China’s population, estimated at 1. 41 billion, will fall to 330 million by the end of the century, predicts Yi Fuxian of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. This unexpected conclusion is included in an article to be published in the Winter 2024 issue of Contemporary China Review. He is the only one worried. “China has embarked on a demographic trajectory of no return,” writes Wang Feng of the University of California, Irvine. Yi puts it this way: “If left unchecked, China’s demographic trap could simply precipitate the collapse of civilization. »

Why do we care? Rapid demographic change could push an ambitious China to become more militant and push dangerous projects.

The crisis is plain to see. Yi’s stunning 330 million figure assumes that China will be able to stabilize its total fertility rate—generally, the average number of children born to a woman over her lifetime—at 0.8. China’s TFR in 2023 was 1.0. and is dropping over time. A country generally needs a TFR of 2.1 to maintain a stable population.

Yi estimates that China’s TFR could even fall to 0. 7, and that China could have even fewer people until 2100.

To what extent will China’s population decline? The 2024 revision of the UN World Population Prospects shows a low estimate of 403. 8 million more people until the end of the century. The UN figures are largely in line with those of China, which has overstated the length of its population for two decades. Yi’s prediction, although excessive today, will probably be closer to the truth when the clock strikes 9:00 p. m.

China is now four times more populous than the United States. At the beginning of the century, one would believe that it had about the same population as the United States.

China is in a complicated situation. No other society has ever faced such a large demographic decline without wars, disease, or famines. These unique events throughout history have led to disastrous demographic declines, but societies are almost recovering. China itself temporarily recovered from the Great Leap Forward famine of the late 1950s and early 1990s. Then the country’s population fell to at least 30 million people. Some estimates double that figure.

Today, China’s population decline is caused by deep-seated changes in society, continued economic failure, and a deepening gloom enveloping the country. Young Chinese now speak of themselves as China’s “last generation.”

These anti-natal attitudes are partly a result of the regime’s incessant indoctrination in favor of the one-child policy. Deng Xiaoping, Mao Zedong’s successor, instituted this policy in 1979 as one of his first projects after coming to power. During the life of this coercive program, “probably the greatest social disaster in human history,” fertility in China decreased from 2. 9 births per year to 1. 1 births in 2015.

China moved to a two-child policy in 2016 and, when that didn’t work, to a three-child policy in 2021. Successive political flexibilizations have not been enough. The country’s population peaked in 2021.

China could adopt a 27-child policy, but this would have no effect. “Notwithstanding the totalitarian conceit that population trends are something that government can ‘fine tune,’ the reality is that birth trends tend to comport very closely with the desired family size of real life parents,” Nicholas Eberstadt of the American Enterprise Institute told me. “It is possible to use bayonets and police power to force birth rates down against the will of a people; it is very much more difficult to use state force to push birth rates up.”

In fact, as Wang Feng points out, “No country has successfully raised fertility with government policies.”

Wang thinks that a declining demography gives China incentives to adopt benign external policies. As he writes, “Economic and political challenges, which will amplify with demographic changes in the coming decades, should compel Chinese leaders to seek and maintain better relations with the United States and in Western Europe, with countries that have both markets for China’s export products and innovations and new technologies that China needs.”

Wang perfectly sums up how the Chinese leader deserves to calculate the country’s interests. However, Xi Jinping may see things differently. Their primary form of international relations in recent years has been intimidation. You can intimidate others by telling them that your China will dominate or even rule the world; You can’t do it if others see your country shrinking rapidly. Given Xi’s goals (he defends the imperial-era concept that China deserves to rule tianxia, ​​or “All Under Heaven”), he knows he doesn’t have much time.

Xi must know that old societies tend to be pacific and that China is getting old fast. If he wants the Chinese people to support his glorious visions of planetary rule, he surely understands the time to act is now. There is, he must know, a closing window of opportunity.

How did Xi come to the idea that he can impose his will on all of humanity?”By teaming up to disguise an old cat in poor health as a ferocious lion, Chinese and American scholars have fueled the political ambitions of Chinese leaders and steered U. S. -China relations down a damaging path toward a raging war between a dynamic tiger and a competitive tiger. “, Yi Fuxian stresses. A strategic miscalculation based on demographic knowledge is costly and harmful. “

“More people means more power,” wrote “Fang Feng” in the People’s Daily Strong Country Forum, as China’s population grew. “It’s the truth”.

The world deserves to be involved because China’s leader believes otherwise and realizes he will have to act before it is too late.

Gordon G. Chang is the author of the Red Plan: China’s Project to Destroy America and China’s Coming Collapse. Follow it on X @GordonGChange.

The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.