Daniel Greenfield December 26, 2021 @ Sultan Knish Blog
China’s
one-child policy suppressed the birth rate with forced abortions and
political terror for a generation. Only allowed one child, many Chinese
families chose to abort their baby girls.
The deficit of 40 million female babies is now the specter stalking Communist China.
China’s
aggressive military moves against Taiwan and India are a desperate
gambit by a corrupt Communist elite facing domestic social instability
and millions of men who can never marry.
But while the focus has
been on too many Chinese men, it’s the too few women whom the regime is
starting to fear. The Communist society is being forced to reckon with
the social problem of supply and demand in the marriage market. Women,
formerly despised, are now in the driver’s seat, with the bride’s family
demanding tens of thousands from prospective grooms.
That price is putting marriage out of reach for a whole other category of poorer men.
But
what really has the Communist elite worried is not the high price of
marriage, but the growing number of professional women who aren’t
interested in getting married at all.
And many of those who do
are getting divorced, leading the regime to impose a 30-day cooling off
period after there were more divorces than marriages recorded in China
in 2019.
The big question for Communist leaders was whether they
could defeat the West economically without becoming so much like it that
they would have to adopt its society and its politics. The fall of the
Soviet Union was a cautionary tale about the dangers of western
liberalization. And China appeared to have avoided the pitfall,
suppressing its democracy movement and maintaining a Communist oligarchy
even as it outperformed America in the marketplace.
But Xi and
the Communist leadership fear that they just delayed the inevitable.
China is seemingly more powerful than ever, its people are
nationalistic, Hong Kong has been consolidated, and Taiwan is expected
to follow, making One China into a reality.
And yet the Communist
leadership shows every sign of panicking, cracking down on
entertainment and tech companies, and purging its own oligarchy on a
monthly basis.
Despite the outward allegiance to Xi and the
Communists, the country’s rising middle class is westernized,
individualistic rather than collectivist, intent on having fun and
stocking up on all the latest consumer gadgets, instead of sacrificing
and laboring in the cause of Communism.
The falling marriage and birth rates are the obvious symptom of China’s new social feminism.
Marriage licenses have fallen to a 13-year low
and the birth rate has hit a 43-year low. With only 12 million babies
born in 2020, the old mathematical joke about the Marching Chinese now
falls flat. Like the rest of Asia, China is aging, and its workforce is
falling by 0.5% a year.
China's 1.3 birth rate looks worse than those of America or Europe, but unlike them, the Chinese birth rate isn't being artificially inflated with a huge population of immigrants.
While
the Communist leadership has tried to apply economic fixes to a social
problem, a recent survey in one rural area found that only 60% of young
women wanted to get married while 82% of men did. The combination of an
aspiring professional female workforce with the sex-selective abortion
caused by the one-child policy has made China’s gender relations
uniquely horrible.
In America, as in most first world countries, women are more interested in marriage than men.
The reversal of the gender stereotype in China is a tribute to how the
country’s toxic mixture of traditionalism, Communism, and consumerism is
playing out in its dysfunctional society.
Communist China made
marriage and child-bearing into a political duty. The rising affluent
middle class that navigated the suicidal peaks of exams, pursue shallow
escapism and luxury goods in the off hours from their stressful office
jobs, and have little interest in children.
The Communist regime is taking notice. In typical leftist fashion, it's fighting the problem
as an ideological threat, arresting feminists and banning the 6B4T
keyword, a South Korean feminist movement that urges women not to marry
and to avoid conventional beauty standards.
But China’s problem
is coming less from the traditional activist woke feminism, which the
regime will have little trouble stamping out, but the larger economic
shift in gender roles.
52.5 percent of students in Chinese
colleges and universities are female. That's not quite as extreme as the
60/40 split in the United States or the even more extreme gender gaps
in some European countries, but in a decade or two, China may catch up
to us there as well.
Religion may be declining in America and
Europe, but the Communists had done their best to stamp out faith in
China and replace it with party loyalty. And then it replaced starving
rural labor with mega-cities and mega-buildings filled with office
drones who have no meaning or purpose in life beyond purchasing the
latest iPhone, listening to the latest hit or watching the latest show.
The
single career women who have redefined the culture and politics of
America and Europe are on the rise in China. In interviews they express a
disinterest in marriage and family. They enjoy focusing on themselves,
shopping, socializing and traveling with little interest in the future
of their country or their society. They seek no meaning beyond the
luxuries and comforts of life.
And the marketplace in China, much
like in America and Europe, caters to them as a cultural and economic
force because of their spending power and role as social media
influencers.
China’s entertainment landscape is filled with shows
that are culturally, rather than politically, feminist. The Romance of
Tiger and Rose, with some 900 million views, features
a matriarchal society where men are not allowed to study or work, and
are cursed when boys are born. The joke here is not just a reversal of
China’s past, but a possible preview of its demographic future.
Had
China retained its former society, the growing economic value of girls
would have led to a reverse gender gap, but the growing shift from rural
subsistence farming to the urban office workers of the middle class
means that the gender gap is being overshadowed by falling birth rates.
The new society spends less time calculating the price and profit of
marrying off children and worries about the imminent disruptions of a
child on a young urban couple’s quality of life.
China, despite
its Communist hierarchy and total control of the economy and society, is
caught in the same conjoined cultural and economic trap as the first
world. On the verge of realizing its aspirations to becoming a first
world power, China is stuck reliving the price that Japan, the last
Asian country to try and become a military and then economic superpower,
paid for its wish.
The Cold Warriors of the eighties were wrong
in believing that economic success was impossible without freedom and
democracy. But they were generally right in believing that any country
that wanted to economically defeat us would have to become us. They just
failed to properly understand what becoming “us” really meant. It’s not
democracy or freedom.
America, like its other first world
counterparts, is becoming less free, and more political. When people say
that our politics is downstream of our culture, what it really means is
that much of our politics is about a culture rationalizing the way that
it wants to live. The abandonment of religion, family, character, and
all traditional values, is not just a Marxist conspiracy, it’s the
self-indulgent behavior of overgrown children who decided that they
never want to grow up.
In the Communist heartland, under a
Marxist system built to reinforce the opposite qualities, a surprisingly
similar revolution is taking place. The Communist regime, which
believed it had total control over the lives of its people, has gone
from mandating abortions to offering families the opportunity to have
three children. The labor force is shrinking, the marriage and birth
rates are falling, and the Xi regime can’t figure out how to turn back
the clock and preserve its power.
Communist China’s history is
one of grandiose planned efforts that blew up in the party’s face. One
of its worst famines occurred when Mao decided to have the populace wipe
out all the sparrows, leading to an infestation of insects that the
sparrows had kept in check. Such subtle checks and balances pervade the
natural world and human society, but the Marxist view of the universe is
incapable of taking into account the complex and paradoxical nature of
reality.
Mao’s inability to grasp the nature of the sparrow, the
imminent obstacle in the ecosystem, is nothing compared to the inability
of his successors to understand the relationships of men and women.
Human nature, always elusive to ideologues, has brought down every
Communist plan for world domination before, not through force of arms,
but the hubris of its miscalculations.
Xi believes that China’s
Communist regime is different even as demographics are undoing his
mandate of heaven. While this century has been heralded as belonging to
China, studies suggest that China's population will drop by 50% by 2100.
While 732 million may be nothing to sneer at, much of that will consist
of its rapidly aging elderly population.
By 2050, 336 million
Chinese elderly will form a bloc larger than that of the United States.
If the birth and marriage rates keep dropping, a Communist gerontocracy
will preside over failing dams, mega-cities, and a shrinking empire of
senior citizens and single career women as the “barbarians” in the
Muslim hinterlands with stronger birth rates sweep in.
Communism claimed to be able to harness history, but history always has the last laugh.
Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.
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Thank you for reading.
About Daniel Greenfield
Daniel Greenfield is a journalist investigating Islamic terrorism and
the Left. He is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz
Freedom Center
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