China used to be the most populous country in the world. But because of its extremely low birthrate, deaths now outnumber births there and the country is shrinking. This essay will recount some of the alarming facts about China’s population implosion. It’s much worse than most people think.

I rely on two government statistics in this article: fertility rate and GDP per capita. Fertility rate is generally measured as the number of children per woman. This can be thought of as children per couple or children per family, but includes all women single or married. Replacement level fertility is 2 children per woman. China’s fertility is 1 child per woman – half of replacement level. That means each generation is only half the size of the previous generation.

GDP per capita measures the productive output, and thus the average income, of the country’s residents. China’s GDP per capita qualifies it as a “middle-income” country, and that is the term I will use for it. A better description might be “poor” because China is certainly poor by American standards. But it is middle-income by global standards, and I will be comparing China to the rest of the world, not just to the US.

The numbers tell the story, but they do so blandly. A personal anecdote may paint a sharper picture of what “middle-income” actually means: When my wife and I traveled to Guilin, China, we visited a tourist site called Moon Hill where you hike to the summit of a local peak to see the limestone karst formations around the Li River. The parking lot was full of old women waiting to sell things to tourists. When we got out of the car, the women ran toward us, and the ones who arrived first dogged us for the entire time we were in the park while the rest returned to the parking lot to wait for the next tourists. The women who attached themselves to us were impressive in their persistence. They followed us on the climb all the way to the top of Moon Hill, lugging ice coolers full of water bottles, hoping to sell us something if we got thirsty. Then they followed us all the way back down, always reminding us that they had cold drinks for sale. When we got back to the bottom of the hill, we bought a pack of postcards from the women for about $1. Our private guide chided us for paying full retail, something no Chinese tourist would have done. Based on the small number of tourists there and the large number of women, we guessed that they were making about $10 per day. Americans generally have no idea how poor other countries really are.

1. What the Experts Say

By many measures, China has the largest economy in the world, having surpassed the United States several years ago. But that’s not because the Chinese people are especially wealthy. China’s income per person is solidly average, ranking at the 58^th percentile among all countries even using the most generous way of calculating their standard of living, known as “purchasing power parity.” The reason China’s total economy is so large is because its population is so huge:

• GDP (large) = number of people (huge) * income per person (middling)

But China’s greatest strength – its population – may not stay huge for long. China has already slipped to #2 in total population in the world, behind India. And after a few more generations of having only one child per family, it’s just math that the population will be small and the economy will be minuscule. In fact, current demographic projections are that, by the end of this century, the Chinese population will crash to 500 million (because of their low birthrate) while the American population will soar to 700 million (because of our high immigration). If that happens, the Chinese economy will be the size of Canada.

Saying “China will be like Canada” may seem like hyperbole, but it’s not. The standard for comparing countries’ economies is national GDP. Here is a comparison of Canada with 100M people vs. China with 500M, using current figures for GDP per person and projections of population in the year 2100:

China may have grand ambitions. But at the rate its population is dropping, it is as likely to become a superpower as our “51^st state” is. For good or ill, the 21^st century is turning out to be another American Century. China will need to quintuple (5x) its productivity and double (2x) its fertility just to keep up with the United States. I believe it can do the first, but not the second.

Outside of wartime, shrinking populations are almost unknown in the modern world. No economy, modern or primitive, can operate when the country’s entire population grows old, sick, and then ceases to exist. A smaller population doesn’t just mean a smaller economy. Economies, to function at all, require constant innovation. It’s hard to see how old, sick, or dead people can innovate. Demographic loss on the scale that China is facing means not merely a contracting economy, but a collapsing economy. For a good model of what that’s like, think of the New World when the native Amerindians first encountered Europeans and contracted illnesses to which they had no immunity, suffering 90% population loss in their first century after contact. Demographers say that China is facing 60+% population loss by the end of this century. No one will think of China as a rising superpower after they lose 2/3 of their citizens.

According to the Peterson Institute for International Economics: “Nothing would suggest that the Chinese TFR [Total Fertility Rate] will reverse and rise again in the long run – South Korea leads the way with its TFR down at 0.72, but Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, Beijing, Shanghai, and other major Chinese metropolises today all have TFRs at or well below 1. Compared to these places, Japan is a high fertility country.”

The least pessimistic forecast for China’s future is found in the United Nations World Population Prospects report: “Due to its large size and sustained low level of fertility, China is likely to record the largest population decline of any country through the end of the century, [losing] 786 million people. By 2100, China is projected to have lost more than a half of its current population and to have returned to a population size comparable to that recorded in the late 1950s.” To be clear, the 786 million loss is a net change: deaths – births = 786 million. Other forecasts are even more pessimistic.

And it’s not just Westerners predicting this. The Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences projects that by the end of this century, China’s population will have shrunk by almost 2/3 from 1.4 billion to 525 million. Last year, they were predicting 600 million Chinese in the year 2100, but every year the birthrate “surprises” to the downside, and they need to cut their estimates further. China’s population is imploding before our eyes, yet China fans (and China foes) are still expecting their imminent victory over the West. As I’ve pointed out elsewhere, the much-discussed White sickness of demographic suicide is actually a lot worse in Asia. Asians are literally eliminating themselves, voluntarily. This is not how countries with a future behave. There is a fatal sickness in China, and happy talk from friends of China (or scary talk from enemies of China) is not going to fix it. There are many theories about why this is happening. But whatever the cause, the important thing for the future of China is that it is happening. If a country stops reproducing, its future is oblivion. It doesn’t matter what else they do – how strong their economy is, what their lead is in AI, how many missiles they build. Their future is extinction and every year that fate gets harder to reverse.

2. Why It Will Get Worse

There is a strong negative correlation between a country’s wealth and its fertility rate. As a general rule, rich countries have fewer children and poor countries have more children. But there are exceptions to this rule. China is a major exception: China is a middle-income country with a birthrate that would be shockingly low even in a high-income country.

People expect great things (or terrible things, depending on perspective) from China because it has already accomplished great things. China’s economy grew exponentially over the past 50 years, starting from horrific levels of poverty under Mao Zedong. Ever since Deng Xiaoping’s free-market reforms, the Chinese have risen from being some of the poorest people on the planet to now being quite average. That’s a huge achievement. But what comes next? Everyone assumes that China’s economy will continue to grow and the Chinese people will keep getting wealthier. OK, let’s say that’s true. Then what?

For every country in history, rising incomes have caused falling birthrates. You can argue about why that is, but you can’t argue that it’s not true. That is what happened in other countries, and that is what will happen in China. If China’s birthrate was currently high like other middle-income countries, maybe this wouldn’t be bad. But unlike those countries, China’s birthrate is already abnormally low. The problem is, they aren’t even rich yet! Anyone who expects China’s economy to keep growing has to also expect China’s birthrate to keep falling. When they finally do become truly wealthy, what will their fertility rate be? 0.5 children per family? 0.1 children per family? What happens then? The answer is obvious. Unless they can develop the technology to grow babies in pods and raise them with robots, their fate is inevitable: no matter how rich, powerful, or high-tech China becomes, their country will dwindle toward irrelevance.

Not only is China’s population currently shrinking, but there is basically nothing they can do to stop this. Even if the government could somehow persuade Chinese women to have children, there simply aren’t enough young women in the population today to reverse the ongoing decline. Just look at the projected 2030 population pyramid from the Chinese government’s 2020 census:

You can see from the population age pyramid that most Chinese people are already over the age of 40. They can’t have any more children even if they wanted to. The government could put a gun to their heads and it wouldn’t matter. There is no coming back from the age imbalance that already exists. Population demographics are predictable decades into the future because you can just ignore everyone over the age of 40. Infertile adults are irrelevant to the future. China simply doesn’t have enough young people to produce the children necessary to stop the population from cratering. There is no recovering from China’s insane past policy of having so few children for so long that most of the population is already past childbearing age. This isn’t up for debate. It is a sad biological fact.

So, China’s population can only go down from here. The age pyramid will become even more top-heavy as families continue to have one child. If Chinese fertility just stays where it is – at half of replacement level – each generation will be half the size of the previous generation. Imagine a triangle (everyone in China below the age of 40), except instead of a stable triangle with a wide base, it’s an upside-down triangle balanced on its tip. That is China’s age structure today. As George Soros says, “I’m not predicting. I’m observing.”

3. What the Data Shows

Is there data to support my dire view of China’s future? Yes, and anyone can download it for free from Our World in Data at https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/effective-fertility-rate-children-per-woman-who-are-expected-to-survive-until-childbearing-age . This data website has fertility rates for every country in the world. There are almost 200 countries in its fertility database, including separate entries for the Chinese regions of Hong Kong, Macao, and Taiwan. 2023 is the most recent year with fertility data available for every country, so that is the year I will use in my analysis below.

Our World in Data reports the “effective fertility rate” rather than the more common “total fertility rate”, but these are essentially the same thing. (To be exact, OWID compiles every country’s total fertility rate from the United Nations World Population Prospects, combines this with the countries’ age-based mortality rates from the Human Mortality Database, and does the following calculation to convert TFR to EFR:

• EFR = TFR * likelihood of newborn babies surviving to childbearing age

When you use TFR, which simply counts the number of babies born, you have to make an ad hoc adjustment for how many of them will survive to reproductive age. For instance, it’s conventional to say that a TFR of 2.1 children per woman is replacement level fertility. But why is it 2.1, not 2.0 or 2.2? Because the assumption is that 95% of the children will survive to adulthood. So, of the 2.1 babies born, 2.0 adults will survive to be able to have children of their own. 2.0 adults exactly replace the woman (and man) who gave birth to them. So, 2.1 is the approximate replacement level TFR because 2.0 is the exact replacement level EFR.

But every country’s mortality rate is different. Western countries have much higher than 95% survival and African countries have much lower than 95%. So, to properly compare countries, TFR has to be multiplied by the percentage of children who will survive. EFR does that. In this study, I am only interested in high-income and middle-income countries whose survival rate is typically well over 95%, so EFR and TFR are almost identical.

In the specific case of China in the year 2023, its TFR = 1.00 and its EFR = 0.99 because China has 1% child mortality, so 99% of newborns are expected to survive until their childbearing years.)

Here are China’s and America’s effective fertility rates from 2010 to 2023 in graph form:

China’s fertility collapse makes the US look healthy by comparison. Every year recently, the Chinese birthrate hit a new low. And it’s not just inching down like in the US, it’s plummeting. (By the way, I can’t resist pointing out that some people believed the US COVID vaccine would depress birthrates in the US. I wonder what they think about the Chinese COVID vaccine.)

When looking at the graph above, keep in mind that China’s one-child policy ended in 2015. The Chinese government is worried about too few children now. But the Chinese people have been doing the opposite of what the authorities want. China has been actively encouraging childbearing recently, but Chinese births keep dropping.

It is well-known that rich people have fewer children than poor people, and rich countries fewer than poor countries. Income matters a lot, although it’s not entirely clear why since the sign of the relationship is counterintuitive. But there are two ways to measure income: in raw currency and in currency adjusted for purchasing power. Both measurements predict fertility very negatively. Income adjusted for purchasing power works slightly better, so that is what I will use, but none of my conclusions would change if I used raw income instead.

Income adjusted for purchasing power not only performs a little better empirically, it also makes more sense theoretically. Incomes in poor countries are low, of course. In China, GDP per capita was $12,614 per person in 2023. But prices in poor countries are low also, so people can buy more with their low income. According to official figures, prices in China for all consumer goods are roughly half of those in the US. Taking all the low-priced goods and free government services into account when measuring income is called “adjusting for purchasing power parity.” Chinese GDP per capita, adjusted for PPP, was $24,569 per person as of 2023. Since PPP provides the best measurement of individual spending power, it is the right statistic for understanding the decisions of Chinese people such as how many children to have.

Here is a graph of all 191 countries in the OWID database, with GDP per capita at PPP on the X-axis (using a log-linear scale) and effective fertility rate on the Y-axis. You can see the strong relationship between income and fertility as the points fall in a steep decline – from more than 4 children at low incomes to less than 1 child at high:

The red line is the best fit from a linear regression of EFR ~ log(GDP per capita at PPP). The slope of the regression line is strongly negative and statistically significant.

The large red dot at the bottom of the graph is China.

I also show the names of all other countries with fertility rates less than 1.0 on this graph. 5 of the 7 of those super-low fertility countries are Chinese-majority areas – China, Hong Kong, Macao, Taiwan, and Singapore. Mainland China is a big negative outlier from the trend line (along with Ukraine) – an average-income country with very low fertility. Israel is a big positive outlier – a wealthy country with very high fertility.

I have drawn vertical lines on the graph at the 25^th and 75^th percentiles of GDP per capita at PPP to separate countries into low-, middle-, and high-income. China is at the 58^th percentile – near the center of the range. China is in the middle of the middle-income countries.

The key point is: the Chinese avoid having children more than any other people on earth, and it’s not even close:

• Among middle-income countries (between the 25^th and 75^th percentiles of income), China and war-ravaged Ukraine have the lowest fertility rates. (Presumably, the low fertility in Ukraine is caused by the war.)

• Among high-income countries (above the 75^th percentile), Chinese-majority Hong Kong, Macao, Taiwan, and Singapore are 4 of the 5 lowest fertility countries.

China and Ukraine had the two lowest fertility rates of all middle-income countries in 2023. There is something remarkable about this: 2023 was the year after the Russian invasion of Ukraine. So, the Chinese in a normal year had as few children as the Ukrainians did in the year their country was destroyed. This should trigger some introspection on the part of anyone who admires China: What does it say about the country that, at least in this respect, Chinese people in an average year behave like Ukrainian people do when their men are being slaughtered and their women are fleeing the country? What is going on in China? From all accounts, it seems like a nice place. Yet its people shun children like victims in a war zone.

China supporters sometimes say that Americans may have more money, but the Chinese enjoy all the public goods that Socialism provides – everything is subsidized, education and medicine are practically free, the government seems to actually care about its people, Xi Jinping is a very competent autocrat, their internet is not allowed to be divisive or degenerate, their children watch educational videos and not TikTok or Instagram. Plus, China enjoys thousands of years of history, the fastest growing economy on the planet, world-leading technology, beautiful newly-built cities, a low cost of living, safe streets at night without Black crime, typically high Asian life expectancy, social order, and national unity whether voluntary or not. They follow the traditional wisdom of Confucianism and reject modern globohomo. They have no Great Replacement, no problems with diversity. The Chinese people are not inundated by the selfish atomized values of Americans. They aren’t bad individualists warped by capitalist greed, but good collectivists with community spirit and extended families which our society lacks. And yet, in spite of how beautiful all of that sounds, Chinese people seem to feel their future is too grim to bring children into. What gives?

Since low fertility has become a political issue in many countries lately, lots of people are looking for a political solution. This often starts with asking people why they have so few children. The answer everyone gives to this question is the same – they can’t afford to have children. It should go without saying that this answer is absurd. China is the most extreme example of this absurdity. 50 years ago, under Maoist Communism, the Chinese people were unimaginably poor but they could afford children. In fact, they had so many children that the government enacted a one-child-per-family policy to reduce the country’s exploding population. When Mao Zedong died and Deng Xiaoping took over as leader, China became Capitalist, and they experienced the greatest economic miracle in world history. One billion people were lifted out of poverty. They did not become wealthy, but they did go from abject poverty to what is considered middle-class by global standards. In the 50 years since Mao, their standard of living rose literally by 4000%. Now that they are 4000% richer than they were before, they say they can’t afford children anymore. When they were 40 times poorer, they could afford them. When they are 40 times richer, they can’t. There is clearly something ridiculous about the claim that people don’t have children because they can’t afford them. China is an extreme example, but this holds true for every country: if people can’t afford children today, how could their poorer ancestors have afforded them in the past?

Lately, the Chinese government has been providing financial incentives to married couples to encourage childbearing. These have obviously failed miserably as they have in every country where they have been tried such as South Korea. (North Korea is 20 times poorer than South Korea and their fertility rate is almost 3 times higher. So, the South Koreans are obviously going about this all wrong.) The only financial program that has been proven to get Chinese people to produce more children is making the country 40 times poorer. That would work. But it would not be popular.

I have some thoughts on why everyone “can’t afford” children today and why the more money they have the fewer they “can afford”, but that would take us too far afield from the subject of this essay, which is China’s future.

4. Predictions

Now let’s not just ask, but actually try to answer, the question: What happens when China becomes rich? Everyone seems to think that China will get rich. Let’s assume they do. Every other country that has gone from middle-income to high-income has seen a huge drop in births. This will happen to China too. When China gets rich, its birthrate, currently at half of replacement, will fall to below half. To what exactly? One-quarter replacement? One-tenth? China currently has the lowest fertility of any middle-income country in the world (except for war-torn Ukraine). When China becomes wealthy, its fertility will fall to the lowest of any high-income country, which means the lowest of any country on earth. But how low will it go? Let’s try to calculate the answer.

All Chinese-majority countries have low birthrates. Here they are sorted by GDP per capita, showing an almost monotonic pattern of falling fertility with rising wealth:

Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macao are almost entirely Chinese. But Singapore is only 75% ethnic Chinese. So, the table above includes another line for just the Chinese population in Singapore. They have higher income and lower fertility than other ethnic groups there such as Malays. The Chinese in Singapore, being six times wealthier than the Chinese in China, have lower fertility than in China. When Chinese people get wealthy, they have fewer children, just like people everywhere else. China, being a middle-income country, has plenty of room to get richer, which means they also have plenty of room to have fewer children.

There are two possible models for how Chinese birthrates could decline if they become rich:

China could just be like other prosperous Chinese-population countries. Here is a table showing China’s fertility compared to its middle-income Asian peers, and the average of the rich Chinese countries (Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macao, and the Chinese population of Singapore) compared to similarly prosperous Asians:

So, a rich China could simply be like other rich Chinese countries and have a fertility rate of 0.75.

However, this ignores how China is unique among Chinese countries. Communist China’s history has diverged substantially from the Capitalist Chinese nations. The most relevant difference is China’s one-child policy. For 35 years, China enforced a draconian policy of restricting families to having only one child. (There were many exceptions to this rule, so Chinese families actually averaged more than one child, but the government’s message was clear: you are allowed to have no more than one or two children.) At best, this history has fundamentally altered people’s expectations about family size. At worst, it has broken the Chinese family in a way that will require generations to fix – time China does not have. So, consider the outcome if China becomes wealthy yet continues to have a fertility rate much lower than its income class. We have all the information we need to make this calculation from the linear regression of fertility on income among Asian countries:

• EFR = -1.2526 * log10(GDP per capita at PPP) + 7.4490

China has a GDP per capita at PPP of $24,569. Based on the regression, middle-income Asian countries like China should have a fertility rate of 1.95. But China’s EFR is actually only 0.99. So, China’s fertility is 0.96 lower than what is predicted by the Asian country regression. Now let’s project what China’s EFR would be if it had Singapore’s GDP per capita at PPP of $141,553. The regression model predicts that such a high-income country should have a fertility rate of 0.99. If China’s fertility continues to be 0.96 lower than the regression, then its actual fertility would be 0.03. This is my “Rich China” prediction – what China’s fertility rate would be if it had Singapore’s level of GDP, while maintaining its current deviation from the trend.

Asian countries generally have lower birthrates than non-Asian countries. So, it makes sense to analyze China within the context of Asia only. (My “Rich China” fertility rate prediction would be even lower than 0.03 if I included all countries in the regression, but let’s be optimistic and just compare China to Asian countries.)

Below is a plot of only the countries in Asia, again showing the regression line and naming the countries whose fertility is less than 1.0:

Among all Asian countries, the ethnic Chinese areas of China, Hong Kong, Macao, Taiwan, and Singapore are 5 of the 6 with the lowest fertility. The other country is South Korea.

On the above graph, I’ve highlighted two special points in red:

• China’s current position, named “China”, showing it as having the lowest fertility of any middle-income Asian country.

• China’s future position, named “Rich China”, if it becomes high-income but continues to have lower fertility than other high-income Asian countries.

The red dotted line on the plot shows this projection, connecting China’s current position to the predicted “Rich China” position. If China becomes as rich as Singapore, its fertility rate is predicted to be 0.03. Let’s just round that estimate to an even 0 children per woman.

So, there are two possible scenarios for what happens if China becomes rich:

1. It could be like other rich Chinese-ethnicity countries, and its fertility rate will fall to 0.75.
2. It could be like itself, only richer, and its fertility will fall to 0.03, or for all practical purposes, 0.

Scenario 1 is slow extinction. Scenario 2 is extinction in one generation. The truth is probably somewhere in between.

China’s current fertility rate is catastrophic. If China grows rich, its fertility will be worse than catastrophic. Even one generation with no children means that everyone left will be too old to have them, so the country will perish. As many others have observed, “China got old before it got rich.” There are other old countries in Asia – Japan for instance. But they got rich before they got old.

5. Speculations

One of the many striking facts in the 2023 fertility numbers is that what was a normal year in China was like the year of utter devastation and death in the war-torn country of Ukraine. What is wrong with China anyway? I can only speculate, and since my speculation is probably not worth much, I will keep this brief: The birthrate crisis that is happening in China today is just an extreme version of the birthrate crisis that is happening everywhere else. Evolution didn’t program animals to want offspring. Evolution programmed animals to want sex. For a billion years of animal history, sex produced offspring whether the animals wanted them or not. Humans inherited those same instincts, which worked fine before contraception but are fatal to us now. Probably most of the time, humans also didn’t want the children that sex produced. This is the plot of countless European novels (Thomas Hardy, George Eliot, the Brontë sisters, etc.) before the modern era. And it is why doctors invented birth control, and as soon as birth control became available, everybody went on it, and then everyone reduced their family sizes from the typical 10 children to about 2, and many people stopped having kids altogether. The truth is, lots of people may have never wanted children all along if their lives were easier without them. Childless people are not a pathology of modern society. Childlessness is not caused by the internet, or prosperity, or the death of Christianity. It’s just that for the first time in history, individuals can get what they want, and it is blindingly clear now that what lots of people want is no kids. If easy-to-use birth control had been available 1000 or 10,000 or 100,000 years ago, there would probably have been a birthrate crisis then too, and maybe we wouldn’t even exist now. But it wasn’t available then, so people couldn’t choose not to have kids. Today, that technology exists, so individuals are choosing what they want, and what they have probably always wanted. Selfishness is not a modern invention either.

But why do the Chinese in particular want fewer children than any other ethnic group? I could joke that it’s because they’re so smart. There is a saying in demographics, “Education is the best contraceptive.” But it’s not really education, it’s intelligence, that’s negatively correlated with children. However, that’s not a very satisfying answer. I really don’t know why birthrates are lower in China than anywhere else. But statistically speaking, they had to be lowest somewhere, and that place turned out to be China and Chinese countries. Every ethnicity evolved in a different environment, under different selection pressures, so every group is different in every way. There is not a single human attribute that is the same in Whites, Blacks, and Asians, and how many children they desire is just one of those countless differences between people. There is no reason why I would have guessed that Asians were the group that wanted children the least. On the other hand, there is no reason to think that they wouldn’t be. Again, somebody had to like kids the least, and it looks like that’s Asians, especially Chinese. But whatever the reason, we need to accept reality and admit that Asians don’t want kids, and the more they get what they want, the fewer kids they will have. The Chinese, it seems, are just the most extreme Asians. That was fine when they didn’t have ubiquitous birth control so couldn’t prevent pregnancies. But now that they do, their desire to not have children will be their demographic suicide.

Can the Chinese government solve this problem by simply ordering its citizens to have more children? I will argue no. But let’s first consider why the answer might be yes. East Asians generally, and Chinese specifically, are known for very high levels of social conformity. That’s not just a stereotype. It is quantifiable. In fact, it is such a verifiable fact that, at the hedge fund I used to work at, we used time series to measure the well-known herding behavior of Chinese stock traders. To the puzzlement of us Americans who are wired to think as individuals, Chinese people really do seem to think as a group in a way that has to be mathematically measured to be believed. There is even a finance paper on the subject which we verified by replicating, named “Individualism and Momentum around the World:

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1540-6261.2009.01532.x

Although as academics they can’t use the ethnic slur “group-think”, they do describe the ethnic differences as “individualism” vs. “collectivism”. The individualism index they use in the paper is from Geert Hofstede. He found the most and least individualistic major countries were:

East and West really are different.

To me, the most nightmarish example of Chinese social conformity was the infamous “smash sparrows” campaign during Mao’s “Great Leap Forward.” In 1958, after several years of collectivized farming, the agricultural harvest was again disappointing and the country again faced famine. Mao Zedong declared that the problem was not Communism, of course, but birds eating the grain that the collective farms had grown. So, he ordered a program which became known as “smash sparrows.” School children were enlisted to search the countryside for birds, sparrows in particular, and to destroy them. Anywhere they saw the birds, they were to chase them until they could catch and kill them. Adults shot sparrows with guns and children used sling shots. People climbed trees to destroy sparrow nests, break eggs, and kill chicks. They banged pots and pans to frighten the birds into flying and kept the birds in flight until they couldn’t fly anymore. Young children chased them until they fell out of the sky, exhausted, and then crushed them to death.

People, especially children, did this all over China until the sparrows were gone. Sparrows have an extremely high metabolic rate and cannot keep flying for long without feeding. With no break to eat or rest, their small bodies quickly deplete their stores of energy and they collapse. Groups of children could easily chase flocks of sparrows from tree to tree until the birds were so tired they dropped helpless onto the ground. Then the children stomped them beneath their feet, killing the useless eaters.

School children were enticed to join the campaign by the typically ludicrous Communist posters of the era, saying things like “Birds are animals of capitalism” and “Eradicate pests and diseases and build happiness for ten thousand generations”. Fortunately, exterminating these “animals of capitalism” did not go on for “ten thousand generations”. The program lasted only two years, until the disastrous ecological results became obvious. From 1958 to 1960, it is estimated that between one hundred million and one billion sparrows were killed.

Chinese children ran down and killed so many birds that by 1960 the sparrow was driven almost to extinction in China. That year, without sparrows eating their main food – which turned out to be insects and not grain – the country was inundated with plagues of locusts which ate far more crops than the “animals of capitalism” ever did. The famine only got worse. This is the horror of totalitarian government plus servile people.

Here is a propaganda poster which reads “Young Pioneers! Children! Fight to eliminate sparrows and increase grain production!”:

A photo of a boy proud of his work smashing sparrows:

If this horror story seems unbelievable (which it would be if it happened in any sane country), you can read about it on Wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Pests_campaign

European authors create works of fiction such as Lord of the Flies or Childhood’s End imagining homicidal children. But Chinese politicians can create homicidal children in reality. Gangs of pitiless children, roaming and killing because their Leader told them to, are the real-life Village of the Damned.

Surely a people who are capable of stomping sparrows to extinction would be willing to reproduce on demand if their government told them to, right? Maybe. But maybe not. The Chinese authorities have been trying to persuade more people to get married and have children for years now, with no success. Every year both marriage rates and birthrates fall to new lows. Apparently, there are some things the Chinese people just won’t do even if ordered to.

The modern world gives every one of us unprecedented freedom of choice, and even the Chinese Communist Party cannot take that away from Chinese people. In a world with so many options, individuals will inevitably choose whether or not to have children, and many will choose not to. Whole countries will choose not to. Whole peoples will go extinct because they choose not to. The Chinese are just the most extreme case of a people who choose not to have children, whether they live in a nominally Communist country like China or an exuberantly Capitalist country like Singapore. There is no point in denying the future that awaits them. The fate of a people who do not have children is determined by biology, and biology is not sentimental.

It is already clear that there are many people in America, Europe, and much of the world who want lots of kids, have lots of kids, and their children will also have lots of kids. Their family lines will get to survive. But there seem to be few people in China who want lots of kids. So, they will not get to survive. No government program can save the Chinese people, unless they invent birthing pods and nursing robots to have children for them. Of course, if they do invent birthing pods and nursing robots, they will not only save China, they will save the entire human race. So, I hope they try. But who knows if such technology is even possible.

6. More Recent News

The Chinese authorities recently published China’s marriage rates for 2024. Every year, the number of marriages falls, and they plummeted a record-breaking 20% from 2023 to 2024. There are almost no births out of wedlock in China, so plunging marriage rates today mean plunging birthrates later. China’s fertility catastrophe is accelerating:

HONG KONG, Feb 10 (Reuters) – Marriages in China plummeted by a fifth last year, the biggest drop on record, despite manifold efforts by authorities to encourage young couples to wed and have children to boost the country’s declining population.

More than 6.1 million couples registered for marriage last year, down from 7.68 million a year earlier, figures from the Ministry of Civil Affairs showed.

“Unprecedented! Even in 2020, due to Covid-2019, marriages only decreased by 12.2%,” said Yi Fuxian, a demographer at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

He noted that the number of marriages in China last year was less than half of the 13.47 million in 2013.

If this trend continues, “the Chinese government’s political and economic ambitions will be ruined by its demographic Achilles’ heel,” he added.

https://www.reuters.com/world/china/chinese-marriages-slid-by-fifth-2024-further-fanning-birthrate-concerns-2025-02-10

So, where are you headed, China? Will you invent the technology that frees women from the difficulty of pregnancy and the drudgery of child care – saving your country and saving the world? With the right technology, you could 3D print a billion babies. And you could make them all Einsteins. That future would be awesome.

Or will technology fail, and you must suffer the destiny dictated by your dysfunctional demographics? If so, maybe in the far future when the Chinese are just a forgotten story from ancient history, some fertile religious sect that bans birth control will flourish in the land that was once China.

Eugene Kusmiak was a red diaper baby and a Harvard graduate. After nearly two decades in Silicon Valley programming some of the first popular video games, Gene returned home to New York City. He found his ideal job as a portfolio manager, working with math geniuses for 20 years at a quantitative hedge fund. After enduring leftist cities all his life, Gene retired in 2022 to a small town in a red state.