A recent opinion piece in the Washington Post by American Enterprise Institute economist Nicholas Eberstadt (“China’s collapsing birth and marriage rates reflect a people’s deep pessimism”) doesn’t seem to have been mentioned here yet, but the implications of the latest demographic data released by the PRC are truly enormous. As usual with any data emanating from the PRC, these numbers probably need to be treated with a certain degree of skepticism, though it’s difficult to see what sort of hidden agenda the CCP might have in actually releasing them.
Beyond the topline number that China actually saw its first drop in total population for the first time since 1961 last year, far sooner than the 2030’s that most demographers were predicting (and even before the 1-2 million additional deaths from Covid that China will have experienced during the first quarter of 2023 according to the current projections from the UK health data company Airfinity), the really staggering number is that live births plunged to just 9.6 million in 2022 — a 40% drop in just 6 years from a peak of 17.9 million in 2016.
Even worse, at least from a Chinese perspective, the overall fertility rate that had already been estimated at 1.77 in 2016 (about 19% under the 2.1 level needed to maintain a stable total population), was now less than half of that recognized replacement level — a nearly 60% drop in the overall fertility rate due to a declining portion of women in their childbearing years among the total population, which was one of the unintended results of China’s nearly 4-decade long one-child per family population policy.
This was of course the main motivation of the PRC in belatedly scrapping its notorious one-child policy in 2015, but as they quickly found out it has proved much more difficult to convince young women to start having babies again — particularly when the future appears so bleak under Xi’s dictatorial direction. This is also borne out by the plunging rates of first marriages in China, down nearly 60% since 2013 when Xi completed his ascent to power.
The demographic problem here is that China’s population is rapidly aging at the same time it is now forecast to start shrinking rapidly, particularly if the fertility rate remains less than half that needed to maintain a stable population:
“the birth of a baby,” in the words of the government-run publication People’s Daily, remains “a state affair.” But now Beijing wants more babies from its subjects. A dictatorship may use bayonets to depress birthrates — but it is much trickier to deploy police state tactics to force birthrates up.
Beijing has not yet figured out how to command the people to feel optimism about their personal futures — or thrill at the prospect of bringing more babies into a dystopian world of ubiquitous facial recognition technology, draconian censorship and the new high-tech panopticon known as the “
social credit system.”
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Last year, during one of the regime’s innumerable, drastic pandemic lockdowns, a video went viral in China before authorities could memory hole it.
In the video, faceless hazmat-clad health police try to bully a young man out of his apartment and off to a quarantine camp, even though he has tested negative for the coronavirus. He refuses to leave.
“Don’t you understand,” they warn, “if you don’t comply, bad things can happen to your family for three generations.”
“Sorry” he replies mildly. “We are the last generation. Thank you.”
That moment prompted the spread in China of a despairing social media hashtag: #Lastgeneration.
The dictatorship has brought this demographic defiance upon itself. Xi calls his vaunted vision for the future the “China Dream.” #Lastgeneration is a reminder that the Chinese people increasingly seem to regard it as a nightmare.