Just days after the free Chinese of Taiwan voted against mainland Communist Chinese domination in Saturday's presidential election, we learn that the women of Xi Jinping's People's Republic continue to express a similar sentiment with the only tool left at their disposal.
Their uteri.
According to official figures released on Wednesday, Chinese women had fewer than half the births in 2023 than they did in 2016 — the year Beijing finally repealed that slow-rolling disaster known as the One-Child Policy. "Have more babies," Xi effectively told his people. "In this country? Are you kidding me?" replied the women of China.
As the Wall Street Journal put it, "The number of newborns has gone into free fall over the past several years," as births in Communist mainland China dropped "by more than 500,000 last year to just over 9 million in total." That puts the People's Republic fertility rate nearly at 1.0, or about half of the 2.1 required just to keep the population from shrinking.
You can skip this next paragraph and go right to the TL;DR if you like.
Communist China's overall population began shrinking in 2022, but the working-age population has been shrinking since 2017. That's a problem for a country whose median age is already nearly 40 years old and projected to quickly rise. It's an even bigger problem for a country with a growing elderly population, not much of a social safety net, and a pressing economic need to shift from an export model of economic growth to a domestic consumption model.
TL;DR: China is losing working-age producers faster than it is creating retirement-age consumers at a time when the rest of the world is growing sick of buying export goods from a bully.
ASIDE: It occurs to me now that one reason Vladimir Putin ordered the annexation of Crimea in 2014 and the full-scale invasion of the rest of Ukraine in 2022 was to add millions more ethnic Russians and other Slavs to his country's shrinking population. It's enough to make you wonder just how hard Xi is looking across the Taiwan Strait — and at the Republic of China's healthy and wealthy 24 million people.
PJ Media and Asia Times columnist David Goldman might be better informed than I am about these things, and he's argued here that the PRC can innovate its way to continued growth. That's what South Korea has done with a population shrinking even faster than China's. Technology — particularly 5G communications using AI as a force multiplier — can make workers so much more productive that fewer of them can generate more wealth than ever before.
And surely he's right about that. But I have to wonder if that model will work in the People's Republic, where Comrade Xi seems determined to reassert Communist control over more and more of the economy — and the crushing of innovation and growth that will follow. In fact, we're already seeing that happen.
The V-shaped recovery everyone expected after Xi finally relaxed his silly Zero-COVID Policy never materialized, precisely because the CCP has its fat fingers in everyone's pie. We haven't seen this level of communism in Communist China since Xi's predecessor, Deng Xiaoping, began his free-market reforms more than four decades ago.
I don't know how this all plays out, but I'm reminded of something Sen. Sam Nunn (D-Ga.) said in 1980 about an American military he feared had grown too small to counter the Soviet Union, despite our technological edge. "At some point," Nunn warned, "numbers do count."
Recommended: Vegas DA: 'I'm Not That Drunk,' Before Falling Back Into Car
Join the conversation as a VIP Member