Example

An excellent example that a small working class has to support the living of a large population was the Shu (蜀) empire during the Three Kingdoms period.

Even fans of Luo Guanzhong (羅貫中) may not know that the population of Shu was 900,000 and around half of them were at the working age. (Although aging was not a problem, the proportion of children was much higher than the society because mortality in the pediatric age group was a considerable number. Ironically, this is a situation when the government should provide extensive free medical care, with an aim to prolong the population lifespan.)

The problem is, women contributed much less in the ancient farming economy, which depended heavily on manual labour, and there were 130,000 soldiers (and another 20 to 30 thousand government officials) within the empire. At the end of the day, each ordinary man had to provide the daily needs for the subsistence of 8 persons.

(The summary is simple: War is not a good thing for the economy because military demand drains up the working class.)

The result ? Of course Shu fell to the hands of Wei (魏). However, you may not know that besides a small number of exceptionally loyal officials, the overtaking was much welcome by the Shu people.

That's why after the decline of the empire, Liu Shan (劉禪) said: 此間樂，不思蜀。