which are majority Chinese – have seen periods of massive economic growth that allowed them to in each case, with the exception of China thus far, achieve a first-world standard of living. With the exception of some oil-rich monarchies, the only sizable nations outside of the West that have accomplished this are all in East Asia. They’re also the only large countries with fertility rates that hover right around or below 1, and the only ones who surpass the West on standardized tests. Those are a lot of unique traits! Economists sometimes talk about East Asian growth and what caused it, but these societies are simply different across a wide range of measures.

Whenever you point out East Asian exceptionalism, the natural response is for people to talk about countries of the region all sharing a common culture. I call this the “Confucius of the gaps” theory. This harkens to the idea of “God of the gaps,” which notices that religious believers will always invoke God for what can’t be explained. Since there are always many things we don’t understand, there is always something for God to do in this worldview, no matter how many phenomena science can demystify. When most analysts notice East Asian exceptionalism, Confucius plays a similar role.

This is quite ad hoc. Korea, China, and Japan do not share a common language, or even closely related languages, or a political history except for a few short periods of time, and they do not even clearly cluster together on the World Values survey. It’s unclear why Confucius should trump everything else we use to traditionally measure culture. We’ve seen that Christian societies can have widely different norms and standards of behavior, and one would think that the same could be true for Confucian ones. This is what makes Confucianism as an explanation a just-so story. If East Asian behavior was similar to that of individuals who live in South Asia, analysts would say that this shows the influence of Buddhism. But because East Asia forms a behavioral cluster, and South Asians behave differently, we assume that Confucian thought is the key variable. This is circular logic. “East Asians behave similarly because they have the same culture. We know they have the same culture because they behave similarly.”

Moreover, cultures change all the time, and it would be very weird if China undergoing something the entire world knows as “The Cultural Revolution” did not fundamentally transform the norms and values of society, in which case culture should be treated as something that is practically immutable. Think of how different the United States is now compared to 1950. Yet somehow, we’re supposed to believe that Maoism, World War II, the Korean War, centuries of political divergence, etc. did not cause meaningful splits between the countries of East Asia. In other words, even if East Asians started out with a similar culture in say 1850, a lot has happened since then, and that should be reflected in behavioral differences.

I do think these nations share a common culture, but believe that people get the cultural explanation wrong. The bad version of a cultural theory says that East Asians all behave similarly because their populations have accepted Confucian ideas, or have had institutions that were shaped by people who were Confucians. What makes this explanation strange is that East Asian institutions vary widely. China is governed in a way that is completely different from Korea or Japan. Maybe East Asian parents are just really good at passing on Confucian values, but I don’t know why they would be so much better at cultural transmission than all the other people of the world. White Christians have seen their children become stalwart supporters of feminism and LGBT, and to the degree that Islam resists modern morality it is usually through government control, extremely coercive social pressures, and threats of physical violence, up to and including honor killings in some places.

Moreover, since East Asians can apparently all pass on the “don’t commit crime and be good at math” aspects of their culture, why couldn’t they also pass on traditional beliefs about the importance of leaving behind descendants? You can say Deng through the one-child policy destroyed the Chinese desire for large families, but a generation before that Mao told the population to breed prolifically, disparaged academic learning, and went to war with the universities. The Chinese Communist Party has throughout its entire history been engaging in social engineering, yet somehow the antinatalism part stuck while the anti-book learning parts, along with earlier pronatalism, did not. For all it has been through, China in terms of fertility, crime, and academic achievement looks a lot like Korea and Japan. Truly bizarre!

To the extent we want to say that East Asians share a culture, I think the theory must be that the people of these nations have certain traits in common. Those traits reliably interact with different aspects of economic and technological modernity to produce certain predictable outcomes. Culture is in part an aggregation of the characteristics of individuals within society, and in part the result of interactions between them, many of which lead to self-reinforcing cycles. If a certain population is highly prone towards interpersonal aggression, for example, it might develop a machismo culture. In contrast, an intellectually-inclined people is more likely to develop norms that favor verbal fluency and the ability to settle disputes in non-violent ways. Cultural variation ends up being larger than average individual differences between groups, since there is a self-reinforcing nature to how norms develop.

So yes, East Asians share a common culture. But this is because they share certain underlying personality characteristics, and are all living in the third decade of the twenty-first century. One can see this as a case of convergent evolution rather than descent from a common cultural source. Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore are at about the same level of economic development, while China is only a step below while living in the same technological epoch. Politically, they are very different, with South Korea, Taiwan, and Japan being democracies, China being a total dictatorship, and Singapore as a sort of half-free society. This variation in governance is quite interesting, because it implies that levels of economic and technological development do more than the nature of each state to shape how these populations behave.

Another theory that I’ll mention just to quickly dismiss is the idea that low fertility can be explained by population density. The studies that purport to show this tend to be awful, and even if a connection can be established, there is what social scientists call an endogeneity problem. Where people live and the prices they pay for goods and services are determined by the choices of individuals. Nobody forces East Asians to pack into major cities like sardines. As Snowden Todd points out in regards to South Korea, the country has a stifling cultural homogeneity that leads everyone to want to live in the same place and measure success in the exact same way. Of course, in societies where people value career success and not children, housing will be very expensive in major cities where there is more economic opportunity. That doesn’t mean that the cost of housing is what causes low fertility. Moreover, Korea’s TFR is apparently below 1 in each province. It’s really frustrating to see so much analysis of fertility that takes arguments about affordability seriously, when throughout history and cross nationally it tends to be poorer people who have more kids.

Speaking of endogeneity, the fact that Confucius appealed to East Asians in the first place is itself kind of weird. The guy’s entire philosophy is “Hey just listen to your parents and government, ok guys? Things will go much easier that way.” It’s difficult to imagine such a figure inspiring Westerners at any point in their history. Yet somehow, Confucius became the most important philosopher in the history of East Asia. This is probably itself a result of the underlying traits of people living in that region.

The Hyper-Conformists

As implied above, my unified theory of East Asians is that they are hyper-conformists, and relatedly struggle in situations where behavior is not scripted. This makes them good at, say, technological development, catch-up economic growth, and keeping the streets clean, but bad at things like entrepreneurship — at least relative to human capital — and forming families in a world without arranged marriages or strong norms bringing young people together.

Social psychology seems to confirm higher East Asian conformity in study after study, some of which are pretty cute. For example, Kim and Marcus (1999) went to San Francisco International Airport and stopped random white Americans and people from China or Korea. They were given the choice of five different pens, four of which were the same color and one different. Americans chose the pen of unique color 74% of the time, compared to 24% for East Asians.

Of course, social psychology isn’t all that trustworthy, and is probably the lowest quality evidence we can bring to the question of addressing Asian fertility, given how much data there is on the ways in which individuals behave in the wild.

For example, are East Asians more or less violent than other people? The answer to this question seems paradoxical, since they are historically very willing to fight and die in large numbers as part of an organized war effort, but nonetheless have rock bottom rates of crime and dysfunction in peace time. Singapore, Japan, Hong Kong, and South Korea have some of the lowest murder rates in the world. When Americans complain about crime, you often hear liberals say it’s just part of living in a big city, so get used to it. Yet Hong Kong and Singapore are practically crime free. If you’re going to discount low fertility in these places and write it off as the natural result of total urbanization, then you have to consider their microscopically low murder rates as that much more impressive. It’s much simpler to assume that urbanization isn’t explaining much, and East Asians are going to behave as they do, which means not committing crimes and not having kids.

At the same time, in the twentieth century, the number of deaths in the Chinese Civil War and the Korean War ran into the millions. If you look at the most violent events ever recorded and adjust for world population size, internal Chinese conflicts occupy many of the top spots. The Japanese shocked American troops with their willingness to fight to the last man in World War II, but that same population did an immediate about-face after 1945 and became completely pacific, both in terms of geopolitics and how individuals within society interacted with one another.

This picture might seem inconsistent with the history of China, which has involved the central state often breaking up into pieces and then reforming. Yet one has to keep in mind that fragmentation is the norm throughout most of human history, given how difficult it has usually been for any authority to establish order across a wide range of territory. China is remarkable for its long periods of centralization before the modern era, with recurring large empires lasting for hundreds of years each. East Asia has had the most centralized state with the most capacity to fundamentally reach into the lives of its citizens for much of recorded history. Today, I’d argue that the government with the most power over its citizens and with the greatest ability to direct them towards a common goal is that of North Korea, with China having the most state capacity among larger countries.

When it comes to conformity, investigate practically any form of dysfunctional behavior, and you will find East Asians at the bottom of world rankings. Before I started writing this article, I had never looked up rates of illicit drug use by country. Now I have, and here are the numbers for deaths per 100,000 residents for a bunch of East Asian countries and the largest states in the West.

Ok, I don’t know what’s going on in Taiwan. It falls within the European norm, though is not anywhere as bad as the Anglosphere. At the same time, China, Japan, Singapore, and South Korea are below every major Western country.

Let’s now do traffic accidents. Once again, I didn’t know anything about this data before looking it up. In fact, I am still writing this paragraph in a state of unknowing. This opens up the risk that I might embarrass myself, but I believe so strongly in my idea of East Asians being high on conformity that I expect the results will prove me correct.

Here’s what I find.

Alright, that didn’t work out how I expected. I suppose we can save race science by invoking more race science. Asians are low on non-conforming behavior, but they’re also bad drivers, and maybe the impact of the latter is more important. Traffic deaths really should be normalized for hours driven, but South Korea still looks really bad when you do this. I’m including this chart because I promised myself to in the paragraph above, but now acknowledge it is one small blow against the theory. Then again, maybe driving well isn’t the best measure of conformity, since how that trait expresses itself depends on how other people around an individual behave.

Struggling without a Script

My model of fertility decline across the world goes something like this. There used to be a time when every normal man and woman was expected to marry off and form a family. In some cultures, this was done through arranged marriages. Yet even where families didn’t do explicit matchmaking, society had evolved norms and institutions that would encourage young people to pair up.

Over time, norms and expectations changed. Partly this was due to the expansion of education, where government paid people to go to school and spend years of their lives in a negative sum credentialing rat race. Meanwhile, technology made it much easier to be entertained while alone, or with virtual friends who one never or rarely meets in person. Jean Twenge’s book iGen is full of charts showing the rise of the internet and iPhones being correlated with lower rates of interpersonal socialization. Starting to hang out with other people can be pretty nerve wracking, but before modern technology people did it anyway out of boredom if nothing else.

Greater wealth also meant parents could afford to support their adult children longer, which they were expected to do anyway because they were supposed to spend years in school to compete with everyone else. The labor of young people relative to that of old people became less valuable, as physical strength and stamina came to matter less and societies adopted gerontocratic policies. While theories that focus on how affordable it is to have kids are silly, it might matter if young people feel relatively poorer to others in society, and scripts regarding what is high or low status have changed. All of this works as a universal theory because societies all have access to the internet and governments across the world tend to subsidize education and adopt gerontocratic policies for common psychological and public choice reasons.

In countries where individuals are hypersensitive to the signals coming from others, compared to other societies they are more likely to form families when everyone else is doing it, but less likely to do so once there is a switch to low-fertility norms.

Here’s total fertility rate between 1950 and 2022 for East Asian states versus the UK and France, taken from Our World in Data.

Total fertility rate from 1950 to 2022 for select countries.

In 1960, Singapore, Taiwan, and South Korea were all at over five births per woman, while China was just under 4. Japan had already made the transition to being at approximately above replacement. Starting ahead of Europeans, for the last quarter century now, all of the East Asian countries have been under the UK and France. Note that it’s now looking like China has been over reporting births for a while, so the fact that their numbers were not that low until the last few years should be understood in that context.

Much can be explained by the idea that East Asians struggle without a script, which is related to being high on conformity. Consider that they are very good at school while being not as talented at or at least prone to entrepreneurship, where the path to success is less standardized. If the task is “go to class, study hard for tests, and acquire degrees,” they are much better than Europeans and other populations. At the same time, of all the groups in the US, Asians were in 2018 found to be the least likely to be promoted from an individual contributor role to management. While Asian Americans were only 5.6% of the population, they were 12% of the professional workforce, but once there they tend not to move up as much as other groups. Of course, part of this is blacks and Hispanics benefit from affirmative action, but that doesn’t appear to hurt whites nearly as much. Of course, left-wing academics blame “stereotypes” for findings like this, instead of accepting the much simpler theory that stereotypes exist because they usually reflect reality.

Meanwhile, business analysts talk about the lack of “entrepreneurial culture” in nations like Japan. None of this is to say that there aren’t East Asians who have founded amazing companies. Only that, given their hard work and talent for engineering and other hard scientific fields, they are much less likely to take a non-standard path to success. Asians lead the world in patents per capita, indicating a high level of ability to engage in technical innovation, but are quite middling when it comes to startups. If one looks at unicorns, or startups with an at least $1 billion valuation, Singapore is in first place with thirteen and Hong Kong is in sixth place, which makes sense given that they are centers of global capital, but beneath that China, Japan, and South Korea are way down the list and behind nations like Canada, the UK, and even the UAE. A list of the most “startup friendly” countries has no East Asian nation in the top 10, as you would expect that cultures where people are high in conformity would not build institutions that require risk taking. It’s also not just about unicorns, as East Asians do poorly relative to advanced Western countries in total number of startups per capita, with the exception once again of Singapore. Think also of the East Asian idea of the “salary man” who has job security with one company his whole life, which is a concept that went out of favor decades ago in the West.

We see something similar in terms of intellectual entrepreneurship. How many ideologies from China, Korea, or Japan have in recent decades had an influence on the rest of the world? China and North Korea got Marxism from the West, while South Korea, Japan, and Taiwan have imported democracy. More recently, LGBT, concern with refugees and minority rights, and feminism have all made inroads in the East. At the same time, as East Asia has seen economic growth, and even had some global cultural successes like K-Pop and anime, it has basically exported no major social or political ideas abroad. Perhaps one can point to the “China model,” but the idea that you should just be a dictatorship because it’s less messy and unstable seems to inspire some autocrats but few others. Some might say this is a question of the US versus everyone else, but in the postwar era, France has produced world famous philosophers, and Russia has become a sort of ideological beacon for nationalists across the world. One might even note how trendy the Palestinian cause has become on college campuses.

Romance is more like business entrepreneurship than doing well in school. Media reports have noted the remarkable degree to which many East Asians have checked out of the sexual marketplace in recent decades. One 2012 study found that of the eleven countries or territories with the highest age at which people lost their virginity, five are in East Asia, and all but one of the rest are majority Muslim. If you have a religious society that harshly punishes non-marital sex that’s one thing, but East Asians are unique in the degree to which they are allowed to have sex but end up not doing so.

Relying on data from the UN, below I show the percentage of women married or cohabitating with someone for different age groups. I use all countries that have a GDP per capita of at least $30K and at least 20 million people. The data covers the years 1970-2015.¹

Once again, we see East Asian exceptionalism. For the age groups 20-24 and 25-29, Taiwan, Japan, and South Korea are the bottom three out of fourteen countries. In 1970, however, these countries were all at the high end of the chart. South Korea used to have the top spot for the 25-29 year-old age range, but now is the lowest in the world.

Here’s what it looks like for ages 30-34 and 35-39.

For older cohorts, Japan is in last place, but Taiwan and South Korea look closer to normal. One thing we might suspect is that the relatively respectable East Asian performance in older cohorts as of the mid-2010s simply reflects the high rate of pairing up among previous generations. This can’t be the entire story, but some of the people who were paired up at 24 in 2001 would be reflected in the statistics among the 35-39 cohort in 2015. This is especially true since these countries have almost no unmarried cohabitation, and average-to-low divorce rates. Many women in nations like South Korea and Taiwan who are not married or living with partners by the time they are thirty will likely end up alone. Moreover, if the data here went up to the present day, things would likely look much worse for East Asia given what has happened to birth rates in Taiwan and South Korea. The latter country saw its lowest ever marriage rate in 2022.

In this data, we see declining rates of marriage and cohabitation since 1970 in all countries. But East Asians have been hit much harder than everyone else. It appears that starting with the generation born around 1985, they became much worse at forming relationships than other people. This was the cohort that first experienced the internet growing up. This has been bad for fertility everywhere, but especially so in the one region of the world where people are most unwilling or unable to act in ways that go against the mainstream of their society.

To invoke “Confucius” here makes no sense, because you would have to explain why South Korea, Japan, and Taiwan all saw the same pattern starting with younger generations, while in earlier eras they were more likely to pair up than most Westerners. My theory is that the internet came along, leading to isolation across the world, and the aforementioned breakdown of norms of in-person socialization. A solitary life where one primarily seeks out career success becomes the mainstream, and marriage and reproduction become for people who are non-conformists, whether we are talking about individuals or communities, with values outside the norm, like Christians who take their faith seriously.

Economic development may also play a role, as in the cases of Taiwan and South Korea, these nations were much poorer than the West until recently, meaning that they only reached first world status a generation ago. Note however that Japan also saw a decrease in pairing up that matches that of the other two states, despite having passed the UK in GDP per capita in the early 1970s. My theory is more about the state of technological development and societal investment in education than directly about wealth, even though all these things are related. A model that places a lot of weight on GDP per capita can explain why birthrates in East Asia collapsed, but not why pairing up and having children ended up becoming less common there than it is in the West. At the same time, by having such low rates of marriage and cohabitation among women in their 30s, Japan may simply be a few years ahead of its neighbors, which can be explained by its earlier start in achieving economic growth.

Interestingly, out-of-wedlock birthrates in East Asia are so low that if you calculated fertility only by legitimate births, Japan would be ahead of most of Europe and South Korea wouldn’t look that bad either. This also makes sense if you believe this is all about conformity and needing to stick to a script. Getting married and then having children is becoming less common for young people, but in practically every developed society to go it alone as a single parent is even rarer. Even in Western societies where parents often aren’t married, they’re usually living together at least. In the United States, subcultures have developed in which fatherlessness is normalized, but East Asians tend not to have subcultures that fundamentally reject the values of the wider society in this way.

The idea that they struggle without a script can explain why in the United States, Asian females are about three times more likely to marry whites than are Asian men. In our species, it is the males who are expected to pursue the opposite sex. All Asian women have to do is sit there and not be obese, which they are pretty good at, and men will approach them. While in the far East both sexes often end up alone because the men do a poor job of attracting and approaching women, when members of the same population find themselves in a multiracial society, the burdens of inceldom fall disproportionately on the men.

Caveats, Qualifications, and North Korea

Some caveats are of course necessary in an article like this. Japanese, Chinese, and Korean societies are in many ways distinct. An analysis like this can’t explain why one nation developed anime and another K-Pop, or why China has so few pop culture exports at all, especially relative to its population size.

The high conformity theory of Asians does not predict the kind of political system countries adopt, since, as mentioned already, the governments of East Asian states run the entire spectrum from North Korea, the most repressive society in the world, to relatively softer dictatorships in China and Singapore, to completely modern democracies in Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. When I predict that China is not going to invade Taiwan any time soon, I rely more on the specific characteristics I observe in the Chinese government than the average personality among the population, even though the two are obviously related.

Speaking of North Korea, it is another country that is in the same East Asian cluster when it comes to ancestry, but I’ve barely mentioned it thus far. This is for the obvious reason that it is at a completely different stage of development economically and culturally, if we can even consider it to be on any kind of cultural spectrum we would recognize. That said, for a theory that says that East Asians are highly conformist, North Korea definitely fits! There have been other dictatorships, but this one is an outlier in the degree to which it’s been able to remain isolated from the rest of the world and stamp out any form of societal dissent across three generations. When it became clear that communism didn’t work, across the Eastern bloc there was cynicism and resistance to the system, but this appears to simply not exist in North Korea. Just as it is impossible to imagine the Kim dynasty in any other region of the world, I have a hard time picturing any non-East Asian country maintaining Zero Covid for as long as China did. Even without government mandates, until at least early last year, Japan was still wearing masks too. East Asians can create democracies or dictatorships, but no matter what form of government they adopt, they end up organizing society in the most conformist way possible given the system.

Before I started writing this article, I thought that Mongolia might be a problem, as a nation that is genetically close to other East Asians but behaves much differently. This is a middle-income country with a murder rate of about 6 per 100,000, which is close to Russia and an order of magnitude higher than the East Asian norm. Its fertility is also at 2.84. Then I looked up some genetic studies, and Mongolians appear to be more distant from Chinese, Koreans, and Japanese than the latter three groups are from one another. I asked Razib whether my reading of the data was correct, and he sent me the data for this Principle Component Analysis chart, which shows the genetic distance between Mongols, Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans.

PCA2 reflects admixture of West Eurasian ancestry. If Mongols turned out to have been genetically indistinguishable from Koreans or Han Chinese, that would have been somewhat harmful to my theory, but as things stand there is not much of a problem here. The fact that I looked at behavioral differences between nations that were geographically close together and could predict the one that was most distant in terms of ancestry increases my confidence in the theory presented here.

The Future of Asian Fertility

The following table sums up the evidence presented in this article. We find the patterns discussed here to differing degrees across North Korea, South Korea, China, Japan, Singapore, Macau, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, in addition to among East Asians living abroad.

We generally judge scientific theories by their simplicity and ability to explain what we see in the world. It’s quite remarkable that just by assuming East Asians are compared to others higher on conformity and more in need of scripts, we can explain phenomena as diverse as crime rates, drug use, out-of-wedlock birth rates, societal responses to covid, startup success, government friendliness to entrepreneurship, fertility, and more. There are a few things in the world that are not perfectly consistent with this theory, like traffic accidents, and maybe parliamentary brawls. But if you have a simple theory that explains almost anything you can think of besides traffic accidents and politicians getting into occasional fights, you should consider it true.

I’ve also dismissed standard cultural theories that invoke Confucius of the gaps. I don’t believe a philosopher who lived 2500 years ago, as influential as he might have been, explains why East Asians behave similarly just about everywhere. Christians and Muslims feel reverence towards Christ and Muhammad respectively, yet there are massive behavioral differences within both Christendom and dar al-Islam, while East Asians tend to behave extremely similarly in terms of all kinds of outcomes. This is despite the fact that one would think that the influence of Jesus on Christians and Muhammad on Muslims would be more direct than that of Confucius on Japan or Singapore today. Yes, East Asians share certain behaviors in common, but this is the result of underlying traits interacting with modernity and economic development.

I’ve framed this article around the question of fertility rather than presenting a general theory of East Asians because I consider low fertility to be a near-existential threat to humanity. This leads to the question of what the ultimate implications are if I am correct.

I think that the news is mostly bad. Low fertility seems to be the norm after a certain level of economic and technological development. If one thinks of East Asians as people who take norms very seriously and conform to them to a greater extent than other people, then they should have very few babies indefinitely into the foreseeable future.

At the same time, conformity is a double-edged sword and can be used for beneficial ends. If you told me that some first world country was going to have a TFR of above 3 by the year 2050, setting aside Israel, I would give it higher odds of being China or Japan than the UK or Canada. Our global culture and societal institutions across the world turned anti-natalist in the second half of the twentieth century. If we ever manage to have a course correction, people who are unusually sensitive to norms and societal expectations might do the best job of breaking the vicious cycle we find ourselves in. Nonetheless, given the low Asian propensity for ideological entrepreneurship, it’s probably going to have to be Westerners who lead the way and popularize pronatalism first.

1. Note that the last few years for most of the countries in the dataset are projections. The projections actually go on much longer, but I decided to end the charts in 2015 because I didn’t want to have to trust numbers that are too speculative. For Taiwan, the projections start in 2001, for South Korea in 2012, and for Japan in 2011. I don’t know why the UN data stops in different years for different countries. The only potential problem here is with Taiwan because of how early the data stops, but given that the TFR of that nation has plummeted since 2000, I don’t think this is an issue.