China’s collapsing birth and marriage rates reflect a people’s deep pessimism

February 28, 2023 Nicholas Eberstadt is the Wendt chair in political economy at the American Enterprise Institute.

China is in the midst of a quiet but stunning nationwide collapse of birthrates. This is the deeper, still largely overlooked, significance of the country’s 2022 population decline, announced by Chinese authorities last month. As recently as 2019, demographers at the U.S. Census Bureau and the United Nations were not expecting China’s population to start dropping until the early 2030s. But they did not anticipate today’s wholesale plunge in childbearing. Considerable attention has been devoted to likely consequences of China’s coming depopulation: economic, political, strategic. But the causes of last year’s population drop deserve much closer examination.

China’s nosedive in childbearing is a silent alarm. It signals deep disaffection with the bleak future the regime is engineering for its subjects. In this land without democracy, the birth collapse can be read as a landslide vote of no confidence in President Xi Jinping’s rule. Official Chinese government statistics are far from perfect (Premier Li Keqiang once called China’s economic numbers “man-made”), but they offer a serviceable approximation of recent birth trends...........To Read More.....