Newsweek Why China Is Banning Foreign Adoptions of Children By Gordon G. Chang

 Newsweek 

Why China Is Banning Foreign Adoptions of Children

By Gordon G. Chang

Author, commentator

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China's population, reported to be 1.41 billion, will drop to 330 million by the end of the century, predicts Yi Fuxian of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. This startling conclusion is included in a paper to be published in the Winter 2024 issue of the Contemporary China Review. He's not the only one concerned. "China has embarked on a road of demographic no-return," writes Wang Feng of the University of California, Irvine. Yi puts it this way: "Left unaddressed, China's demographic trap could precipitate a civilizational collapse."

Why do we care? Rapid demographic change can push an ambitious China to become even more militant and accelerate dangerous plans.

The crisis is plain to see. Yi's stunning 330 million figure assumes that China will be able to stabilize its total fertility rate—generally, the average number of children born to a woman over her lifetime—at 0.8. China's TFR in 2023 was 1.0. and is dropping over time. A country generally needs a TFR of 2.1 to maintain a stable population.

Yi believes that China's TFR could even fall to 0.7, meaning China could have even fewer people by 2100.

How far will China's population fall? The 2024 Revision of the U.N.'s World Population Prospects shows a low estimate of 403.8 million people at the end of the century. The U.N.'s figures closely track China's, which for two decades have overestimated the size of the Chinese population. Yi's prediction, although considered extreme today, will probably be closer to the mark when the clock strikes 2100.

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The Chinese and American flags are seen at the 2022 Winter Olympics, in Zhangjiakou, China, on February 2, 2022. On December 4, 2024, a White House official said that at least eight U.S. telecom companies... More AP Photo/Kiichiro Sato/AP Photo/Kiichiro Sato

China today is 4 times more populous than the United States. At the turn of the century, it could conceivably have roughly the same number of people as America.

China's in a fix. No other society has ever faced a steeper population decline absent war, disease, or famine. These one-off events throughout history have resulted in disastrous demographic drops, but societies almost always bounce back. China itself bounced back fast after the famine during the Great Leap Forward at the end of the 1950s and the beginning of the following decade. Then, the country's population plunged by at least 30 million people. Some estimates are double that figure.

Today, China's population decline is caused by deep-seated changes in society, continued economic failure, and a deepening gloom enveloping the country. Young Chinese now speak of themselves as China's "last generation."

These anti-natal attitudes are partly the result of the regime's relentless indoctrination enforcing the One-Child Policy. Deng Xiaoping, Mao Zedong's successor, instituted the policy in 1979 as one of his first initiatives after assuming power. During the existence of the coercive program, "probably the largest social experiment in human history," China's fertility declined, falling from 2.9 births per female to 1.1 births in 2015.

China moved to a two-child policy in 2016 and, when that didn't work, a three-child one in 2021. The successive policy relaxation has not done the trick. The country's population peaked in 2021.

China could adopt a 27-child policy, but this would have no effect. "Notwithstanding the totalitarian conceit that population trends are something that government can 'fine tune,' the reality is that birth trends tend to comport very closely with the desired family size of real life parents," Nicholas Eberstadt of the American Enterprise Institute told me. "It is possible to use bayonets and police power to force birth rates down against the will of a people; it is very much more difficult to use state force to push birth rates up."

In fact, as Wang Feng points out, "No country has successfully raised fertility with government policies."

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Wang thinks that a declining demography gives China incentives to adopt benign external policies. As he writes, "Economic and political challenges, which will amplify with demographic changes in the coming decades, should compel Chinese leaders to seek and maintain better relations with the United States and in Western Europe, with countries that have both markets for China's export products and innovations and new technologies that China needs."

Wang perfectly sums up how China's leader should calculate the country's interests. Xi Jinping, however, may see things differently. His primary form of diplomacy in recent years has been intimidation. He can intimidate if others believe his China will dominate or even rule the world; he cannot do that if others see his country shrinking quickly. Given Xi's goals—he is pushing the imperial-era notion that China should rule tianxia or "All Under Heaven"—he knows he does not have much time.

Xi must know that old societies tend to be pacific and that China is getting old fast. If he wants the Chinese people to support his glorious visions of planetary rule, he surely understands the time to act is now. There is, he must know, a closing window of opportunity.

How did Xi ever get the idea he could impose his will on all humanity in the first place? "By teaming up to dress up an old, sick cat as a ferocious lion, Chinese and American scholars have fueled the political ambitions of China's leaders and misdirected U.S.-China relations down the dangerous path of a furious battle between a dynamic tiger and an aggressive lion," Yi Fuxian points out. "Strategic miscalculation based on incorrect demographic data is costly and dangerous."

"More people means more power," posted "Fang Feng" on the Strong Country Forum of People's Daily when China's population was growing. "This is the truth."

The world has to be concerned that China's leader both believes the opposite is also true and realizes he must move before it is too late.

Gordon G. Chang is the author of Plan Red: China's Project to Destroy America and The Coming Collapse of China. Follow him on X @GordonGChang.