Communist China May Be Running Out of People

The People’s Republic of China has been a misleading moniker for the mainland since Mao proclaimed its existence in 1949. It has never been a republic in any meaningful sense. Now, the communist regime is evidently running out of people, too. For four years running, the country has been reporting more deaths than births. The birth rate has not been so low since Mao’s forces seized control of the country at the end of the Chinese civil war.Nearly 8 million babies were, per Beijing, born in 2025 on the mainland. Yet that failed to exceed the 11.3 million who died last year. The birth rate, 5.63 for every thousand Chinese, is “the lowest level on record since the founding of the People’s Republic of China,” Bloomberg reports, calling it a “stunning” development that reflects “a deepening demographic struggle” for President Xi and his camarilla.The falling population is more than an embarrassment for Mr. Xi and his regime, which has in recent years been trying to reverse the demographic disaster set in train in 1980 when a one-child policy, animated by Malthusian fears, was imposed by Beijing. The policy ended in 2016, replaced by a two-child policy. Yet by then the damage was done. Now the regime is even taxing contraception in a last-ditch effort to get China growing again.Yet the dismal demographic news comes amid adverse economic reports that, as these columns have marked, reflect the failure of central planning on the economic front. The signals include dropping industrial profits, falling investment, and stubbornly high unemployment among the young. Another “warning sign,” per Bloomberg, is that young Chinese, doubtful of the safety net’s future, are refusing to put money into the pension system. These economic developments present an antidote to the overoptimistic prognostications prevalent in the press and among politicians about the inevitability of a “Chinese Century.” The falling Chinese population, too, we have averred, is best seen as “a leading indicator of the failure of the communist regime” and of state-directed economic policies, as opposed to free markets and democratic self-rule, to direct the fortunes of China’s populace.People, after all, are a nation’s most valuable resource and an even better measure than gross domestic product or per capita income of a country’s health. As the late Soviet dissident, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, explained, too, a growing population amounts to a benchmark for a government’s legitimacy. As he put it, “every move, every law should be assessed in terms of whether it helps to preserve the people. If not, down with the law.”America, too, faces demographic challenges that have come into relief with President Trump’s success in curbing illegal immigration. Vice President Vance is decrying a fall in rates of marriage as “a big problem,” the Times reports, and a Health and Human Services official is urging the department to “make America fertile again.” Concerns are being raised, too, that America’s population may have failed to rise in 2025 for the first time.One country avoiding demographic declines is Israel. The Jewish state’s fertility rate is nearly 3 per woman, the highest among the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and more than twice the average of member nations. The contrast with Mao’s atheist regime suggests the vindication of God’s words to Abraham: “Look now toward heaven, and tell the stars, if thou be able to number them: and he said unto him, So shall thy seed be.”

Communist China May Be Running Out of People

Communist China May Be Running Out of People

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