AMAC Exclusive – By Ben Solis
After China implemented a one child policy in 1980, Xi Jinping is now scrambling to encourage women to have more children amid a dramatic collapse in China’s birth rate and looming demographic crisis. But while the United States is experiencing its own, albeit less severe decline in births, President Joe Biden and the American left are actively making it worse – something which could potentially shift the balance of power in the ongoing competition between China and the United States.
Soon after returning from his summit in San Francisco with Joe Biden last month, Xi issued a special message to women in China urging them to have more children. In January, China’s National Bureau of Statistics reported the first population drop since 1961, the last year of China’s Great Famine. The country’s birth rate has now dropped to 1.28 births per woman, well below the replacement rate of 2.1.
This trend means that China’s population is rapidly aging, with fewer and fewer young people to keep the economy humming – just one of many looming economic crises Xi now has to contend with.
Xi stressed that being an excellent Chinese woman means “family harmony, social harmony, national development, and national progress.” In order to achieve these goals, Xi said, women should strive to give birth to at least two or three children “for the glory of China.”
Xi specifically called on the Chinese people to “actively cultivate a new marriage and childbirth culture, strengthen guidance of young people’s views on marriage, parenthood and family, as well as promote policies to support childbirth.”
High childcare costs, poor career prospects, and declining marriage rates have deterred many young Chinese women from having children. Now, Xi says the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) will make major investments to help every woman who wants to have children do so.
Xi’s new policy is a stark reversal from when Deng Xiaoping implemented the one-child policy in 1980 – a policy that has directly created the situation China now finds itself in.
Professor Fei Wangyu, a former Politburo economic policy planner who defected to the West in the 1990s, told me that the CCP in the 1980s viewed overpopulation as a major threat since statistics on birth rates, especially in rural villages, were regularly forged.
Professor Fei also said that the one-child policy resulted in many families abandoning baby girls in the hopes of having a son. “The party hides it,” he said, referring to an internal CCP report showing that the male-to-female ratio was as high as 117:100 in some rural areas. “The CCP’s policy allowed for the elimination of little girls from society,” Fei said.
Chinese leaders now reportedly fear a “Gorbachev moment” as a result of the population collapse, referring to the decline and eventual fall of the Soviet Union.
As Gorbachev explained at an informal meeting in Munich that I attended in 1995, declining birth rates in the Soviet Union had indeed played a significant role in its eventual collapse, much more so than perhaps many in the Western media realized. He relayed how he had experienced a huge shock after taking power when he saw the actual statistics on birth rates and economic prospects for young people, rather than the fake numbers released by the party.
“At that moment, I understood that all the party’s policies had failed, and I knew that the idea of progress we preached for decades was faulty,” he said. “I knew that in 70 years, we regressed.”
Gorbachev also said that he saw how “young people conveyed their disbelief in socialist ideas, including the socialist state” – something that China is now dealing with as well.
Gorbachev’s aide, Alexander Yakovlev, whom eminent Russian historian Richard Pipes deemed the father of Glasnost, told me once that the fall of the Soviet Union forever falsified the idea of an earthly workers’ paradise preached by Marx. He added that China would have to realize this as well and change its course, or more pain would be sure to come.
In the early 2000s, the late Chinese dissident Harry Wu said that he believed the population collapse would ultimately be China’s undoing, as “the CCP will pay for crimes of killing babies and harming families with its collapse.” Now, it seems the bill that both Yakovlev and Wu cited is coming due.
But China isn’t alone in its birth rate struggles – the United States’ birth rate has now dropped almost as low as China’s to 1.64. All population gains in the United States are now a result of net migration in, a phenomenon that creates a whole separate set of problems.
While the United States isn’t still dealing with the cultural fallout from a one-child policy, radical leftism is still to blame for the birth rate collapse here.
In a 2021 survey, four in ten young people aged 16 to 25 said they feared having children because of “the climate crisis.” The left has been pushing climate alarmism in American schools for decades, and Biden has notably said that global warming is “even more frightening” than nuclear war.
American pop culture also constantly disparages motherhood and caregiving, encouraging young women to value their career over having children. The “DINK” (Dual Income No Kids) lifestyle has recently become a popular trend on social media (particularly on TikTok, which is owned by a Chinese parent company) with young people promoting the supposed benefits of never having children.
Moreover, the American left – led by Joe Biden and congressional Democrats – continues to push for abortion as a “solution” to unexpected pregnancies. Although exact numbers are fuzzy, somewhere between 500,000 and 600,000 babies are killed in their mother’s womb each year in the United States.
Xi Jinping is undoubtedly an authoritarian thug who cares little about the suffering of his people except when it threatens his grip on power. But in this case, American leaders would do well to similarly acknowledge the looming threat Xi has identified.
The fact that Joe Biden cannot do so and in fact actively encourages the demographic collapse of the U.S. population should be a major indictment on his leadership – and could prove disastrous for future generations of Americans.
Ben Solis is the pen name of an international affairs journalist, historian, and researcher.
