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BEIJING, May 31, 2021 (LifeSiteNews) — The communist rulers of China have told their population that they may now have three children, reversing its long-time one child policy, which only a few years ago became a two children policy. The Communist Party of China, which is synonymous with the Chinese government, made the announcement after census data revealed that the birth rate is still plummeting.

Concerned about the greying of its ethnic majority population, in 2016 China relaxed its infamous one child policy to allow two children. However, despite a small, immediate rise, this has not led to a lasting trend.

According to the BBC, a census published earlier this month showed that “around 12 million” babies were born in China last year, the lowest number of births recorded since the 1960s. This is down from the 18 million babies born in China in 2016.

David Mulroney, a Canadian former ambassador to China, told LifeSiteNews that there are “no winners” after China’s Malthusian attempt, beginning in 1978, to stop its population from growing.

“China’s four-decade war on the family ends without any winners,” Mulroney said. “For forty years, the state has visited violence on its people, born and unborn, in the name of population control, only to arrive now at an emerging demographic disaster.”

“As the number of seniors approaches 20% of the population, economic growth is tailing off and healthcare costs are skyrocketing. Having ruthlessly suppressed any consideration other than economics, China’s leaders are finding that it is precisely on economic grounds that many young Chinese women are declining to have any children at all.”

The BBC reported that Chinese citizens who grew up without brothers and sisters do not value the idea of having more than one or two children, thinking them too much trouble or too expensive to maintain. As Chinese people increasingly move from the countryside, where children are valued for their ability to help in farming, to the cities, they see children more as economic liabilities.

But Mulroney doesn’t blame atheistic communism for China’s loss of love for bigger families. He blames a western “anti-life” ideology that still wreaks havoc today.

“Western countries, which introduced population control theory to China in the 1960s and 70s, are now visiting this anti-life obsession on countries in Africa, in partnership with the abortion industry and funded with our tax dollars,” he said.

China’s anti-child policies have led not only to mass contraception, but to forced sterilization and forced abortion. Until recently, China’s minority populations have been exempted from the one-child, and then the two-children, policy. However, in the past decade, intensifying four years ago, the Chinese government has pursued what critics call a “genocidal” policy towards its Muslim Uighur minority population. China has been forced to admit that it has been running so-called “re-education” camps for Uighur people, and there are many reports that a million or more Uighurs have been imprisoned in them. The majority Chinese population, called the Han, make up 92% of the country’s population.