China is a serious threat to America’s dominance in the world, and when America’s dominance collapses, so does America’s lovely standard of living. Nothing happening within the U.S., especially on Biden’s watch, will change that. However, China is at very profound risk from its internal problems. The latest one to catch the headlines is China’s continuing and, indeed, accelerating demographic collapse.

China famously instituted its one-child policy in 1979 when it was afraid that its population growth was out of control. Not only did the policy have the effect of lowering the birth rate, but it also decimated the number of female babies being born.

Normally, the ratio of male-to-female births is roughly 101 males to 100 females. However, across China, especially in rural districts, families wanted boys, so female babies were aborted in utero or became victims of infanticide. That skewed the ratio to a peak of 117 males to 100 females. The problem, of course, is that females can’t produce as many babies as males can. One woman and 100 men will have a much lower birth rate than 1 man and 100 women.

Image: A Chinese elementary school. YouTube screen grab.

By the 1980s, recognizing the disastrous problem of the missing women and realizing that its population was about to hit a decline from which it could not recover, the Chinese government began to back off from the one-child policy. In the 1980s, it said that, if you were a rural family and your first child was a girl, you could try for a second child in order to have a boy. By 2015, the government set a new two-child limit. In Spring 2021, it went for a three-child limit only to abandon that months later, removing all limits entirely. Now, it offers financial incentives to have children.

But even with changed laws and financial incentives, China is running into a problem: Chinese women. They don’t want babies. According to a report in The Wall Street Journal:

Births in China dropped by more than 500,000 last year to just over 9 million in total, accelerating the decline in the country’s population as women shrugged off the government’s exhortations to reproduce.

The number of newborns has gone into free fall over the past several years. Official figures released Wednesday showed that China had fewer than half the number of births in 2023 than the country did in 2016, after China abolished the one-child policy. The latest number points to a fertility rate—the number of children a woman has over her lifetime—that is close to 1.0, a level considered by demographers as “ultralow.”

Currently, India, not China, is the world’s most populous nation, something that is sure to make old games of Trivial Pursuit instantly obsolete. Nor will that change soon.

For a country to maintain its population, it must have a replacement rate of 2.1 babies per woman. Japan, considered a dying nation because of its low replacement rate, still comes in at 1.66 babies per woman, while Italy, another dying nation, has an even lower replacement rate of 1.25 babies per woman. America, incidentally, is also failing the replacement rate algorithm, with only 1.78 births per woman. Israel is one of the few developed nations with a high replacement rate, boasting a rate of 3.11 children per woman.

So, while the developed world’s birthrate is generally trending downward, something is very wrong in China. The Wall Street Journal offers some theories: women want careers, not children; economic uncertainty; and COVID policies. Those are guesses. The sure thing is that the Chinese population is aging rapidly, without youthful replacements. There’s also the intangible of hope. The declining birth rate means that people don’t see a good future for their children.

China has other problems as well. Its much-vaunted Belt and Road Initiative is flagging somewhat (although it’s still a powerful force), and its economy is struggling. A serious problem for China is that its manufacturing sector, which has driven its growth for decades, is shrinking.

Why? Several reasons: Surrounding Asian nations are growing their manufacturing sectors; China’s COVID responsibility and response took the bloom off the rose; and, I’d like to think, people in America are (a) sick of shoddy Chinese-made goods and (b) worried about not having any domestic manufacturing.

All in all, China is not doing well despite Xi’s military parades and projection of strength around the world. Don’t kid yourself, though, that this makes China less of a threat to America and the East Asian region, whether economically or militarily. Instead, it probably makes it more of a threat, at least militarily. The likelihood that China will quietly shrink away is small; the likelihood that it will act hard and fast in 2024 while the weakling Biden is still in the White House is very big.