China is crashing towards a childless society, while, surprise surprise,
the Chinese government is finding ways to make the situation even more dystopian than it already is.
Welcome to China Uncensored. I’m Chris Chappell.
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Now back to the episode.
Chinese leader Xi Jinping is great with kids.
He gives them important lessons,
He shows them how to use a bucket safely,
and he even tackles them, just for a bit of fun.
Plus he sometimes sends them and their families off to camps for free. What fun!
In fact, Xi’s many interactions with
Chinese children have landed him the nickname “Grandpa Xi” in Chinese state
media. And that’s the only nickname he has. The rest definitely aren’t censored.
And Grandpa Xi and his government are so stoked about children that
they want Chinese people to have more of them.
To achieve that, in recent years, the Chinese authorities have rolled
out all sorts of incentives to try to encourage Chinese baby-making,
from subsidies and tax breaks for families
to free fertility treatments for couples trying to conceive.
Some local officials might have gone to the task with a bit too much enthusiasm, though,
like those calling women to ask whether they are pregnant, and,
if not, when they’re planning to be.
Which shouldn’t be a surprise. Given how the CCP treats Taiwan,
you can tell they don’t respect boundaries.
Yet, despite all the various attempts, it’s not working.
China’s birth rate is declining fast,
resulting in the national population falling three years in a row now,
and it has set the stage for China to become a severely
aging society by 2035. And that’s coming from my favorite Chinese state-run media,
Global Times, and the CCP health authority, so the situation might be even worse!
Hm, maybe if women get calls by even more strangers from the government
asking probing questions, that’ll put them in a baby-making mood.
The situation even appears to be accelerating, as it came out recently that Chinese marriage
rates took a record-setting plunge in 2024 – dropping by about a fifth compared to 2023.
That was an even deeper drop than during COVID,
leaving marriage numbers at their lowest since record-keeping began in 1986.
And with family life in China centered around the institution of marriage, no weddings means
no babies.
But as Chinese society races towards zero births,
it’s not just the prospect of an aging society that’s raising alarms.
In fact, China is heading for a geographic and ethnic sea change the likes of which
Grandpa Xi and his government have never seen. And really really don’t want to see.
You see, if there’s one thing Xi likes almost as
much as growing the Chinese family, it’s growing the Chinese countryside.
Literally. Here he is inspecting a vegetable field in Hubei Province in late 2024 and
telling farmers how to do stuff. Man, he just loves telling people how to spread their seed.
But they love him for it in the rural areas, as this very natural clapping scene suggests.
Such trips to the provinces are part of Xi’s push to breathe new
life into the Chinese countryside – a central mission of his.
Chinese development in the cities,
especially on the country’s east coast, has long outpaced the development
in the countryside, creating one of the largest rural-urban income gaps in the world.
At the same time, large parts of rural China are plagued by issues such as soil degradation and
deindustrialization.
Do, uh… you have any helpful advice for that, Grandpa Xi? Any at all?
But the declining birthrate is now putting Xi’s rural development plans under threat.
It actually used to be that higher birth numbers in rural China compensated for
the lower birth rates in the Chinese cities, but that is no longer the case.
Today, births among young people in rural areas
are dropping more rapidly than among their urban counterparts.
On top of that, Chinese people continue to migrate from the countryside to the cities,
contributing to some rural areas becoming severely depopulated – a
phenomenon referred to in China as “hollowed out” towns and villages.
And it’s especially bad in some of the regions bordering China’s
neighboring countries. These towns are more hollow than one of the CCP’s promises.
Not far from the Chinese border with Laos, Myanmar and Vietnam,
which is formed by the two southern provinces of Yunnan
and Guangxi,
there have been accounts of border towns and villages turning into ghost towns
after locals either died out or abandoned them for better living elsewhere. Which is bleak,
but at least not as bleak as back when places became ghost towns
because all the locals starved to death. Ain’t communism grand?
In the north, along the Chinese border with Mongolia and Russia,
the situation is even more dire.
There, the population of the region of Inner Mongolia fell
from almost 25 million people in 2010 to just 24 million in 2022,
and the province of Heilongjiang went from more than 38 million
people in 2010 to less than 32 million in 2020.
These declines have raised deep concerns among the Chinese authorities,
with one government adviser saying in November that
“to bolster national security amid a countrywide demographic slide,
China should turn its eyes to the declining populations of its towns bordering Central Asia”,
while the ever glorious Global Times said last year that Inner
Mongolia is the "northern gateway" and the "moat" of the capital city Beijing
that shoulders a major political responsibility in safeguarding
national security and border stability.
The Global Times also reported that the leader of Inner Mongolia had vowed to
implement “comprehensive measures to attract more people to settle and live in border areas,
and ensure human shields- I mean national unity and border security”.
While the population decline is immense, it isn’t exactly clear,
though, what sort of immediate national security threats could emerge from it.
After all, it’s rare to see Mongolian hordes come riding down from the north these days,
and that’s what the Great Wall proudly rises to protect against, anyway.
However, the Chinese Communist Party is notoriously obsessed with appearing strong,
and having large stretches of the northern regions looking like this doesn’t exactly signal strength.
Certainly not like Grandpa Xi’s super tough rough housing. What a tough guy! And an awesome grandpa!
China does have some real reasons to want to appear strong.
For example, in the late 19th century, when China also looked weak on its northern front,
Russia seized the opportunity to annex vast areas of Chinese territory.
Given the state of the China-Russia relationship in the 21st century,
it seems unlikely that the Russians would make a similar move again,
but then, few thought that Putin would be crazy enough to invade Ukraine,
so, who knows. His promises are also just as hollow as those ghost towns.
In China’s southern borderlands,
though, the potential effects of depopulation are much more immediate.
In the south, the Chinese government has long struggled to assert and maintain
control, especially along the nearly 1,400-mile-long border with Myanmar.
Not only is the cross-border area a patchwork of ethnic minorities, the dense jungle and
mountainous terrain also make large stretches of the region difficult to traverse and monitor.
This makes the region a hotbed for illicit trade and smuggling – including *people* smuggling,
in which crime syndicates based in Myanmar have lured Chinese people into the war-torn country,
where tens of thousands are currently enslaved and forced to work as cyber scammers.
Of course, this explains why people might want to leave the area,
but when locals begin rapidly disappearing, either into Chinese cities or into Myanmar
scam centers, there’s not much left in the towns to maintain a strong border.
But not to worry – Xi has an excellent way to solve all of China’s rural problems.
He has called for Chinese youths to make greater contributions to rural revitalization.
This sentiment was mirrored by an action plan announced in 2023 by the local government in
Guangdong Province that aims to send 300,000 college students to the countryside by this
year. Which I’m sure is just what they were hoping to gain from going to college.
This plan would have the added bonus of getting unemployed youth out of the cities, where they
might stir up trouble and unrest and start getting crazy ideas about autonomy and freedom of speech.
The whole thing is also a fun throwback to the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and 1970s, when
millions of Chinese young people were sent to the countryside to educate and be educated. Oh,
and a whole bunch of people were killed. You know… fun!
Xi himself has often spoken fondly about the time he himself spent in a rural village back then.
Those were indeed splendid days,
with Chinese youths gathering to exercise with hammers on Chinese cultural treasures
and making oversized necklaces for their friends and loved ones… fun!
But it’s not just decline and depopulation that
seem to be spurring desperate moves by the Chinese authorities. It’s the demographic
shifts that come with it. And I’m not just talking about an aging society.
Because, while Han Chinese are experiencing massively declining birth rates, it’s a different
matter for the more than 125 million people that make up China’s 55 ethnic minority groups.
Regions such as Inner Mongolia,
Gansu Province,
and Guizhou Province…
have all experienced population decline in recent years among Han Chinese,
but this was partly counterbalanced by higher birth rates among minority groups.
Across China, 13 percent of all newborns had minority background in 2000, and their
population as a whole was estimated to make up almost 9 percent of the total population by 2020,
which is quite a change from the 1960s, when they made up less than 6 percent.
Of course, Xi is super happy with all minority groups,
and even sends some of them and their families off to camps for free to thank them… fun!
Now, we do have to be a bit careful with these numbers. After all, they’re all based
on official Chinese figures, which, according to researchers, aren’t always the most reliable,
due to low quality data collection, incentives for local governments to either inflate or deflate
certain population numbers, and the sensitivity of the issue for the Chinese leadership.
This means that the actual minority population of China and its growth could be higher than
what the official data shows, which sounds like a good thing, given that many minority groups
live in the border regions where Chinese officials are fussing about depopulation.
But the Chinese authorities don’t seem to be rejoicing about it.
For example, one of China’s fastest growing minority groups, the Turkic-speaking Uyghurs,
saw their birth rate almost cut in half between 2017 and 2019,
according to the government’s own numbers.
That sudden drop coincided with an intensified crackdown on the Uyghur people,
with mounting evidence indicating that many Uyghur women have been coerced into taking birth control
and subjected to forced sterilization. Which — and I’m no scientist or
anything — doesn’t sound like it’ll help in the whole baby-making whatchamacallit.
Although few have experienced the same draconian measures as the Uyghurs,
other Chinese minorities have been targeted, too,
including the Mongolians, who have had their language banned in schools,
as well as the Tibetans, whose children are increasingly getting
sent to Mandarin-dominated boarding schools, while Tibetan educators are disappearing.
And measures that weaken children’s ties to their parents’ culture don’t sound like a
strategy you use if you want people to have more kids. That’s about as effective an aphrodisiac as
the movie Teeth corner box. If you know, you know… and you haven’t been the same since you’ve known.
It’s become more difficult for us to know the effect of such policies, however, as the
authorities have stopped publishing statistics on the birth rates of separate non-Han groups.
For…some reason.
But there are clearly a lot of signs that the Chinese leadership are looking to restrict
minorities rather than tap into China’s ethnic mosaic to alleviate the depopulation issue.
That’s not really a shock, as Xi is less the poster boy for minority empowerment and more
the kind of guy that stresses Chinese uniformity under the rule of the CCP.
But such posturing risks dealing a heavy blow to China’s national birth
rate at a time when it’s already in free fall.
And with the current generation of young Chinese people being small already as a
consequence of the one-child policy, it’s unlikely that there are enough
unemployed youths in the cities to revitalize the countryside and plug
all the expanding population gaps in the border regions –
unless robot college graduates count.
So, despite the Chinese government’s desperate attempts to lift the birthrate,
the leadership seems to be willing to sacrifice population growth at
the altar of ethnic dominance for the Han Chinese.
I guess at least, as China approaches zero births, the CCP is trying to make sure that
all of China across ethnic groups is heading towards dystopia together.
While that certainly sounds grand, it’s less “Grandpa Xi” grand
and more “Grandstanding Xi” grand.
And before you go, don’t forget to sign my petition. Apple—which just so happens
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Once again, I’m Chris Chappell. See you next time.