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
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
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Apple—which just so happens to rely on the China market
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Once again, I’m Chris Chappell. See you next time.