The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has created an economic model that is unsustainable.
Official corruption and mismanagement of the economy, the crushing of creativity and innovation in the name of control, the recklessly escalating debt, and the destruction of the environment are all factors that will contribute to the coming collapse.
China’s real estate market is already almost there, with the country’s largest developers, such as Evergrande, teetering on the edge of bankruptcy and buyers furious over unfinished homes they have already paid for.
But it is the wanton destruction of human capital by the Communists over the past 75 years that has not only brought that collapse nearer but virtually ensured that China may never rise again.
The one-child policy in particular has resulted in the elimination of some 400 million of the most productive, hardworking, enterprising people on the planet.
Roughly half of each of the past two generations of Chinese never saw the light of day because of abortions coerced under the one-child policy.
Moreover, the rabidly anti-natal propaganda of the policy has helped to create a culture in which children are no longer valued but rather rejected as expensive luxuries.
When the government finally ended the one-child policy in 2016, it rosily predicted that the total fertility rate — defined as the number of births per woman over her reproductive lifetime — would rebound to 1.8.
But China’s birthrate not only did not recover, it continued to fall.
In 2022, only 9.56 million children were born.
Earlier this year, the CCP’s National Bureau of Statistics finally admitted that China has one of the lowest birth rates in the world.
The official figures claim that the fertility rate in 2022 was 1.09 children per woman, which only suggests that the real numbers are even lower.
Before the beginning of the one-child policy in 1981 Chinese women were averaging 2.7 children, a number that the policy quickly cut in half.
However, since officials exaggerate their successes and hide their failures, exact numbers are hard to come by.
For example, China claims that its current population is 1.41 billion people.
University of Wisconsin demographer Yi Fuxian, however, drawing upon a wide array of data, has concluded that the actual number is actually less than 1.28 billion.
This discrepancy of 130 million is not a mere rounding error.
It is a number larger than the population of all but nine of the world’s countries.
It is the result of a systematic exaggeration of the number of births in China over the past few decades. China’s population is aging faster than the CCP is willing to admit.
And, for the first time since Mao Zedong’s great famine of 1959-1961, China’s population is falling.
The “demographic dividend” that supported China’s rapid economic growth, military buildup, and strategic expansion is gone.
Instead, as the number of working-age Chinese declines, labor costs will rise, and an increasing proportion of the economy will go to caring for the growing population of elderly.
Other East Asian countries, like Japan and South Korea, also have rapidly aging populations. But unlike China, they grew rich before they grew old.
China is still a middle-income country, with hundreds of millions living in abject poverty.
The baby bust also explains why China’s economy will probably not recover from its current doldrums, regardless of what mix of economic policies the central government adopts.
None of the tools available — such as lower interest rates, export subsidies, and infrastructure investment — will compensate or 100 million empty cradles.
Not to mention that falling tax revenues and unsustainable government debt are limiting the CCP’s policy choices to begin with.
China’s problems will accelerate as the population collapse picks up steam.
If — and it is a big if — the CCP is able to stabilize the fertility rate at 1.1, Professor Yi’s projections show that China’s population would still decline to 440 million by 2100.
However, given the rising reluctance of young Chinese women to have children, it seems more likely that the fertility rate will come to approximate Hong Kong’s current 0.8.
If that is the case, there will only be 310 million people alive in China by the end of the century.
Either way, the results will be catastrophic, both for the Chinese economy and for the CCP’s rapacious geopolitical ambitions.
The 21st century will not belong to China after all.
To put China’s coming demographic collapse in perspective, compare its numbers to those of its chief self-declared rival, the United States of America.
America’s population currently stands at 340 million — and still growing.
By the year 2060, the population of the U.S. is projected to be 417 million, and on track to surpass that of China in the decades following.
As China’s population contracts, so will its geopolitical ambitions, as the CCP is forced to focus its attention on maintaining internal stability.
But even should the Chinese Communist Party fall, so intractable is China’s birth dearth that it would be a major challenge to overcome for any future government, however democratic.
The CCP’s leaders from Mao Ze-dong onward have always treated China’s masses as an inexhaustible resource that they could squander at will.
Neither Deng Xiaoping nor any of his successors could ever imagined that their brutal one-child policy would result in the death of the Chinese dream.
But just as surely as they buried the 400 million little victims of their one-child policy in unmarked graves, they have buried their own dreams of world domination.
Steven W. Mosher is the author of “Bully of Asia.”
NEWS CREDIT
