Array
The Chinese Communist Party’s National Bureau of Statistics reported on Tuesday that it had documented a decline in its population of about 850,000 people in 2022, the first official drop since 1962 despite many demographers warning that China may have been in population decline since at least 2020.
Chinese state media outlets decried “pessimists” for expressing concern regarding the future of the Chinese economy given bleak prospects for China’s birth rate, which has continued its collapse despite dictator Xi Jinping expanding the brutal “one-child policy” to two children in 2016, and three in 2021. The Global Times, China’s most aggressive English-language state propaganda outlet, argued that the population collapse was a direct result of China’s economic success, attributing it to low birth rates rather than mass death caused by the Chinese coronavirus pandemic.
Chinese birth rates have for years fallen dramatically below the 2.1 children per mother universally accepted as the “replacement fertility rate” necessary to keep a country’s population stable, largely as a result of the “one-child policy.” The policy outlawed women from having a second child and was enforced through mass killings of newborns and unborn babies. The Global Times has boasted in the past that the “one-child policy” killed 400 million people, not counting mothers dying during the course of government-forced abortions. The trauma of the one-child policy coupled with an outsized male population and widespread anti-communist sentiment among Chinese millennials – who have adopted a “lying flat” attitude of failing to build families, seek promotions at work, or exhibit any ambition that could be used to the benefit of the Communist Party – has resulted in little prospects for the baby boom necessary to reverse the trend.
Some demographers predicted, using unofficial or indirect official statistics, that China began declining in population in 2020. The National Bureau of Statistics delaying the publication of its population data in 2020, following the mass deaths triggered by the Wuhan pandemic, escalated warnings of a population collapse, but the government incident that modest population growth occurred that year. Similarly, in 2021, several population experts citing hospital statistics to claim the population had declined that year, but the regime denied it.
