East Asia seems no different. In 1950, when most Koreans were poor farmers, Korean women bore five children on average. Today the average is less than 1.3. Modernity, it would appear, is a terminal disease. In most of the world, nothing but the constraints of traditional life had persuaded men and women to marry and raise children in numbers sufficient to perpetuate the species. The blandishments of K-pop and consumerism appear to have overwhelmed South Korea’s residual Confucian impulses; the extremely low South Korean birth rate corresponds to the world’s highest elderly suicide rate, a sad phenomenon of the past 20 years.

Yet there is something different about China. One sees it instantly in entertainment, fashion and advertising. Cosmopolitan magazine’s mainland edition features models in severe if elegant apparel, and business success advice rather than sex tips. Chinese films and advertising portray women in a romantic aura rather than as sex objects. To some extent this stems from official censorship — the government banned provocatively-clad models from this year’s Shanghai Auto Show — but that is not a complete explanation. The Chinese family is strikingly resilient despite the great disruptions to traditional life.

Why hasn’t the decline of traditional society in China led to the same demographic consequences as in South Korea and Japan? We cannot know the answer, in part because we do not have accurate data on the extent of the consequences. But it seems likely that the statistical methods that produced very high estimates of Chinese fertility have some validity, and that the truth lies somewhere in between. And it seems a reasonable conjecture that the value the Chinese place on family life corresponds to a higher birthrate.

China is less affected by the transition from traditional society to modernity, perhaps, because China in some ways has always been modern by design. China is not a country but a construct. The Chinese empire grew from the small territory of the Shang Dynasty in the Yellow River valley 3,500 years ago by assimilating ethnic and language groups into a centralised written culture and administrative structure. Chinese who speak and eat differently were bound together by a common system of ideograms. Universal literacy today requires Chinese children to toil for three or four hours a day between the ages of six and 11 simply to learn to read the characters that allow them to communicate with other Chinese who speak distinctly different languages. Adult literacy, though, had already reached 20-30 per cent by the turn of the Common Era.

As China’s empire expanded to its natural boundaries, those Asiatic peoples who became Chinese pledged loyalty not to an ethnicity as in post-Roman Europe, but to an empire. China was not a fixed entity but an expanding one, where culture determined geography. This empire, moreover, offered everyone who could learn the characters the chance to join the Mandarin bureaucracy and become wealthy. As often as it collapsed the system re-created itself, because it was of the nature of what it meant to be Chinese. The empire, moreover, preserved the extended family farm as the primary unit of economic life. The head of household was an emperor in miniature, such that family harmony was social harmony: that is the nub of Confucius. The Chinese do not need to study Confucius’s texts; they have lived them for thousands of years.