When the demise of the People’s Republic of China occurs — perhaps soon and perhaps many decades from now — the story will be not of Western aggression, but of national suicide.
The obvious catalyst for China’s crisis came with the coronavirus, which may have very well resulted from the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s reckless gain-of-function experiments. When faced with a rapidly transmitting and mutating airborne pathogen, the Chinese Communist Party, rather than embrace Western vaccines, which have been successful at minimizing the risk of hospitalization and death from COVID, instead locked down its billion-plus population in the vain hope of reaching zero-COVID.
CHINA’S POPULATION FALLS FOR THE FIRST TIME IN 60 YEARS
As a result, the Chinese economy grew by an anemic 3% last year. Other than the pandemic year of 2020, last year’s GDP growth was China’s worst since the year Mao Zedong died.
Perhaps China’s economy will rebound after its government gave in to protests and dropped its general house-arrest policy. But China laid the groundwork for its own demise long before the pandemic came along and accelerated the timeline. For as with its economic growth, 2022 also marked the beginning of the end of its demographic dominance.
For the first time since Mao’s Great Leap Forward caused the deaths of 50 million people, China’s population contracted last year. The National Bureau of Statistics reported that China’s population fell by 850,000 in 2022, closing off the year with 1,411,750,000 billion people.
Both China and the U.S. share the problem of an aging population, whose ever-more numerous elderly will demand an ever-greater share of ever-fewer young workers’ paychecks to sustain themselves. But China’s problem, like its population trajectory, is much more severe.
What’s more, China’s role on the global stage is threatened in unique ways, both great and small. Even if the population of, say, France shrinks, it shares similar market demands with the rest of the West. China’s wants — be it movies and entertainment or surveillance technology — are idiosyncratic. Hollywood may be willing to debase its films to appeal to an audience that comprises one-fifth of the global population, but what happens when that population shrinks?
By some measures, China’s share of the world population has not fallen so far so quickly in more than a millennium. The Qing dynasty once ruled over one-third of the world’s population. For most of the Chinese Communist Party’s existence, China has contained at least one-fifth.
Mao famously used China’s population growth not just as a tool in economic or diplomatic disputes, but as a threat of warfare.
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“I’m not afraid of nuclear war,” the dictator famously said in 1957. “China has a population of 600 million; even if half of them are killed, there are still 300 million left.”
Now, the United Nations is forecasting that China’s population will shrink to 800 million by the end of the century — still more than in Mao’s day. But the U.N. also projects that the global population will reach 10 billion people by then. China will surely be in an unprecedented situation: outnumbered.
