Now communist China, always secret about everything that might be damaging to its run to world supremacy, is admitting that its population is declining. What does this mean in the longer term? The same problem is in the West, as the younger population will not be able to support the massive aged demographic strata. This could go in various directions, including war, as argued below. But, whatever happens, the aged are going to face increased deprivation, due to resource shortages, such as medicine and health care. It is difficult to see how the mainstream economic system will deal with this. Hence, another argument for Douglas social credit.
“The New York Times reports that China has admitted for the first time that its population is declining. (I’ve heard from sources that this has been going on for some time; what’s different is that China is admitting it.) Populations across the West are declining as well, including in the U.S. What does this mean for our children and grandchildren? The sure bet is that they will not live as we have lived.
In 1968, Paul Ehrlich and his wife wrote The Population Bomb, a book that quite literally changed (and is continuing to change) the Western world. Basically, it was premised on the Malthusian concept that a wealthy society, rather than planning for the lean years, simply produces so many people that its resources fail, at which point there is a horrible, painful, and violent collapse involving mass starvation and war as different nations fight for scarce resources.
What neither Thomas Malthus nor the Ehrlichs envisioned (although the Ehrlichs should have) was that technology would make such great advances that well-run countries are able to feed not only their own citizens but other countries’ citizens as well. Paul Ehrlich is still out there shilling his failed theories, and Western countries are still acting as if they’re real.
The result of Ehrlich’s theories is that Western countries, which used technology to feed themselves and others, are no longer replacing themselves and are in steep demographic decline. Although it’s not literally a Western country, within the concept of the modern, developed world, China is the country that keeps the rest of us supplied with just about everything. And now, China has admitted that it also belongs on the demographic decline list, resulting from 50 years of its disastrous “one child” policy, which led to the mass murder of female fetuses and infants.
The government said on Tuesday that 9.56 million people were born in China last year, while 10.41 million people died. It was the first time deaths had outnumbered births in China since the Great Leap Forward, Mao Zedong’s failed economic experiment that led to widespread famine and death in the 1960s.
Now, facing a population decline, coupled with a long-running rise in life expectancy, the country is being thrust into a demographic crisis that will have consequences not just for China and its economy but for the world.
Indeed, data released on Tuesday showed that the Chinese economy last year had one of its worst performances since 1976, the year Mao died.
There’s more in the same vein. The gist is that China, like the rest of the West, will have a small young population incapable of supporting a massive older population. There will be labor shortages that will affect a world that’s come to rely on Chinese productivity and a food shortage that will be disastrous domestically for China. When that happens, war usually follows.”