(LifeSiteNews) — Last week, the Chinese Communist Party propaganda outlet known as the Global Times reported the bad news: the number of young couples getting married in China is dropping precipitously, hitting a record low of 6.83 million in 2022.
That’s an 800,000 drop from the previous year’s total, and is the lowest figure since the Ministry of Civil Affairs began releasing numbers in 1986.
In other words, fewer people are getting married today in China than at any time since the country began keeping accurate statistics. Whatever else it may mean, this fact is proof positive of how badly the CCP’s birth control policies have crippled China’s population.
The Global Times article, however, didn’t even mention the failed one-child policy, which ran from 1980 to 2016. Instead, it immediately went into cover-up mode, quoting “an independent demographer” (as if there were any such thing in China) “attribut[ing] the decline to multiple reasons such as the decrease of young population, the unbalanced gender ratio, and the changed marriage concepts.”
Of course, the declining number of young people didn’t just happen. It was the direct and intended result of the CCP’s barbaric one-child policy, which eliminated roughly half of the last two generations of Chinese. Each generation was smaller than the one before it. While 215 million babies were born in the 1980s, only 155 million were born in the 2000s, even though the total Chinese population was much larger.
The “unbalanced gender ratio” is another, although unintended, consequence of the one-child policy. Tens of millions of baby girls were eliminated before or shortly after birth over the past four decades by parents desperate to have a son to support them in old age and carry on the family name.
Right now, according to the latest census, there are 17.52 million more men than women of marriage age, defined as the population between 20 and 40 years of age. That’s 17.52 million men who will, in all likelihood, never find a bride.
Skyrocketing bride prices – the payment that the groom must make to the bride’s family – is cited by the Global Times as another reason marriage rates are down. But this bidding war for women underway in China is another result of the scarcity of women, which in turn resulted from the one-child policy.
Finally, the Global Times cites “a shift in the marriages attitudes among the younger generation, with more and more young people choosing not to marry or have children for various reasons.”
I can name one key reason: the relentless barrage of anti-natal, anti-family propaganda that the CCP spewed out over decades to convince the Chinese people to stop having children. This brainwashing seems to have done its job all too well, poisoning the minds of the young against marriage and family itself, leaving marriage and birth rates in free-fall.
The one-child policy is an example of communist social engineering gone horribly wrong. One would think that, even if CCP leaders had not consciously rejected the idea that human life is sacred – and like all leftists they had – they should still have understood that driving the birth rate down to one child per women would be, over time, a collective death sentence.
But, of course, reveling in their control over what they thought of as the endless masses of Chinese humanity, that thought never occurred to them.
Nor had it occurred to the late Chairman Mao Zedong. Mao had ordered in 1957 that “Reproduction needs to be planned. In my opinion, mankind is completely incapable of managing itself. We have plans for production in factories, for producing cloth, tables and chairs, and steel, but no plan for producing humans. It is anarchy, with no control, no organization, and no rules. We need to have a special government ministry – what about a Planned Birth ministry?”[1]
Two-thirds of a century later, we can see how well Mao’s “plan for producing humans” has worked out. Central planning for births has turned out to be even more of a disaster than central planning for tables, chairs, and steel.
It has produced nothing but an aging and dying population.
Steven W. Mosher is the President of the Population Research Institute and the author of “Bully of Asia: Why China’s Dream is the New Threat to World Order.”
FOOTNOTES
[1] Mao Zedong, “On the Correct Handling of Contradictions among the People,” 27 February, 1957. Mao Zedong zhuzuo zhuanti zhaibian (Excerpts from Works of Mao Zedong by Topic) (Beijing: Central Document Publishing House, 2003), 970. The translation is my own.