Demography is Destiny

"And when I get excited My little China Girl says Oh baby, just you shut your mouth..."

What about China?

 A relevant question considering our president has such close “ties” with the ChiComs.

I’m not as concerned about China’s economic power as I am what they will do to keep it – or more accurately, what the Chicom leadership will do to keep a hold on power.

China’s one-child policy did something no military could do.

It put China in an irreversible population decline.

The preference for male children led to abortions of female fetuses. If you could only have one child, it should be a boy.

Demographics are destiny.

The predictions the China would overtake the US economically ignored that. It is mathematically impossible they will. By 2035, they will have lost their place as the most populous country to India and fallen to number five.

But that makes them more dangerous, not less.

Having personally seen China on its upswing, I’ve been tracking them over the years. I haven’t been there since 2016, but I do watch their numbers and their birthrate is a significant tell.

The Chinese birthrate has dropped to record 1.09 in 2022. That’s roughly one pregnancy per 11 people. Numbers like that contributed to the first drop in Chinese population since Mao’s programs starved the populace. The population of mainland China was 1.411 billion people at the end of 2022, a decrease of 850,000 over the previous year.

China's recent attempts to reverse course and encourage families to have more children haven't worked. Since the one-child policy was scrapped in 2016, births have declined 50 per cent.

Yun Zhou, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Michigan, noted:

"From my own research, what I've seen is women often resisted and often prioritized their paid employment and prioritized their pursuit of individualistic ideals over this sustained incentivization.”

With such a bend in demographics, one that will produce a population with over 40% that are 65 or over, continued Chinese economic expansion seems unlikely.

According to the Financial Times:

“China already has worker shortages in manufacturing. Younger workers, aged 16 to 24, shun factory jobs. Beijing expects a shortage of nearly 30 million manufacturing workers by 2025. The resulting rise in labor costs will weigh on both local and international companies with factories in China. Labor cost rises there have already outpaced those in Thailand and Vietnam.”

As access to workers decline, the laws of economics kick in, even in a communist economy. China faces a future of lost status as the workshop of the world.

Chinese are, if nothing else, racist. The Han (Mandarin) speaking Chinese population accounts for nearly ninety percent of the population, and it looks down on the Cantonese speakers and other groups. Mao made Mandarin the national written and spoken language of China. This level of racism means immigration is not an option to supplement the loss of Chinese workers, engineers, and scientists.

Which I think is why China has a more powerful reason to go to war. “Reunification” of Taiwan, which they consider a province, will be simply an excuse.

China’s only choice is depopulation, and war seems the most likely and expedient way to do it.